These are the words I shared at the Thanksgiving celebration in Calais tonight:
Good evening, my friends,
Before we begin the festivities, I’d like to share a few words.
My name is Joseph. I’m from the United States, and I moved here two years ago with my wife and two boys to help at a safe house for women and children. While we’ve been here we’ve had the privilege of meeting many different people from almost any country you can imagine.
There is a myth that American parents tell their children about the very first Thanksgiving celebration. It says that when the first European settlers arrived in North America they were poor and hungry, with very little to eat.
Seeing their plight a village of native people chose to host a feast for these poor, starving Europeans. They brought turkeys, vegetables, corn, and many other things to share with the settlers. It is said that at this feast Europeans sat down with Native Americans and enjoyed a cross-cultural feast and communal celebration, and a sharing of thankfulness for the gifts that God had provided. This is why we still eat turkey on Thanksgiving to this present day.
Like any myth, this story has some truth to it. A feast like this did indeed happen. What we don’t often tell our children, however, is that over the following 200 years the European settlers would go on to murder the majority of the native population and seize their lands from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific.
It wasn’t until over 200 years later, when my country was involved in a terrible Civil War, that Thanksgiving became and annual tradition. You see, during this conflict brother fought against brother and hundreds of thousands of American men, women, and children died. Those who remained were often poor and hungry or seeking refuge somewhere else. Perhaps this story sounds familiar to some of you here.
After 3 years of fighting, our president, Abraham Lincoln, issued a proclamation that the next Thursday would be celebrated as a national day of thanksgiving, where he said, “I do, therefore,
invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and
those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of
November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent [God]. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also…commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the Nation.”
I know that many of you have faced suffering in many different ways, some of you for no other reason than the color of your skin or the country where you were born. Some of you may be widows or orphans or mourners. Some of you struggle in different ways. But we are all human and all of us have inherent worth as people created by God.
I am a Christian, and I know that many of you have a different faith. However, I believe that we all worship the same God, so let us turn to our God today to thank him for the kindness and love he has shown us. Let us thank God that we are alive and can still work to alleviate the suffering of those around us.
My desire is to follow the greatest commandments that Jesus shared with us: to love God and to love others with all of my heart.
And so, if no one else ever tells you this and means it, please know that I mean it when I say that I love you, that I am happy you’re here, and that I pray every day that you will find the welcome and safety you seek, whether you end up in France or England or somewhere else.
Let us enjoy this evening together and together with one voice across cultures and nationalities thank God for the kindness that we receive every day, even amidst our sufferings.
For you are loved and beloved beyond what you can possibly imagine.
So now I’m going to invite [person] to share a Christian prayer of Thanksgiving for our feast tonight, and then I’m going to ask [person] to share the traditional Islamic words of thanks to God.
Then we’ll eat until we can’t anymore. There will be music and dancing, as well as football outside, led by my 10 year old son.
Have a beautiful evening of community and thanks tonight, maybe make some new friends, my beloved fellow humans. Remember: true kindness and love are never wrong.
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