The Gathering In

To properly celebrate Thanksgiving, we must appreciate the harvest

Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD shall choose: because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.

Deuteronomy 16:13-15

There is little question that Thanksgiving is the most neglected and underappreciated of major American holidays. In the commercial realm, it’s barely allotted a sliver of attention, sandwiched between an ever-encroaching Halloween and a prematurely-advertised Christmas—indeed, they now practically overlap. Overflowing aisles of Halloween candy are just around the corner from displays of artificial Christmas trees, with Thanksgiving relegated to one small, hard-to-find shelf of paper plates and napkins ornamented with turkeys.

“It’s just another day to me,” my sister overheard one woman say with an indifferent shrug at this time last year.

Many Americans, it seems, have come to regard Thanksgiving as a kind of burden—a day of making food you don’t particularly like, and entertaining relatives you don’t particularly want to see. Few seem to give much thought to the holiday’s original meaning—even those who aren’t openly hostile to the chapter of our country’s history it commemorates have only the vaguest conception of what we are meant to be remembering and celebrating. It makes one wonder sometimes, why do they even bother? Because everybody else does it? To please those relatives they don’t even want to see?

The more pervasive and offhand the Thanksgiving neglect becomes, the more of a shame it seems to me, because it really is the most American of American holidays—and perhaps, in a way, actually the most Biblical of our holidays as well.

The last time I read through the Old Testament, it struck me that the Feast of Tabernacles sounds very like what our Thanksgiving is supposed to be: a day of rejoicing and giving thanks for the harvest. It was “the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field” (Exodus 23:16), and was actually the second of two feasts to celebrate the harvest—the first held when harvest began, and another when it was finished.

The vital importance of the crop and the harvest is a thread running through the whole Old Testament—Israel had its cities, but all were dependent on the land. Fertile land for growing crops and raising livestock is a treasured possession; careful instructions for the proper cultivation of it, for its purchase and sale and inheritance, figure in the Old Testament Law. Bountiful crops and successful harvests are always named among God’s blessings, while droughts and poor harvests are central to the catalogues of judgments and curses for disobedience.

I can’t help wondering if more of us would celebrate Thanksgiving in a truly heartfelt way if we were closer to the process of growing and harvesting—as the ancient Israelites were, and the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony were. If more of us experienced the labor of turning soil, planting seed, cultivating, pruning, weeding, and yet knowing all along that even if we do our part perfectly, we are still wholly dependent on God’s sending the early and the latter rain to reap the fruits of our labor—if more of us were keenly aware, from our own experience, how utterly dependent we are on the elements of nature that He holds in his hands for our very sustenance and survival, perhaps we would feel more keenly a renewed gratitude with every successful harvest.

But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone. Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the LORD our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.

Jeremiah 5:23-24

In a society where the average person’s idea of food is of something that comes from a grocery store, and whose reaction to empty shelves is mere annoyance at somebody in charge for not having the goods shipped in fast enough from…somewhere…what conception can they have of thankfulness for a successful harvest?

To spur true gratitude, we need to remember that the food which sustains us comes from the fields, and that it is the Creator of the fields who “causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and the herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth.” (Ps. 104:14)

Our American forebears, who labored for every meal they ate, who felled trees and wrestled stumps and rocks from the soil to clear land for their planting—and ours—lived in the awareness “that thou givest them they gather: thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good” (Ps. 104:28), and when their harvest was done, they rejoiced and gave thanks. And so every year, at the time when the harvest that so many of us are so little aware of has been gathered in, we remember them, and remember the great mercies and bounty of the God who still brings us summer and winter, seedtime and harvest.

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