A Spiritual Thanksgiving Celebration
Ruth Ann Stites, Staff Writer
When I was in elementary school Thanksgiving always included cutouts of pilgrims thumbtacked to the bulletin board with the occasional Indian thrown in for good measure to commemorate the Thanksgiving feast of 1621 in Plymouth Colony. But the story of American Thanksgivings is far more complex and ancient than the European celebration from which we typically derive our Thanksgiving traditions. And even among Europeans, the Plymouth celebration was hardly the first. Thanksgiving services date back to the first European explorers in the 1500’s.
In an online article from the Smithsonian, “Thanksgiving: From Local Harvests to National Holiday,” comes the following, “Long before Europeans set foot in the Americas, native peoples sought to insure a good harvest with dances and rituals such as the Green Corn Dance of the Cherokees.”[1] Giving thanks for the harvest and influencing future bountiful harvests seem to be a universal desire for farming peoples worldwide and throughout history. It certainly was evident in Hebrew tradition with its primary festivals of Shavuot and Sukkot related to the spring and autumn harvests.[2]
This season of Thanksgiving turned my thoughts to the spiritual harvests we should celebrate as well as the bounty of the physical harvest embodied in our Thanksgiving Day feast. In Galatians 5:13-26 the Apostle Paul addresses how we should use our freedom in Christ. In it He speaks of the Fruit of the Spirit our lives should produce: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control…” (Gal. 5:22-23). Jesus, too, likened spiritual abundance to a harvest in John 15:1-17. In verse 5 He says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” The harvest our Lord has in mind for us comes, not so much from our own efforts, but from the glorious growth that comes through Him. Our job is to abide in Him and walk in the Spirit.
At this Thanksgiving, stop and examine the harvest you can see in your life. Mother Teresa, later Saint Teresa, of Calcutta put it this way, “We will be the happiest people in the world if we belong to God, if we place ourselves at his disposal, if we let him use us as he pleases.”[3] How happy are you because you are letting Him use you just as He pleases by taking up your cross to follow Him?
(Photo credit: R. A. Stites, Dogwood Canyon park, Lampe, Missouri, 2024)
[1] For more about this Cherokee festival see: Cherokee PINS Project video Cherokee Green Corn Ceremony and Georgia Public Broadcasting video about the Green Corn Festival.
[2] From Google AI Overview: “The primary Jewish harvest festivals are Shavuot, which celebrates the start of the wheat harvest and the giving of the Torah at Sinai, and Sukkot, which is the ‘Festival of Ingathering’ or ‘Festival of Booths’ commemorating the autumn harvest and the journey through the desert. Shavuot, a spring holiday, was originally an agricultural celebration of the first fruits, while Sukkot is an autumn festival focusing on the season’s bounty and the Exodus from Egypt.”
