Judith Valente's Blog: Mindfulness in the Age of Twitter - Posts Tagged "thanksgiving"

My mother was such an integral part of my life, it seemed preposterous to me that she could be gone from it forever. Her death showed me just ho vulnerable I am. I realized in ways I never had before, that I too am going to die one day. I remember how my mother, when she entered her eighties, would rise before dawn to see the beginning of a new day. She always felt grateful for having lasted another night.

She prayed for about two hours every morning. Her first prayer was always one of thanksgiving. After she died, I found myself waking earlier, too, trying to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. I felt privileged now to see the sun come up. It was a privilege my mother no longer enjoyed.

Sometimes this cherishing would strike me in the oddest places. I remember going into a deli and ordering a corned beef sandwich. I suddenly burst into tears right there at the table at the sight of slices of corned beef lying on a bed of pumpernickel. I thought of how my mother love corned beef and pastrami sandwiches.
When I was in college, we would mark the start of a new semester by shopping in New York, then stopping by the Carving Board restaurant at Macy’s for a sandwich. I felt horrible that my mother could no longer have this pleasure. I felt guilty that I could.
Then it occurred to me that one way of cherishing those memories is to go to a deli every once in a while and order a corned beef or pastrami sandwich, to give thanks for those memories, and in so doing, honor my mother. It is a way of saying, “I am living. I remember you.”
A few years ago, I began doing nightly what St. Ignatius of Loyola called the examen. It is a daily accounting of what I did well each day and of where I fell short. I also list all that happened that I’m grateful for. It is my favorite part of the examen. The funny thing about gratitude is, the more you focus on it, the more you find to be grateful for. These days, I find myself more and more grateful for the most ordinary of moments — when I look out on the ever-changing prairie as I drive from Chicago to Charley’s and my home in central Illinois. As I walk past our living-room windows in the middle of the day and spot the sunlight sifting in through a latticework of branches.

In the final scene of the film American Beauty, the main character, Lester Burnham, speaking from the grave, says he doesn’t feel regret that he’s no longer alive, only intense gratitude “for every single moment of my stupid little life.” Then he adds: “you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry, someday you will.”

From Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul
by Judith Valente and Charles Reynard

For many years, I lived alone as a single woman in cities where no relatives lived close by. Holidays were particularly painful times. When I first moved to Chicago, I had an apartment in a high rise where hundreds of other people lived. I could literally peer into the living room of the couple that lived in the building next door. I could even see what they were watching on TV. Yet I felt impossibly alone.

The feeling was more acute on holidays when I couldn’t get away to be with family. Wherever I lived, though, I was always fortunate enough to find people who welcomed me. When I was an exchange student in Paris, it was the family of a French friend the same age as me whose parents worked as the concierges in a building near the Eiffel Tower. My first year living in Washington, D.C., a friend’s large Lithuanian-American family invited me for Thanksgiving dinner — a day, by the way, I had to work as a young staff writer for The Washington Post.

When I moved to Chicago, a generous and gregarious Italian-American family took me under its wing. And when I worked as a correspondent in London, a Catholic priest I knew arranged for me to spend holidays with families from his parish.

Those were often lonely years before I met my husband. But they taught me something valuable. We might not have the family we want or the spouse we desire, but we all can have community. Robert Frost famously defined family as the people who have to take you in. Community, by contrast, is something we construct, through a thousand small acts of decency.

During the Depression, artist Normal Rockwell created his famous “Four Freedoms” series. “Freedom from Want” depicted what most people recognized as a nuclear family — parents, grandparents and grandchildren gathered around a table about to launch into a turkey dinner.

The models Rockwell chose were all white. Today’s nuclear family might look quite different, as the artist Hank Willis Thomas and photographer Emily Shur showed in their series of contemporary re-imaginings of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms.” Their “Freedom from Want” offers a mixed racial and multi-ethnic as well as multi-generational vision of family.

Today, family connotes more to me than blood relations. All who enter my life in a meaningful way are family. Now that I am married, I love nothing more than to fill my holiday table with a wide cast of friends, but also people I don’t know very well. People who might otherwise be alone.

My friend, the retired pastor Jim Bortell, writes with insight about the internal turmoil that holidays can cause:
“Thanksgiving is usually a happy-thankful time, but not always. It may come when the inward springs of the human spirit don’t match the outward festivities. The occasions for this are legion. They include family problems, losses, distress with what is going on in the nation and world, encounters with human suffering, and anguish about what humans are doing to the beautiful world in which we live. And this is the short list.”

With all the vitriol swirling around the recent impeachment hearings, and popping up in the presidential debates, this might prove to be a particularly challenging holiday season for families of differing political views, especially if Fox News or MSNBC forms the background soundtrack of our meals. So let’s turn down the volume. Let’s turn away from discussing quid pro quo, conspiracy theories, and who is perpetrating what lie.

Let’s feel gratitude that we have someone sitting beside us. Let’s be thankful for our ‘freedom from want’ and commit in the coming weeks to filling the needs of those who still live with want.

Let’s remember too that somewhere out there is a person who just might feel impossibly alone. What can we do to change that? As my friend Pastor Jim writes, how can we insure that our outward festivities match the inward springs of our spirit?