Thanksgiving, History, and the Sources of Privilege

I woke up this morning with a song we sing in church running through my head:

“My heart is filled with thankfulness To Him who bore my pain; Who plumbed the depths of my disgrace And gave me life again;…(hum hum hum, because I forgot the next few lines)

My heart is filled with thankfulness To Him who walks beside; Who floods my weaknesses with strength And causes fears to fly; Whose every promise is enough For every step I take, (more forgetting, more humming)

For every day I have on earth Is given by the King; So I will give my life, my all, To love and follow Him.”

Yes, I know that Thanksgiving as a holiday is heavy laden with a legacy of pain. But for me, thanksgiving as an activity and even as a disposition is a daily practice—a debt I owe, to my Creator and to my family.

I grew up somewhat confused about families whose holidays were full of drama and anger, the resurfacing of buried resentments into drunken arguments. But I was equally confused about families who dressed in their best and had carefully curated and stage-designed meals presided over by a whole glistening turkey with little paper feet. For Thanksgiving most years of my childhood, my family went to Uncle Johnny and Aunt Naomi’s farm. We spent the day butchering hogs, the men outside manning huge kettles of boiling meat and the women inside making sausage (the process of which I find much more interesting than gross, but I’ll demure the details here) and getting ready to serve a meal, the kids doing other stuff—tobogganing if it was snowing (one time into the creek, so that we had to spend some time in our underwear under a blanket in front of the furnace while our clothes dried), picking freshly cooked bits out of the kettle to sample, trying to keep out of the way while still being in the middle of everything. One time, my cousin Jamie from the other side of the family needed to do a report for school, so he came along and we all followed Uncle Johnny through the whole process, from live pig to hanging hams in the smoke house and watching Aunt Hulda make sausage (I REALLY want to describe that process apparently, but, again, I won’t…). Anyway, there was some laughter, and catching up, but mostly the sounds of people working together. I don’t remember a single argument, and nobody dressed fancy.

As to the other side of the family, we shared meals regularly. Nearly every Sunday night, in fact, all the Mosers who lived on Moser Road had dinner at Mamaw and Pappy’s house. It was a special treat when the cousins who had moved away came to visit, or we went to visit them. This happened pretty often—each family had its own holiday to host a get-together. My dad grilled on Labor Day; we went to Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Jim’s house for New Year’s; Uncle Jerry and Aunt Martha hosted July 4th; and there were birthday celebrations throughout the year with Uncle Russell and Aunt Sidney, and Uncle Jim and Aunt Sandy. Christmas was spent making the rounds to the great aunts and uncles. My childhood was indeed privileged—no drama, no outsized expectations, no eruptions of anger, and competitions for affection or power were teasing (“Mom always did like you best” was a recurring joke among my uncles whenever Mamaw made someone’s favorite dish).

As I reflect on this experience, I have come to realize that that kind of harmony is no accident. I come from a long line of people who have sought to live humbly before their God, and that, I believe, is the source of our peace and our privilege. As far as I’ve been able to research, my people came here in the first decades of the 1700s. They were (and until my generation, continued to be) farmers with small dairy farms, seeking to make a modest living from the work of their own hands. My ancestors were Brethren and Moravian—two groups that stress obedience to Jesus Christ and a simple way of life. The older Brethren eschew human hierarchies of any kind (my grandparents’ church, for instance, had no ordained minister when I was growing up, just a farmer with the gift of preaching) and are one of three historic “peace” denominations. While my ancestors believed in service in times of war, they refused to take up arms; I know of one who was a weaver, for instance, and made uniforms for soldiers during the Revolution. The Moravian side of the family had and has similar commitments to nonviolence, humble living, and adherence to Scripture. When my Pappy prayed before our meals, he wept, humbly asking God to bless the food to strengthen our bodies, and equip us for His service.

In today’s academic culture, the holiday of Thanksgiving has become equated with colonial oppression, the decimation of Native culture, and a celebration of white privilege. The significance of that legacy of suffering cannot be overstated, and is too often dismissed by many as unimportant in contemporary society. It matters, and we must continue the unfinished work of seeking justice and opportunity for all people everywhere. But a Christian worldview locates the source of both oppression and privilege not in whiteness, understood metaphorically or materially, but on a radically equal footing for all people groups, for all individuals, for all identities: Just as the seeds of oppressive behavior lie within everyone--“For there is no distinction: for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23)--so the ultimate privilege of grace is open to everyone as well: “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). God doesn’t forgive us because He is made of love; He is just, and a just God can’t turn away from the pain humans inflict on one another. But because of His great love, He paid the full cost of our restoration to Himself by sacrificing His own Son.

Today, then, I celebrate debt by offering thanksgiving for grace freely given, for a legacy of peace, for the privilege of being able to live humbly before a great, good God.