There's no electricity this a.m. A car slid off the road and took out a pole
that carried all our energy. It's been dark, completely, for an hour. I'm
trying to type on a tablet, and it's not going well.
Thanksgiving can be spontaneous and often is. It doesn’t always require practice or dogged devotion. Hard times in our family are somewhat safely behind us, thank the Lord, but all I have to do is stumble over an image or walk along a familiar road somewhere, and the dark days find a way to sneak back in, my personal PTSD.
In days of old, I smoked a couple of cigarettes a day out in the barn. Standing there in the frozen cold, I remember the smoke drifting down, dissipating slowly in air so motionless that it seemed I was exhaling ghosts. But what I also remember is that the spirit-like shapes of the smoke drew me back to an earlier time standing out there, a time when my nerves felt torn to pieces by bloody warfare in church. Just like that, total recall, blindingly uninvited.
I have no trouble saying I'm thankful all of that is ancient history, even if I wouldn’t mind a smoke. When I remember that mess, I give thanks it's finished.
Still, thanksgiving doesn't come naturally for me. I have to work at it. I have to discipline myself to do it because I’m hopelessly “Emersonian,” buoyed by good old, rugged self-reliance.
That pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins seems perfectly obvious. There's some gluttony in me—especially this holiday weekend; a pinch of lechery I don’t like admitting; some greed, I imagine, but not a whole lot; lots of sloth, but, hey!—I’m retired. I'll admit to some envy too--a really great lens, for instance; and okay, I get angry, or did, before the elections. But none of those, in me, are really capital offenses.
But pride? That’s huge. I don't think I walk around with my nose in the air, but me-first-ness beclouds everything I do. Not arrogance--that’s a whole different line of work; but the driving determination that what matters most about my life and my times and my fortunes are my life and my times and my fortune. That I got. In spades.
Most of us thusly cursed come off the factory line that way; it takes rugged fight to bridle it, to love God above all and your neighbor as yourself. Far easier to say than to do. Such selfless regard is not human after all, it’s Godly, so much so that we know selflessness when we see it. And we remember it too.
That's why, speaking for myself at least, Thanksgiving turkey is medicine for the soul, a celebration of the discipline some of us sinner must be reminded to do--to give thanks. Gluttony may well be a sin this weekend, but tomorrow, I say, the end justifies the means.
Meanwhile, this morning I'm still swallowed by darkness, tapping away at the iPad. The refrigerator isn’t running, the freezer isn’t either. Green lights from a dozen appliances are doused, and the darkness is appalling. Cold is creeping up my back as I sit here at the kitchen counter.
I’ve not panicked yet, although the power’s been out for close to an hour. What on earth does one do when there is no power? You get out the flashlights and light candles, and in the curse of darkness you almost certainly give thanks for what you have when you don't, as I am now.
I conceded there's always cause for thanksgiving, and the list is eternal. Tomorrow, right after dinner, we could go around the table and go on forever.
I just need a nudge, like Thanksgiving. You too? You got my
permission to take an extra helping of stuffing tomorrow--if I've got yours.
This morning's thanks is for tomorrow's turkey or ham or spinach salad or those shocking cranberries. And once-a-year pie. This morning's thanks is simple enough: it's for Thanksgiving.
And light. Because it's back. The energy's on. Thanks, Lord, for that
lineman in the hard hat just down the road, the one who spent a couple of
cold hours up in the cherry-picker hitching up wires in the blowing
snow.
Make me good at it, Lord. Make it a discipline.
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