From Rev. Susan Frances: November 27, 2020
Image from the Indian Health Service website.
Dear Friends,
Fall is my favorite time of year. The colors on the trees, the smell in the air, the chill of the water, and the movement of the sun all remind me of my connection with the Earth and with the people in my life. For many of us, the fall brings with it traditions of the Thanksgiving holiday, when many of us typically gather with friends and family and express our gratitude for what is in our lives. Due to the pandemic, I know many of us spent Thanksgiving this week living out our usual traditions virtually or making new traditions. This year, I invite you to dig deeper into the story of Thanksgiving and embrace living with both gratitude and lament.
The Thanksgiving holiday comes as an annual reminder for me to make explicit my overtures of gratitude to the natural world and to my loved ones by sharing the abundance in my life through words and deeds. This year I am embracing my usual traditions of gratitude and combining them with my heart felt laments. This year, when I placed my hand on the bark of the Gingko tree outside my front door and expressed my gratitude for the miracle of being alive, I also expressed my sorrow for the overpopulation of the Earth as well as my deep grief at the deaths of people I know and the countless people I don’t know from COVID-19. This year, when I mailed cards to my family of origin and my chosen family to express my gratitude for them being in my life, I added in words of longing to see them and hug them. This year, when I reviewed my yearly donations to express my gratitude for my material comfort, I also donated the vacation funds that I did not spend to organizations providing vitally needed housing and food for those displaced from employment by the pandemic.
For decades, I have leaned into the Thanksgiving holiday as a complex combination of gratitude and lament. Growing up in an area that was predominately white and middle class, my childhood Thanksgiving story was a simple tale involving sharing food and expressing gratitude, and I continue to embrace the gathering of community and sharing of food over the Thanksgiving holiday. As I have learned that the Thanksgiving story is a story of settler colonialism that has been used over the years to advance the erasure of Native lives and history, I have made time to learn about and find ways to support the Wampanoag tribe, who inhabited the land where the Pilgrim ships landed in 1620, and other Native people who are still struggling to survive. This year, I invite you to learn about these additional holidays that encompass both gratitude and lament:
As we celebrate our personal traditions of gratitude and express our personal grief and sorrow this fall, let us practice reaching out beyond our comfort zone to learn about and find ways to support the gratitude and laments expressed by the Native people within our UU community and disbursed across the large continent we call home.
Grateful to be with you,
Rev. Susan