'Let us give thanks . . . . '

A message for Thanksgiving from Robert Bruttell, chair of the Interfaith Leadership Council of Metropolitan Detroit:

“Let us give thanks.”  Said that way, it sounds like we are about to pray.  But if I say that an attitude of gratitude is good for the soul, though the words are similar, it sounds like it could be just a figure of speech in everyday language - something we might say in conversation with the person we just met in the course of an ordinary day.

To my mind that is one of the ironic things about the intersection of faith and the so-called secular.  The lives we live in our churches, temples, mosques and other places of the worship, and the lives we live elsewhere in the community may just have more in common than we usually notice.  Many very valuable sentiments or truths have both a profoundly and recognizably religious syntax as well as an ordinary commonplace one.  The spirit and celebration of Thanksgiving give us many opportunities to observe just how much our faith values overlap with the values we express in our more public lives.

Thanksgiving, in both the actual sense of feeling grateful for all that we have, and in the civic holiday we celebrate this month, is a very important part of our lives as Americans.  It is so important, in fact, that we have found it necessary to teach our children an invented civic mythology: that the Pilgrims initiated the Thanksgiving holiday in 1621 and that we Americans have been celebrating it ever since.  We even point out that they celebrated diversity way back then because Native Americans and Pilgrims, the very few who survived that first year as immigrants, shared a meal of thanksgiving together.  Surely, had it not been for those kind natives not even the 46 Pilgrims who did survive would have been alive and able to give thanks.

So again this year, in celebrations marked by gratitude for the plenty we have, we Americans will give thanks and enjoy the company of family and friends.  We also will celebrate gratefully the pluralism and diversity that is so bountiful as well.  In the Detroit area, and elsewhere around the country, Thanksgiving is being observed with many “interfaith” Thanksgiving celebrations and services, bringing together people of various faith traditions to give thanks and to celebrate the values and cultures we share, despite the differences that can occasionally divide us.  The benefits of diversity are just as critical for us as they were for the Pilgrims.  This is a truth worth honoring and celebrating in as many religious and civic ways as we can find to do so.  For my sake, I am grateful that many of us will give thanks very much in keeping with our forebears who recognized how important an appreciation of family, friends and food are to our civic life.