In predawn dark two days before Thanksgiving the streets are silent, cold rain isn’t set to arrive until this afternoon, the old boiler below sends warmth clicking and burbling through pipes that heat this ancient building.

Two days before Thanksgiving.

For what are we thankful, and whom do we thank?

Thankful for an oversized bird stuffed with an unrecognizable gray brown goo that by the time it comes out of the oven smells wonderful but is looking a bit dangerous?

Thankful our team is winning on a day that seems to celebrate football?

Thankful for the noise of family, if we have one, for friends, if they’re around?

Would we be thankful with no turkey, no football, no family or friends?

To whom do we give thanks? Do we bow our heads and on this day thank a God we don’t understand who seems to exist in books we don’t read as we take credit for our successes and blame others for our failures?

Stop it! That’s too harsh. Be more gentle, it’s Thanksgiving, for goodness sake and there are children about, or not, the team just scored a touchdown, or not, Uncle Ralph is shouting that the country is going to hell, or not.

It’s tempting to merge faiths and thank God, or omit that detail and mutter softly to an undefined higher power, a being All Powerful and Everywhere and Who doesn’t need to be named but has apparently acute hearing, that we’re thankful for family and friends and that Uncle Ralph is here with us today after what he had to go through last summer.

Amen. Pass the potatoes.

Are we thankful for the stuff in our lives, even though we’ve been told that doesn’t matter? Thankful for being better off? For not being worse off? That we’re not the ones living at the edge of the forest under a blue tarp in the rain; cold, wet, truly alone?

Stop it. For The Children. Stop it, the forest people got what they deserved. Ralph! Don’t start with that!. What’s the score? Down six, four minutes left!

Noises: predictable, pleasing, disturbing, mulching a Knowledge that there’s something more.

Thanksgiving. Thankful. Maybe that’s it, maybe that’s all there is, all there has to be.

There’s More here, we didn’t create all this and much will survive us, will survive this day, this moment. There’s more here, in this moment. Thankful.

A sense of humility condenses like a light, bright mist. In This Moment. Family is more than a gathering of differences. Community is more than a sum.

In this moment a feeling of grace flows slowly into the room, a feeling that right now is alright, that the future is uncertain but the past is here, now, and it’s Alright, as it is, as it should be. Forgiven. Shared.

Happy Thanksgiving.

~ ED