Unlike Canada’s Thanksgiving practice, which is more of a harvest celebration, the American observation is couched in a subjugating narrative. Wisdom is invited of you as you navigate this holiday. The particularity of your bodied, cultured, and located self will invite an equally particular practice. How can you foster gratitude? How can you foster acknowledgement of the abuse of power by Western colonizers? How can you foster awareness of this country’s history of dehumanizing violence of aboriginal Americans and enslaved peoples? How can you foster greater awareness that “American” Thanksgiving – as a National holiday – is most easily celebrated by whiteness culture. Just who is giving thanks, and for what?
Navigating complex cultural spaces is a wonderful formational opportunity for any collective. I’m thinking of leaders of Christian faith communities as I write today.
Unless you helped plant the local faith community you are a part of, you entered a community with practices, language, traditions, values, and histories already in place. In fact, that’s who the community is. Its a fallacy to think the church is people…the “church” is the stories, rituals, and values that enable connection. And it is their shared holding of their collective practices, language, traditions, values, and histories that keeps them together while simultaneously presents their greatest impediment to change. The inability listen and learn from the changing local context is why so many churches are dying.
What might your role be in your community at this moment? Is it yours to protest common practice? Or to tell it “slant”? Or question it? Or lament? or abstain? Listen? Other? What assumptions might lay underneath the group’s the practices, structures, and beliefs?
Listening deeply to the Divine invitation to foster gratitude, while listening to the dominant culture’s practice of Thanksgiving, while listening to the voices of colonized peoples can actually invite a community to collectively discern even more faithful ways of following Christ within their particular context.
Peace, dwight
PS – You likely are aware of this, but this Sunday, November 29th is the beginning of the season of Advent and marks the beginning of the New Year according to the church calendar. So, “happy new year!” We are entering “Year B” of the three year lectionary cycle.
