Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is an awkward observance for most clergy, or at least those of a liturgical bent. This is because, quite simply, Thanksgiving is not a Church holiday; it is an affair of state. As such, we do not have a ready-made observance, no rubrics to follow. This leads to an improvised hodgepodge of Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve services, some certainly better than others, yet all of them blurring the line betwixt the secular and the sacred. Thus we must take care. Render unto Caesar, and all that. One could approach the story of Thanksgiving from several different angles. School plays often point to the Year of Our Lord 1621, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, both Strangers and Saints, shared a three-day harvest festival with their Wampanoag allies. Historians often point to 1863, the height of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Federal holiday commemorating the founding unity of the American nation. But an honest account of its origins, methinks, lies somew...