Community Matters: The liturgy of Thanksgiving

Daniel Rossi-Keen

Thanksgiving is both a holiday and an act. An event on the calendar, yes. But also, something that is birthed in the hearts and minds. It is both a moment in time and a disposition that only some celebrants of the holiday actually manifest.

If I am honest with myself, I must admit that a great many of my Thanksgivings have lacked the kind of intentional act of giving thanks that I briefly described above. As a child, I recall my grandmother directly quizzing each person assembled around the Thanksgiving table, calling them to account for gratitude and asking them to share with the family something for which they were thankful.

Previous column:Community Matters: Five community hypotheses

I don’t come from a particularly reverent clan, so this liturgy of thanks generally felt a bit forced and not altogether serious. My grandmother commanded enough respect that we all dutifully played along. But none of us were sufficiently skilled enough as actors to produce the kind of on-demand introspection that I expect my grandmother sought. I always had the impression that my grandmother was both pleased with herself for enacting this communal liturgy of thanks and was also simultaneously underwhelmed by the depth of the experience.

Looking back, I give my grandmother kudos for her commitment to the liturgy of thanksgiving. It was a noble and honorable attempt to surface gratitude among those who had much for which to be thankful, even if they were generally unthoughtful about the many blessings in their lives.

The problem with my grandmother’s approach to corporate thanksgiving is probably not very hard to discern. The power of a liturgy generally has little to do with any single observance of the act. Instead, the benefit and wisdom of liturgical practice is bound up with its repetitive, cyclical, and corporate nature. When undertaken over time, in community with others, and throughout the seasons of life, the discipline of a liturgy becomes a kind of teaching tool. Liturgy, when done well, is a vehicle for culture-making, education and transformation. But, when done poorly or only occasionally, the liturgy of thanksgiving is likely to be shallow and obligatory. Liturgical acts gain power as those who are involved grow into the aspirations and dispositions that the liturgy aspires to illuminate. And this was the part of the story that my grandmother’s noble but forced act failed to account for.

Story continues

In my capacity as a community leader, I have been thinking lately about the need to be more deliberate in corporately calling out those things for which we are thankful. To make this more regular and obvious, RiverWise gatherings sometimes start with what I have begun calling a “Circle of Honor.” During the Circle of Honor, I intentionally create time and space for participants to speak honorably about something they have recently observed in the life of the community. Sometimes those who are present speak about an event that was exemplary, a project that was notable, or an award that was received. Other times they praise the character, leadership, or disposition of someone in the community who has acted nobly.

What I have found interesting is that the more deliberate and consistent I am about starting meetings with a Circle of Honor, the more probing and substantive the reflections become over time. What begins with an obligatory response quickly becomes a discipline of seeing the community differently. Beyond a simple pat on the back, the Circle of Honor becomes, over time, a liturgy of thanksgiving during which the community begins both to observe and to perform a different kind of corporate identity. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways this discipline of thanksgiving is changing not only the way we view one another, but also the manner of our interactions and the range of possibilities among and between our organizations.

We have all kinds of liturgies in our life. Checking email first thing in the morning. Exercising. Prayer or meditation. Having a cup of tea before bed. These liturgies subtly impose order on our lives while also signaling implicitly what we value. In a world full of countless liturgies, we must be deliberate and committed to the liturgy of thanksgiving to ensure that this discipline is not drowned out by other forces.

My grandmother had the right idea, and I am thankful for her noble attempt at corporate thanksgiving. Obviously, her aspirations had some effect on me and my memory of the holiday. I suppose what my grandmother got wrong was being too timid in her commitment to the liturgy of thanksgiving. We should, I suppose, have undertaken the act every week when we gathered on Sunday around her table. Had we done so, we would have learned together that the act of thanksgiving cannot be turned on and off in an instant. We would have come to understand more clearly that the disposition of thanksgiving is a discipline and a muscle that must be exercised to gain in strength and relevance to the broader organism of which it is a part.

For my part, this Thanksgiving is renewing my commitment to enacting more and more Circles of Honor in the life of the community. Perhaps, by so doing, we can corporately level up our capacity for giving thanks, for speaking nobly about others, and for performing together a more dignified and honorable identity for ourselves and our communities.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends!

Daniel Rossi-Keen, Ph.D., is the co-owner of eQuip Books, a community bookstore in Aliquippa and the executive director of RiverWise, a nonprofit employing sustainable development practices to create a regional identity around the rivers of Beaver County. You can reach Daniel at daniel@getriverwise.com.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Community Matters: The liturgy of Thanksgiving