For each new morning with its light, ...

The USA holiday where we gather together to eat turkey is uniquely American, although Canada and other countries have thanksgiving holidays too. In the USA we celebrate the very beginning of the community of our nation, although of course the official documents didn't come until much later. Along the way came contention about exactly where the first thanksgiving feast was held and considerable mythology about what happened where and why. The people who attended the first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, Pilgrims and Wampanoag, celebrated a harvest and survival. They joined as a community of human beings with different ethnicities and different beliefs and different values to acknowledge their dependence and their interdependence. Independence wasn't really an issue then.

The act of expressing thanks, of acknowledging gifts, however, is not unique to any country or people. Sometimes I like to think about the lives of people who are very different from me, and often the Tarahumara of Mexico come to mind. There was a day in November, only a few years ago and just a few days before El Dia de Dar Gracias in los Estados Unidos, when a friend and I had taken the train on a spectacular trip through the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains to see the Copper Canyons. Near the end of our journey, we could see colorfully dressed, dark-skinned women and children selling their handmade crafts at some of the stations. A walk through a market set up by some others like them took us from the train to a lodge that was perched on the very edge of the canyons. Not only were we within walking distance of the market, but also we were within walking distance of the homes of some of the Tarahumara. Many of them live at the bottom of the canyons, but some also live in cliffside dugouts and in primitive wood cabins. One family, whose business included making violins, and whose home had animal pelts hanging from the low ceiling, invited us into the dirt-floored one-room main cabin of their home.

Among my fellow travelers there were varying reactions to what we saw. Some I felt were insulting in their judgement but in the time since I've often thought about that day and about my own reactions. Sometimes I find it difficult to choose the best lens for the perspective I need on a situation that seems so different from what I'm used to and yet so right for the ones who are in it and who may actually have chosen it. What seems clear though is that the indigenous people of the Copper Canyons are grateful for their homes and families, for food and for tourist dollars. Their gratitude may be mixed with misgivings about the introduction of new ideas and new values into a way of living that goes back for centuries, but they accept what they think will work for them and are friendly as they do so. I wonder how different they are at heart from the native Americans of the 16th and 17th centuries who must also have had misgivings about the people with whom they broke bread.

People ARE different. We are different within families, within neighborhoods, within countries. We value different things and therefore are grateful for different gifts, but the one thing we all share is that we are alive at this very time. May we all, Americans and Tarahumara and so many others, be grateful for life, the lives we have and the lives we've shared. We don't have to agree about what life is or what it should be or when it starts, but we can agree that we're glad to have it. Not ALL of us WILL agree about that of course, but the rest of us can make our gratitude and love present to those who dissent, and that will be a better grace than any we can say at a bountiful table.

Thanksgiving

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food,
For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)