This Thanksgiving essay doesn't serve up the traditional meal of holiday platitudes. It shows how we can give thanks consistent with a God who won't be reduced to our expectations and conceptions--and consistent with the traditions of thanksgiving maintained by the Wampanoag and the Haudenosaunee before and after the "original" Thanksgiving centuries ago. The essay is the first to show me that we don't have to choose between what has become a traditional Thanksgiving, often insensitive to its historical lessons, and (pardon this) going cold turkey.
I love how this essay starts with Thanksgiving, weaves away from it, and returns to it in force: “‘Thank’ and ‘think’ share the same root.”
Some of my favorite lines:
“What emerges from Scripture isn’t a way to keep divine presence close. It’s a long, slow education in letting go.”
“Jacques Derrida (yes, that Derrida) might call this theological non-closure—a refusal to let meaning, or God, be finalized. It’s not a denial of truth; it’s a resistance to idolizing our own grasp of it.”
Thank you for this reflection as well as for your reference to James Breech's The Silence of Jesus. I read its introduction online and was intrigued, so I ordered a copy.
Thank you for such a generous and attentive reply. I’m especially grateful that my Advent reflection resonated with your reading of the essay rather than competing with it. And I’m glad Breech’s book intrigued you; his sensitivity to Jesus’ silences deepens the very questions you’re raising about gratitude, memory, and how we inhabit Thanksgiving without evasion.
This Thanksgiving essay doesn't serve up the traditional meal of holiday platitudes. It shows how we can give thanks consistent with a God who won't be reduced to our expectations and conceptions--and consistent with the traditions of thanksgiving maintained by the Wampanoag and the Haudenosaunee before and after the "original" Thanksgiving centuries ago. The essay is the first to show me that we don't have to choose between what has become a traditional Thanksgiving, often insensitive to its historical lessons, and (pardon this) going cold turkey.
I love how this essay starts with Thanksgiving, weaves away from it, and returns to it in force: “‘Thank’ and ‘think’ share the same root.”
Some of my favorite lines:
“What emerges from Scripture isn’t a way to keep divine presence close. It’s a long, slow education in letting go.”
“Jacques Derrida (yes, that Derrida) might call this theological non-closure—a refusal to let meaning, or God, be finalized. It’s not a denial of truth; it’s a resistance to idolizing our own grasp of it.”
Thank you for this reflection as well as for your reference to James Breech's The Silence of Jesus. I read its introduction online and was intrigued, so I ordered a copy.
Thank you for such a generous and attentive reply. I’m especially grateful that my Advent reflection resonated with your reading of the essay rather than competing with it. And I’m glad Breech’s book intrigued you; his sensitivity to Jesus’ silences deepens the very questions you’re raising about gratitude, memory, and how we inhabit Thanksgiving without evasion.