“Thanksgiving
as a Myth of Origin” Nov. 26, 2017
Roger Ray, pastor
The Emerging Church
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality
(pp. 18-19) regarding sacred feasts:
1. It
constitutes the history of the acts of the founders, the Supernaturals.
2. It
is considered to be true.
3. It
tells how an institution came into existence.
4. In
performing the ritual associated with the myth, one “experiences knowledge of
the origin” and claims one’s patriarchy.
5. Thus
one “lives” the myth, as a religion.
There are reasonable disputes
about exactly when and where the first Thanksgiving took place. . . not that it
especially matters. The regular observance as a national holiday can be easily
traced to the days of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln called for
the observance as a way to foster a sense of patriotism and pride in being
Americans before America tore itself apart.
Most cultures have some sort
of spring and fall holiday to reflect the agricultural cycles of life but in
almost every nation, one of those has evolved into a religious or a nationalistic
observance and, in our case, Thanksgiving is both.
I’ve been reading the work of
the late Romanian scholar, Mircea Eliade, since I
was in grad school, though I have never had the faintest idea about how to
properly say his name. But it was in studying his work 40 years ago that my Old
Testament professor helped us to understand how the Jewish observance of
Passover was not a simple recitation of their story of origin but was, in fact,
an almost magical feast in which their history was repeated in the telling of
the story about their wandering Aramean father, their Egyptian captivity and
escape, and how the things that they ate were to remind them of their
deliverance from bondage, and the hardships of their journey to a land flowing
in milk and honey.
The events described in a
Passover celebration are not terribly historical. There was neither a mass
exodus from Egypt, nor a sudden conquest of the land these nomads would later
occupy. Nor did either Moses or Charlton Heston divide the Red Sea or provide
mana from heaven. But the story is told as if it is absolutely historical and
it defined families as being Jewish, as living on the land God had given to
them, and it bound them to one another, their nation, their land, and their
shared faith.
The Jewish claim that God
gave them the Promised Land, a land that was already occupied by another nation
with walled cities, and agricultural practices, has no more authority to it
than if I showed up at your house and asked you to leave because God had given
me your house…. Oh, and leave the car keys, God gave me your car too.
But we tell these stories
and reenact myths through ceremony, liturgy, and sacred meals and at some very
deep level we start to believe that it is true. God gave Palestine to the Jews,
gave North America to British invaders, and lately the Russians think that they
have some mythic claim to a great deal of eastern Europe. Just as Jihadists
believe that God has put them in charge of Islam so that killing other flavors
of Muslims is not a moral issue.
Thanksgiving is that for
most of our nation, even when it is so unconsciously. In our elementary
schools, we drew pictures of Pilgrims and Indians who shared in a great harvest
feast. But in our homes we drew upon previous generations to eat foods that
often go back four, or five, or six generations. Our traditions may be
different but each family has theirs. Valerie and I have concrete expectations
from our annual Thanksgiving feast from which we do not vary. The way my family
makes a crusty dressing, the prominent placement of roasted chestnuts, and a
sweet potato casserole that is both as addictive and possibly as bad for your
health as heroin. None of these things are normal foods for us that we would
eat any other week out of the year but they cannot go missing from our annual ritual
that, in some ways, defines who we are.
But as Eliade points out,
the ritual is also a part of reinvesting ourselves in our own myths of origins.
The myths about God having gone into the real estate business on behalf of the Jews,
giving them clear title to a parcel of land that already had people living on
it, but the God connection justified how they treated the Canaanites. It so
clearly baptized their national interests that their wars were not about land
theft, enslavement, and cruelty, because they were fulfilling God’s will.
As we here in America
were trying to sleep off our Thanksgiving feast this year, people in Egypt were
waking up to a deadly horror as more than 300 worshippers in a mosque were
being murdered by other Muslims. And here is one of the things I wish that most
Americans could come to understand, including and especially our current
president: the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism are, in fact, other
Muslims.
Why would Islamic terrorists
kill worshippers in a mosque? Well, because they were, from the Jihadist’s
view, the wrong kind of Muslims. In this instance, it was not a case of Shi’a
attacking Sunni’s or Kurds attacking Shi’a. In this case, the victims belonged
to a smaller division of Islam called, Sufis. Sufism is often described as the
mystical branch of Islam but in spite of the visuals of whirling dervishes,
this is a branch of Islam that we would love to see spreading. Its adherents
are peace loving and their spirituality is rooted in meditation and
contemplation. If there is a progressive branch of the Muslim world, it is
likely to be found among the Sufis.
But the existence of a
peaceful, contemplative group of Muslims who pray five times a day, memorize
the Quran, eat only Halal foods, but who yet disagree with both Sunni and Shi’a
interpretations of the Quran is like trying to tell Judge Roy Moore that it is
wrong for a thirty-year-old man to date teenaged girls. Please forgive me if I
feel compelled to quote Voltaire once again, “Those who can persuade you to
believe in absurdities and get you to commit atrocities.”
Passover, Thanksgiving,
Ramadan, these sorts of rituals that mix myth with history and national
identity can be so powerful that we start to deny facts and gloss over either
current or ancient violence.
Isis fighters killed 300 Sufis
in Cairo on Friday and you know immediately that is horrible. No myth of
religious righteousness could justify that murder but before we move on, may I
ask you: The military fort that is just
up I44 from us, Ft. Leonard Wood . . . do you know who Leonard Wood was?
He was a general who in
the early 20th century led an American army in the invasion of the
Philippines. The battle for which he is best known was derided at the time it
happened by none other than Mark Twain. General Wood was engaging a group of
Filipina insurgents who happened to be Muslims. They were called Moro. Over a thousand of these primitives armed
with only wooden clubs and spears took refuge in the crater of an inactive
volcano. Men, women, children, huddled in the crater to escape the gun fire of
Wood’s army but the Americans were not in a mood to take prisoners.
They lined up machine
guns on the lip of the crater and shot down on the Moro until they were all
dead. The soldiers then went down into the crater to have their pictures taken
with the mounds of dead bodies. We named this huge fort in Missouri after
General Leonard Wood.
Now, in 1906, Wood’s men
killed about 1100 defenseless Muslims. In 2017, this band of Isis fighters
killed 230 defenseless Muslims. To hear our media pundits talk about it, the immorality
and vicious nature of Isis is beyond comprehension. I don’t disagree with them,
I just can’t get comfortable with pretending that we haven’t done the same and
worse.
There are not many
bleeding heart liberals who have not, at some time or another, quoted Gandhi’s
famous teaching that we must be the change that we want to see in the world but
the shoe fits in this case. We want Isis to stop murdering people and to join
the world of decent civilized folks. But we may have to go first.
Telling the hard truth is
what churches are for. I know an awful lot of em just give into indoctrinating
folks into our cultural myths so deeply that we can confidently say that the
German genocide against the Jews in the 20th century is the worst
crime in the modern world, while we hardly consider the American genocide of
Native Americans as being historically relevant. That is why, in my opinion, it
is important to pull apart our myths and take a serious look at what they are
made of.
We use national myths to
build patriotism and bind a diverse society together but we can also use them
to whitewash both our history and our current conduct. From across the distance
of a half a century, we can decry the racist ways in which black people were
treated during the civil rights marches of the 60’s in America’s south but,
folks, realistically, when last December the police in North Dakota trapped a
couple of hundred peaceful protestors at Standing Rock on a bridge and sprayed
them with fire hoses in subfreezing temperatures, using pepper spray and police
dogs to keep the protesters in check… it doesn’t look like we have come very
far from our racist past.
Oh, and if you are
keeping score, I told you last year that if the DAPL pipeline was completed
that it would leak…. It leaked nearly a quarter of a million gallons of dirty
crude oil on North Dakota this week. I’m not a prophet or anything. It was easy
to predict that the pipeline would leak because they all do.
The myth of American
exceptionalism has an origin in the Thanksgiving story of harmonious
celebrations between British invaders and Native Americans. We know that the
truth of that relationship, while it had its moments of compassion and a good
deal of financial trading, it was largely a history of violence, broken
treaties, and land theft, usually in the name of God.
These encounters between
Europe and the Americas sent corn, potatoes, and pumpkins to Europe and the
Indians got cows, pigs, chickens, and wheat from Europe. They also got small
pox, measles, and malaria from Europe, and because Europeans captured millions
of Indians, mostly women and children, and took them to Europe as sex slaves,
the Indians were able to share venereal diseases with Europe.
But there were instances
of inter-tribal slavery as well. And, just like in Africa, there were Native
tribes that sold captured members of rival tribes to the European slave trade.
It is not, at this point, about good guys and bad guys. Humans of all stripes
have a remarkable penchant for simultaneously being horribly cruel and at the
same time telling themselves that they are doing the work of God.
I’m just saying that God
doesn’t want your genocides, your real estate, your slaves, or your
self-righteousness.
We don’t seek to expose
the deception behind popular myths as some kind of public shaming of white,
European history, or of some kind of religious self-flagellation but only this:
ignorance of history dooms you to repeat it. Self-deception about past failures
means that you learn nothing from those failures and set yourself up to do it
again.
Our faith journey should
give us insight into ourselves and into the world, not serve as a set of
blinders to keep us from ever knowing what is going on. When we are honest
about it, we have to acknowledge that our path to this juncture in history
involved a genocide of 50 million Native Americans, the enslavement of 12
million Africans, and the exploitation of uncounted legions of immigrants, and
some pretty shoddy treatment of the continent we took from its rightful owners.
But the past doesn’t have
to be prelude. We are in charge of our future and we can put some of that
liberty and justice that we want to be known for in it. We can put equal rights
in it. We can put sustainable building and renewable energy into it. And
please, let’s put some sane religion into it. God’s knows we’ve had enough of
the other kind!
