Thanksgiving with the Family.

It's a great gift to hear new words pop out at you while listening to time-honored liturgy. My experience this week was really hearing this phrase (the part in bold), for, I think, the first time:

“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:37-40

Have you ever caught that before? Here, Christ is explicitly identifying himself with the poor and marginalized. My family, he calls them.

(For some reason the reference to family makes the Godfather's voice pop up in my head...)

I am at times stymied by some of my radical views, in that at times they keep me from engaging joyfully in some of the simple pleasures of life that others happily enjoy without any further thought - and this is especially true at Thanksgiving. I think I have a harder time with Thanksgiving than just about any other holiday.

All over America, families will gather at table and thank God, many of them using these exact words, "for the great feast before us". Some families will list off their great blessings of the past year - jobs attained, health achieved, obstacles avoided, objects acquired. They will gather and thank God for these things, when just a short ways down the road, another family will be unable to put food on the table, or name half as many blessings from the year gone by. The first family, by invoking the name of God as the provider for all that they have, are simultaneously asserting a very strange hermeneutic - that God wanted them to have all of these things, and that God also somehow did not want those same blessings for the neighbors.

So I squirm to be part of it. In the days surrounding the holiday, the term "thankful" will be tossed around until it is rendered nearly meaningless. But each time it's invoked, the person saying it will be saying, by their "thankfulness" that they have God to thank for whatever item or blessing they name. This in a world walked by hundreds of millions of desperately poor.

So my attitude most Thanksgiving Days is to have some turkey, but hold the thanks. I just try to enjoy the time to relax and be with family.

And then along comes Jesus and says "the least of these... are members of my family" - and suddenly I'm taken by an entirely new vision - who is my family? And the answer, it seems, is the family down the street - and them every bit as much as my actual flesh and blood. Jesus reminds me that I am joined to the whole world as a family. I'm struck by this question: "How do I go about spending the holiday with my whole family?"

And I'm struck, oddly enough, by thankfulness. Thankfulness for this radical, lifechanging teaching we have from Christ - thankful for a country bursting with progressives who are breaking down so many barriers, building new communities, new economies, and electing new leaders - so many of them spurred on by true compassion and the call to look after the least of these. The Kingdom, it seems, is indeed at hand, the hour drawing closer. And for that, this year, I am thankful to God.

Obama and Prop H8: The last shall be first.

The images from the world's reaction to Obama's election are disorienting - throngs of people, thousands of them, reduced to tears of joy and dancing at the very thought of America's new president. The crowds didn't just appear on Election Night, either - Obama had been drawing huge crowds - nearly 100,000 in Denver, many tens of thousands in St. Louis, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, and elsewhere - whole cities that never come out of their buildings, congregating to look at each other and the man they hope can lead us out of the darkness of the Bush years.

In the joy that so many the world over have felt about Obama's ascendancy, though, there is something deeper, too. And the joy that has bubbled up is about much more than race. Obama's election points to something deep within us - a desire for justice, and a reminder of what Christians call the Kingdom Coming wherein

The last will be first, and the first will be last.

The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

(Matthew 20 and 23)

In his ministry, Jesus proposed a radical turning of our social systems, a Kingdom that would undercut the power of the entrenched winners of the current order. But more than simply laying out the vision, Christ used this premise as a way of articulating God's love for his children - a love defined by a lack of condition - a love set apart for the poor and oppressed as much as, if not moreso than, for the kings and high priests.

Not to rely solely on Christian wisdom, though, The Tao te Ching also has these words:

All streams flow to the sea
because it is lower than they are.
Humility gives it its power.

If you want to govern the people,
you must place yourself below them.
If you want to lead the people,
you must learn how to follow them.

(66)

These are words that make our hearts flutter, because we know deeply that they are True; that they point to a basic spiritual fact that pride and power are inherently disconnected from love - and that it is the will of the Spirit, whatever you name it, that we be governed by love.

And so when we see a black man, elected through the force of thousands of poor volunteers, standing at the podium on Election Night, we are reminded of the generations of suffering that fell upon people like him, and we remember the Kingdom where the last shall be first. Therein, I think, is the key to understanding the gush of tears and emotion the country has worked through in these last few days. Obama's election is, in the fullest sense of the word, a revelation. It's a glimpse of the Kingdom.

The day after the Election, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has done phenomenal work in retelling the history of the African American race, said this to NPR:

What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor — resulting in spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all of those black collective dreams deferred — that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama's election? ...

I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, "Yes! Yes! And yes, again!" I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay — the price of President-elect Obama's ticket.

On that first transformative day when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Frederick Douglass, the greatest black orator in our history before Dr. King Jr., said that the day was not a day for speeches and "scarcely a day for prose." Rather, he said, "it is a day for poetry and song, a new song."

Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound
Let all the nations know,
To earth's remotest bound:

The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

This sign was spotted in Grant Park that night...




~~~

So... all of this is to say to our brothers and sisters in the gay and lesbian community - the pain that you feel now over the passage of California's Proposition 8 is shared by so many, and should spur all of us to immediate and aggressive action. But know that it is also a pain that is also temporary. Know that the progressives always win in the end. The change you seek has not come, but it is coming. You too will have your Obama.

The last shall be first.









Crossposted on DailyKos and Street Prophets

A Blogger's Prayer

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

From Thoughts in Solitude

by Thomas Merton