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A Waste of a Day
by Father Dominic Legge, OP 

What is the essence of Thanksgiving?  Is it the meal – turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie?  (One year, an inexperienced Thanksgiving cook forgot to thaw the frozen turkey before putting it in the oven.  Dinner was seven hours late.)  Do you have to play football before you eat?  (The “Turkey Bowl” touch football game is a tradition at our Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and only occasionally does it send a brother to the emergency room.)  Is it that we spend it with family and friends?  Or is there more?

My answer: Thanksgiving is a waste.  Literally. 

A true holiday is always a waste, at least from a utilitarian perspective. It is not for the sake of something else – so we can be more productive when we get back to work, or so we can build up familial bonds of unity. A true holiday exists for its own sake. It is gratuitous; it doesn’t respect the calculus of cost and benefit. In fact, we take what otherwise would be useful time, and devote it to something entirely not useful. In the case of Thanksgiving, we might even act unwisely, were we merely to keep our eyes on our pocketbooks or our pantries.  In this sense, a holiday means, in a certain sense, a waste.

In fact, the same could be said of every act of worship. We worship God not for the sake of some benefit we hope to get out of it, but simply because of His goodness.  Indeed, our worship already is a participation in his goodness. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, our worship of God is above all the offering of ourselves to God, but this is made real in our exterior acts. The summit of those external acts of worship is the sacrifice of the Eucharist – the sacrament of the Lord’s own body, which he offered on the cross as a holocaust and sacrifice. From the perspective of this world, his death was a waste. (Think of the miracles he could have worked if he had stayed on earth – or the peaceful reign he would have had if he had been crowned king!) And in a certain sense, that was the point. The most valuable thing that has ever existed in the world – the humanity of Christ – he offered to the Father, not to get some benefit from the act, but simply out of the wastefulness of a love that wants to give all to the beloved.

Thanksgiving is one of the few true public holidays that remain on our national calendar – that is, it is one of the few days that we, as a nation, have set aside in a way that remains open to this deeper meaning. At its best, it is a day pointing beyond this world, a day marked by a genuine festivity, rather than simply being a day without work, or one ordered to our use and pleasure.

Why, then, should we be thankful?

Principally, it is not because we have had a good year, or because we have enough food on the table, or even because we have family and friends who love us (though those are all good reasons, to be sure). Rather, we should thank God for his goodness. He is the cause of all that is. He is the reason that we exist. He is the source of every blessing we have received. He loves us, and desires to draw us into an infinite communion of life and love with Him. And everyone can be thankful for that.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)