The Meaning of Thanksgiving

Why should Americans be thankful -- and to whom?

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

For generations, American school children learned the story of the First Thanksgiving as having been celebrated by the Pilgrims of New England at Plymouth. Vaguely I recall being a kindergartner, with a feathered Indian headdress (actually made of construction paper) and participating in a Thanksgiving pageant in which the Pilgrims wore black hats (also made of construction paper), relating the tale of how the English colonists had learned from the natives how to plant corn, thus ensuring the survival of the settlement. Public schools in Georgia did not yet offer kindergarten, so we attended the one at Austell Methodist Church, with Mrs. Bookout as our teacher, and the religious significance of Thanksgiving was emphasized.

As familiar as the tale of that first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts is to most Americans, it was not actually the first Thanksgiving in America. That honor belongs to Virginia, where the Good Ship Margaret arrived from England in 1619 carrying 37 men who settled at Berkeley Plantation. These men were Anglicans, not Puritans, but their two-and-half-month trans-Atlantic voyage had been perilous, beset by storms, and during their journey they had earnestly prayed to God for their safety.

Three dozen male Berkeley settlers landed here on December 4, 1619. Their first order of business, according to their instructions, was to say the following prayer: “We ordain that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantation, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

The men likely knelt on the cold ground by the shore. So far as can be known, there was no feast and no Native Americans were present.

The remembrance of that Thanksgiving in Virginia is due to historians who insisted that the Old Dominion not lose her proper place in American history. In 1962 — when I’d just turned three years old — President John F. Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation that began with a tribute to the Pilgrims of Massachusetts. This prompted a state senator in Virginia, John J. Wicker, to send a telegram to the White House protesting the omission of Virginia’s earlier Thanksgiving. Kennedy staffer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. replied apologetically and “attributed the ‘error’ to unconquerable New England bias on the part of the White House staff.” This was corrected the next year, with Kennedy’s 1963 Thanksgiving proclamation:

Over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and in Massachusetts, far from home in a lonely wilderness, set aside a time of thanksgiving. On the appointed day, they gave reverent thanks for their safety, for the health of their children, for the fertility of their fields, for the love which bound them together and for the faith which united them with their God. . . .

Today we give our thanks, most of all, for the ideals of honor and faith we inherit from our forefathers — for the decency of purpose, steadfastness of resolve and strength of will, for the courage and the humility, which they possessed and which we must seek every day to emulate. . . .

Let us therefore proclaim our gratitude to Providence for manifold blessings — let us be humbly thankful for inherited ideals — and let us resolve to share those blessings and those ideals with our fellow human beings throughout the world.

Barely two weeks after issuing that proclamation, Kennedy was assassinated, but I should hope that we still feel that “gratitude to Providence” he acknowledged.

‘Here I Raise My Ebenezer’

One of the things I’ve tried to emphasize to my children is to remember that they are descended from survivors. In the not-too-distant past, our ancestors had to make do without most of what we take for granted in making our lives safe and convenient. There was no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no automobiles, etc. In terms of medical care, there were no antibiotics, no X-rays, etc. Our ancestors were farmers in an age when that meant spending all day behind a plow hitched to mules, just to get the fields ready for planting in the spring. The farmers of yore worked from dawn to sundown, six days a week, merely to eke out their living. When you consider what an ordeal our ancestors endured up until just two or three generations ago, it not only makes you grateful for the relative ease of modern life, but also inspires an admiration for our forebears, who somehow managed to survive through all that.

Great-grandfather Winston Wood Bolt (seated); my grandmother at far right.

The fact of our ancestors’ survival should give us confidence that we can survive whatever troubles we might experience in life. My great-grandfather survived two years fighting in the Civil War, was captured in the Battle of Gettysburg, and then spent two years as a prisoner of war in Fort Delaware. Compared to all that he lived through, any problems in my life are trivial to the point of being microscopic.

Far be it from me to presume an expertise in theology, but it seems to me that if God is sovereign, then the survival of our ancestors was ordained by God, and there must have been some reason why He willed it to be so. Our own existence in the present day being dependent upon our ancestors’ survival, therefore God must have some meaning and purpose for our lives. God’s purposes may be mysterious to us, as on those occcasions when I wonder: “Why am I sitting in this traffic jam? What curse has befallen me? What sin have I committed for which I’m being punished this way?” Yet despite these mysteries, our Christian faith assures us that God’s got it all under control, even when chaos and catastrophe seem to loom everywhere.

In 1785, the English pastor Robert Robinson wrote a hymn that I later learned to sing as a boy in the pews of the First Baptist Church of Lithia Springs:

Come, thou Fount of every blessing;
tune my heart to sing thy grace ...

The second verse of that hymn begins thus:

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.

What does it mean, to “raise my Ebenezer”? The reference is from the first book of Samuel. The Israelites had gathered at Mizpeh, where they were attacked by the Philistines. “And the children of Israel said to Samuel, Cease not to cry unto the Lord our God for us, that he will save us out of the hand of the Philistines” (I Samuel 7:8). The prophet offered a sacrifice, the Lord intervened, and the Philistines were defeated. “Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us” (I Samuel 7:12).

The dictionary defines Ebenezer as “a commemoration of divine assistance,” so that what the lyrics of the hymn mean are, “I raise this monument here to acknowledge that God has helped me make it this far in the journey of my life.”

Alas, we live in an irreligious age, when atheistic experts of The Science™ expect us to believe that the entire universe is a random accident, that life has no transcendent meaning or purpose, that there is no God, and therefore no need for thanks to Him.

Well, it’s a free country, and I can’t stop the experts from insisting that they are descended from apes, but as for me and mine, we are created in God’s image. Unlike those self-proclaimed Monkey Men, we believe that our lives have meaning and purpose, and that God still answers prayer. It was faith in God that preserved our ancestors in their struggles, and answered prayers that delivered them across the ocean to arrive here in America, as President Kennedy said, “far from home in a lonely wilderness,” where they “set aside a time of thanksgiving. “ Let us not forget all that God has done for us. And praise God, from whom all blessings flow. Amen.