Today I bring to you a writing from “the Ancients.” My favorite president of all time Abraham Lincoln.
As part of the human condition, we come at odds with each other. During Lincoln’s term so much so that we went to war brother against brother. I know we are at a war of words among ourselves these days all over the decisions of our current president. (I am going to TRY to write this without actually GIVING my opinion of Donald Trump.) I want to focus on the solidarity of our times in comparison to the times of Abraham Lincoln.
The American people as a whole are at diverse odds among AND between ourselves. The “writing of the ancients” that I offer to you today puts into perspective that, yet again, this is part of the human condition. This has happened before and humanity has survived. The United States of America has survived. Thrived? Yes, even thrived. (NOT something SOME nations and countries can attest to. USSR, Siam, Persia, Suriname… to name a few.)
How did we do it? To what can we owe our salvation and preservation? GRATITUDE. Being thankful and NOT FORGETTING to what or whom we owe this gratitude. And yet we do, we DO forget. Time and time again we are steered off course to focus on, who? Ourselves? Our president? Our perceived enemy?
What you are about to read is a piece I discovered decades ago. I was so taken aback that I have been reading it at the Thanksgiving Meal as a traditions ever since. No matter what family I am with or who is visiting in my household, I read this piece out loud every year as or as part of the blessing before dinner. Always before a completely captive-if not sometimes captivated-audience. After 9-11-2001 it brought even MORE poignancy and I inserted timely verbiage on the spot to include “our soldiers in Afghanistan.” I encourage you to do the same. Make it timely for ourselves.
The president of the United States of America, in 1863, thought this debt of gratitude so CRUCIAL to the survival of our nation that he proclaimed we take an entire day, together as a nation to honor and REMEMBER. Take a step back out of the ring, the world does not revolve around you, or me or “us”or “them” but something/someone far far greater.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S
THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION OF
1863
It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.
We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness or our hearts, that all these blessing were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. 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 as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father Who dwelleth in the heavens.
(signed) A. Lincoln
October 3, 1863
