This year, at least in Canada, Yom Kippur almost coincides with Thanksgiving. In English, Yom Kippur is referred to as the Day of Atonement and involves repentance for sins committed in the previous year. Of all the Jewish holy days, this is the most likely to be observed even by marginal Jews. As for Thanksgiving, it’s a largely irreligious holiday established nearly 400 years ago by an obscure Protestant sect. Humble origins notwithstanding, it tends to be observed even by marginal Puritans i.e. everybody who enjoys a statutory holiday.
Churches everywhere like to decorate their sanctuaries with sheaves of long grasses or maize and pumpkins and gourds and butternut squash. They get creative with the liturgy, offering up thanks to god, the universe, the great whatever, for all the bounty we’ve enjoyed through the past year. It’s a minor festival that church has relegated to religion lite.
But a more muscular religion would stare Thanksgiving straight in the eye and acknowledge the celebration’s roots in attitudes which are antithetical to faithful living. Thanksgiving is not the celebration of all we have received from god so much as a gloating over all we’ve taken from those we felt free to dominate. This day marks the systematic disenfranchisement, slaughter and cultural eradication of an entire people. How can thanks be appropriate? Especially in a church.
I am a direct descendant of the oppressors. My ancestors were among the Puritans who first arrived in New England on the Mayflower. Though they were oppressed in their homeland, they merely transplanted an authoritarian approach to human relationships and became oppressors in their turn. Many of the advantages I enjoy today (the things for which I ought to be thankful) I inherit as a legacy, not from the hard work of my ancestors, but from the suffering of those they exploited. On Thanksgiving, what am I to do with that legacy? And what is there that I can bring with authenticity into a sanctuary?
A more muscular religion might look to Yom Kippur for an appropriate approach. It might say that, instead of thanks, what we need to offer is atonement. What this holiday demands of us is a repentance for our personal implication in a grander sin.
Those like myself who are more directly aligned to the oppressors should not stop with guilt. A more muscular religion can take us further. We find an excellent example of this in the writing of Dorothea Sölle. I think in particular of her short monograph, Creative Disobedience. She begins with her own implication in systemic or structural sin. She was a German Protestant born in 1931. Though too young to have participated in the atrocities committed against Jews, nevertheless she acknowledges that she inherited the legacy of the oppressor. She observes a correlation between the idea of obedience to Christ and obedience to the Third Reich. Obedience was elevated to a virtue in its own right without the need to ground its consequences in anything of value.
There is a sense, too, in which the Puritans acted about of obedience. They were obedient to scriptural authority. It allowed them to evade atonement and, instead, salve their consciences by relying on the stories that belonged to another race who had lived 2,000 years before. As they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, they drew strength from an identification with the Israelites who had escaped bondage by fleeing across the Red Sea. They arrived at Plymouth imagining they had found a promised land of their own. They plundered that land secure in the knowledge that their god had granted them dominion. Thanksgiving marks our obedience to dead ideas. It commemorates our capacity to twist the sacred to self-serving ends.
Sölle notes that alongside obedience was a German trait the Nazi’s bore with pride: efficiency. Efficiency was its own reward and a national virtue. When average German citizens applied their obedience to the Nazi cause, they implemented their final solution with a terrifying efficiency.
There is an eerie correspondence between this calculated efficiency and the Puritan legacy. Efficiency is now a term of art amongst economists to describe the effective allocation of resources. But when we strip from this word its aura of scientific analysis, we find underneath an ethic without ground. We dazzle ourselves by the efficiency with which we can extract coal from a mountain, or clear-cut a forest, or pave a highway. All of these were projects the Puritans began. And in the dazzle of our efficiency, we stand blind to the prior question of whether we ought to do these things at all. We give ourselves the sense of moving forward, but we do so without intentionality.
Having popped the balloon of our Thanksgiving celebration, are there ways we can acknowledge the occasion which take us beyond simple guilt?
Perhaps the answer to this question is a matter of emphasis. The celebration is Thanks – giving. Although the “thanks” half of the word seems disingenuous, the “giving” half remains intact. Giving can be an act of atonement. It can also be an act of subversion. In a world that values efficiency, giving is one of the most irrational, undermining, and inefficient things you can do. And in a marketplace that demands your loyalty, giving is thoroughly disobedient.
This Thanksgiving I will:
• acknowledge my heritage and my alignment with oppressors;
• act intentionally in assuming my share of responsibility, both for my participation in structural sin, and for my role as an agent of change;
• give
I will give of my time, my personal resources, and perhaps most importantly, I will give of my attentiveness.