Thanks to God Almighty

Thanksgiving isn’t until next Thursday, but in a way, it’s already here.

Although we may have to wait nearly a week for family gatherings, turkey carvings and an afternoon of football, a profound sense of thanks-giving should be a part of every day.

“Thank you” is often one of the first phrases taught to little children, along with “please” and “excuse me.” By the time we become adults, though, these words may have lost some of their original impact.

When I say “thank you,” I am acknowledging that I have received something for which I cannot pay. I am acknowledging my own insufficiency and dependence.

It is perhaps curious that Americans, who celebrate a day of independence from England, and who enjoy the independence brought about by vehicles, private homes and technological gadgets, also celebrate a day in which we implicitly admit our dependence.

It is quite possible, though, that this implicit admission of dependence has lapsed into a mere enjoyment of our own sufficiency.

Even in the midst of economic downturn, most of us in the United States still have enough to maintain comfortable lives. But Thanksgiving was not always like this.
The Pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621 fled encroaching religious authorities in England in 1609 and then in the Netherlands in 1619.

They set out to the New World in search of independence, but also with an attitude of dependence on God, as William Bradford explains in his contemporary account, “Of Plymouth Plantation”: “What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?”

In this same vein of thanks and dependence on God, an early American writer, William Byrd of Virginia, records as part of his routine in his Secret Diary during the early 1700s: “I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.”

Successive U.S. presidents have also acknowledged a dependence in their giving of thanks. George Washington, for example, on the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the national government on Oct. 3, 1789, included thanks for God’s “kind care” and “his Providence.”

Abraham Lincoln, too, in the midst of the Civil War in 1863, proclaimed a “day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

More than that, Lincoln instructed that this Thanksgiving be observed in “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience,” and that citizens “commend to His (God’s) tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife.”

Of course, many current Thanksgiving traditions are endearing, family-centered, relaxing and rejuvenating. And what’s wrong with food, football, shopping and Macy’s parade?

But clearly, our heritage of Thanksgiving in the U.S. indicates that something is missing in our comfortable, often inward-focused celebrations. A giving of thanks implies not just dependence, but also an object of thanks.

Giving thanks is an opportunity to look beyond ourselves, beyond even our families and what we own, to our ancestor’s “God Almighty.”

And we don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving Day to do that.