Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. (Melody Beattie)
Americans need a day dedicated to gratitude. I have noticed that in the lineup of most of our holidays that Thanksgiving is perhaps the one least given over to secularism - the one we still observe in a traditional fashion. We need it to keep our focus clear and to teach our children what it means to be thankful for family, friendship and faith.
We need a time to gather around the table with extended family and enjoy turkey and dressing and gravy, two kinds of potatoes, cranberries, hot rolls, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie and whipped cream. We need it, not for the calories, but to create an awareness that there are those who don’t have those blessings, because in the hectic pace of our everyday lives we tend to forget those in need.
Family and food are important, but above all else, Americans need a rededication to our faith.
Faith brought the pilgrims to the new country in search of a place to practice their faith in peace and freedom, a voyage undertaken “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith.”
Faith led Thomas Jefferson to write “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Faith inspired Benjamin Franklin to stand up in that July steaming heat in a building in Philadelphia that we now call Independence Hall, where the delegates had assembled to draft a Constitution that would forever bind us together as a nation, and make a plea that “henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business...” In only a short time after they began the habit of prayer, the Constitution, one of the most important documents of all time came together and this new nation was on its way to becoming the epitome of freedom and democracy throughout the world and so it remains today.
It was President Reagan’s faith when he described America as “a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.” The reference was to a phrase coined by Governor John Winthrop as he crossed the ocean to the new land in 1630.
It was his Faith that caused Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an elder in his hometown Presbyterian church, to ask his pastor to prepare for him the elements of communion and he took them, along with a small silver chalice and his Bible on board the spaceship as part of the personal items each astronaut is allowed to have. Before he stepped out to make that “giant leap for mankind,” he celebrated communion, giving thanks that the first liquid ever poured on the moon and the first food ever eaten there were the elements of the communion service.
And finally, as reported on NASA’s own website, on Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, became the first to orbit the moon, and as their command module floated above the lunar surface, the three men beamed back images of the moon and earth and took turns reading from the book of Genesis the first ten verses starting with “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
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