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In a recent issue, Time Magazine posed to all a question: darkened by the long shadow of September 11th, will Thanksgiving be the same? This question, while an obvious journalistic play upon our fears, is nonetheless a valid one. Can we celebrate as we have before? Perhaps this is a question that each of us must answer individually, but I suggest that we would all benefit from considering the foundation, and the founder, of Thanksgiving as an official holiday.

Starting in 1621, the day had been celebrated occasionally, though not consistently. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln felt it right to proclaim Thanksgiving a permanent national holiday. The country was in the depths of despair over a horrible and seemingly endless war. Our wise president understood the need for a time of spiritual stock taking; a time for appealing, as a national body, to our creator.

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord...

Thus Lincoln began with a recital of great truths. He then turned to demonstrate proof of the founding father's faith in them:

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no nation has ever grown.

How strange and surprising (perhaps coincidental?) that the interval between Lincoln's day and ours has been a repetition of those blessings - a time in which America stepped to the very forefront of nations, second to none in wealth and might. Yet the president felt that the war, afflicting the land as he wrote, was a sign of something amiss.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

Thus did Abraham Lincoln call for the one appeal that could help lift so ponderous a weight from a nation's collective shoulders:

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

So right was this gesture that America took Lincoln's holiday to heart, and holds it quite sacred to this day. How great a blessing, as our country enters a new age of uncertainty, that we already have such a day set aside. Surely, we should invest in it a reawakened reverence; and take from it a greater appreciation of, a deepened dedication to, the things that matter most. To answer the journalist's question, this day will not be the same, indeed: we will gain from it renewed and more powerful meaning, both as individuals, and as a people.

Copyright ã, Douglas Holt, 2001