Thanksgiving with Habakkuk 3 comments

By Bradford Winters

One lost her husband over the summer in a freak accident on a tractor, leaving her alone with two adopted children still healing from prior traumas suffered in a Russian orphanage. Another lost portions of several digits on his feet and one on his hand to the ravages of a bacterial infection that almost took his life entire.

Three of them lost babies to a miscarriage, the last one after years of trying to get pregnant. The first one later lost her battle to stave off the onset of clinical anxiety and depression in a most cruel double-fisted blow.

One is in the process of possibly losing her husband to the fallout of her adultery; another her beloved parents’ home that has been a family retreat for decades, and now might have to sell for little more than it was purchased back in 1980.

And it was on me to say the Thanksgiving prayer.

Not that I had much choice, as the host was none other than my boss. (He also happens to be a good friend, as well as the godfather of one of my daughters.) This being the tenth year in his New York City home, a landmark building that was once the Andrew Jackson Public Reading Room in the late 1800s, he wanted to celebrate the anniversary with a select group of friends.

But with many of the 30+ people invited (my extended family being half the group) beset with calamities such as those above, far be it from him to say any kind of fitting thanks in a year whose onslaught of suffering has been abnormal at best and paranormal at worst. We had a good morbid laugh about it in my office—how can you not?—and then he promptly stuck me with the duty of the blessing.

Not only is this a formidable task because inevitably I’ll get notes from Tom come Monday, when I get notes on a script that was also due today, but more so because if there was ever a year to challenge our individual and collective sense of Thanksgiving, certainly that year is 2009. Nevertheless, here we are. So here goes:

Lord, who only out of darkness created the light, of whom the psalmist says, “even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee,” toward the end of a year that has brought untold hardship to many, and unthinkable loss to some, we say thank you, at least, for this hour of abundance—abundance of food, family, friendship and fellowship that you continue to provide in the deepest of valleys.

We thank you for our gracious host, Tom, endless blessing that he is, and we thank you for the children, these bright lights in our midst, and our hope for the future.

And should our own efforts to say thank you fall short, we turn to the words handed down to us from your ancient prophet, Habakkuk, who managed his own prayer of thanksgiving in a time of equal if dissimilar hardships to our own:

“Though the fig tree do not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. GOD, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like hinds' feet, he makes me tread upon my high places.”

Amen.

In hindsight, I might have qualified the line about an “hour of abundance” apropos food after yesterday’s stupefying news of the soaring number of Americans on food stamps—one in eight overall, and one in four children.

But I wouldn’t revise the Habakkuk, who would have been delighted to see the hinds’ feet that had sprouted, or were just beginning to sprout, at various places along the table.