Post Thanksgiving Thoughts

November 25th, 2016  |   

The leftover turkey bones and meat are in a pot on the stove here in Durham, NC, where I spent Thanksgiving Day at daughter Elizabeth’s home. The bird’s remains will become soup. The stuffing, now unstuffed, is long gone. The pies are history. The wine glasses have been drained. Family members are nowhere in sight, they left last night stuffed like the turkey itself, exhausted from marvelous table talk and laughter.

Yesterday I took a walk on a portion of the Duke campus. While walking, I spotted a  little boy sitting on the path. He was pushing dirt around with a stick. I stopped and asked him what he was making. He pointed to a mound of dirt he called a mountain. Around it he had created roads and tiny piles of dirt, meant to be houses. 

Continuing along the path, I thought about a man I had known, now deceased. He was a prominent and successful architect, who had spent his life creating plans for buildings and parks. Before he died, he told me that his career had begun as a boy, when he had made tiny mud and stone buildings in the backyard of his home, located in a dirt-poor section of West Virginia. 

Past, present and future, I do believe,  have an almost incomprehensible way, at times, of intersecting with one another. A man now dead, a child very much alive, separated by time, both playing with dirt, both making little cities. And me as well, a child, so many years ago, scratching out words on a pad, making sentences with a pencil. All of us living into an uncharted future. 

As a child, I was taught “to give thanks at all times and in all places,” words from my church prayer book. What did I really know about those words back then? Even now, years later, what’s to be made of those still-remembered words? All times? All places? Joyful times as well as places full of grief? Claim all of them? All times, no matter what? All places? Here, right now, in my very own nation, when my country is in dire political straits?

Thinking about my 81st Thanksgiving Day, now gone, I am compelled to say, yes, all times and all places. Yes, all of it, for I do believe, with all my heart, mind and soul, that we human beings will be no good for one another, nor will we be able to do good in a troubled world, unless we can find a way to say thanks for life, all of it, past and present. And not just on Thanksgiving Day.

Yesterday, a friend sent these timely words from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”

But what about the future? Is it possible to give thanks for the future, for things yet to come, or are we human beings trapped between past realities as we knew them, and the precarious moments we are now living through?

Of course not. We are unable to predict the future because there are too many variables, too many unknown possibilities, too much time-to-come, time that is outside the realm of our immediate reach. 

But perhaps, just perhaps, even though we can’t give thanks for future things-to-come, things we cannot see, maybe, just maybe, we can give thanks for the time, just the time, we know is yet to come. Time to create a world, not to destroy it. Time to take hold of dirt, and mud and stones and words, in order to put imagination, always on the move, to work. Time to live into the future. 

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