The Thanksgivings We Have Lost (But Can Gain)

The first colonists to what would become the United States came from nearly every background imaginable.

Pastors and priests, soldiers and settlers, strong men and sickly, young and old. A few were rich, but most were poor—the kind of men and women who would get on a seventy-four-foot wooden ship and sail away from the land of their fathers, where the sun seemed to rise, and into the endless unknown.

But it wasn’t their bravery that set them apart from us today.

These men said Mass on the sandy beaches of St. Augustine, praised God on the grassy shores of Jamestown, and broke bread with the Wampanoag in the cold fields of Plymouth. These wayward Englishmen distinguished themselves among men by forming the Mayflower Compact—a “covenant” between the religiously motivated Dissenters and the profit-motivated “Strangers” to “combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.”

It was a simple document in which they joined their European brethren to the south in paying homage to their king, but also broke with the old ways in establishing a voluntary constitution where all were equal before the law.

Their good work that late November day complemented the work of those who gave praise to God in established colonies to the south, in meager forts to the north, and even in the plains of the Texas Panhandle. All these were intrepid explorers, motivated by fame, fortune, liberty, or all of the above. But before all these, they gave their thanksgiving to God.

These men were no Jonahs, hoping “that a ship made by men will carry [them] into countries where God does not reign.” These were grateful men, steeped in the ways and religions of their fathers beyond the seas they’d crossed. They brought that humility before the Lord to the new land.

While they had their differences, they stand much further from our people today. Over four centuries after these humble thanksgivings, a culture of widespread entitlement makes the holiday, properly understood, feel out of place and almost antiquated.

The Americans who schlep their ways to the dinner table in elastic waistbands and hoodies (to feel “comfy”), who make sure the TV is loud enough to hear the game, who skip grace to get to the feast more quickly—they bear little in relation to those first settlers beyond their mean shape.

This problem is not unique to the Americas. Across the West, we are sated by our prosperity and entombed in our technology. Some of us remember Christ’s warning on how difficult it is for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, but we wonder little further than our political prisms allow. It never dawns on us that the Lord knew the rich man struggled to enter the gate to the Kingdom because a comfortable man would not bother looking for it.

To be thankful, you must develop a sense of humility in receiving privileges, experiences, and relationships that you don’t deserve. In a culture that idolizes self-love and mean comfort, the virtues outside ourselves are rarely cultivated anymore.

But the first people to give thanks in the New World weren’t kings, and few were saints. Many were cheaters and thieves, slavers and murderers. In a harsh new land with few visible things to follow—to guide them—but themselves, they chose to follow the invisible things.

They chose to look to their God, guided by the virtues of their forefathers. Those invisible things are still here today. We can still reach out, touch them, and make them our own. True, Western Civilization seems far from us now, but it seemed far from those first settlers too—yet they grasped it.

“Measured by the standards of men of their time, they were the humble of the earth,” then-Vice President Calvin Coolidge said on the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth Rock. “Measured by later accomplishments, they were the mighty.”

Their legacy is ours, if only we will strive for it. Happy Thanksgiving. May God bless us on our journey.