Advent and Thanksgiving can coexist

SOUL FOOD

It’s now just 34 days until Christmas and one week since the start

of Advent -- a 40-day period of abstinence, fasting, prayer, charity

and reflection practiced by many Christians worldwide. Advent is a

time of anticipation and preparation for the Feast of the Nativity --

the annual Christian celebration of the Incarnation, the coming of

God in the flesh, in the person of Jesus.

The fast arrives for Christians in the U.S. just as our national

day of Thanksgiving comes into calendar view, meaning that, where the

paths and practices of both traditions cross, something has to give.

Those who observe the Nativity Fast are called to abstain from

meat, milk, milk products and eggs from Nov. 15 through Dec. 24. On

most of those days, they also abstain from alcoholic beverages, fish

and oil. Whatever they eat, the point is to eat simply, to -- as one

priest put it -- “not cater to our bellies by preparing especially

tasty foods.”

Then along comes Thanksgiving. Food pages in newspapers offer

epicurean recipes. Dump the dry old turkey. Have a fat duck or goose

or salmon.

Food ads are rife with fat, bronze birds, mountains of mashed

potatoes and streams of creamy gravy. Some days I could swear they

are rendered in scratch and stiff. The aroma of stuffing seems to

rise from the pages. Champagne bubbles seem to fizz from soy-ink

bottles. I feel them tickle my nose.

Thanksgiving can be a decadent thing, as good as gluttony. But as

Harry Bauman, one of my readers in Huntington Beach, reminded me, it

wasn’t intended to be that way.

Bauman sent me a column called “The Words We Live By,” which he

co-wrote with Long Beach freelance writer Jessica Shaver some years

ago.

The column quotes many of our nation’s former statesmen and

presidents. Franklin Pierce sounds almost prophetic, as though he

could be speaking in our time: “There is no national security but in

the nation’s humble, acknowledged dependence on God and His

over-ruling providence,” he wrote.

In a similar vein, in 1863, while the Civil War tore at the

borders and the spirit of his nation, Abraham Lincoln wrote, in the

spring, a proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humility, and

Prayer and, later, a proclamation for our national observance of a

day of Thanksgiving.

The words of the latter echo the words of the first, at some

points word for word.

“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,” Lincoln said.

“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 of

our hearts that all these blessings 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,”

Lincoln said.

That’s food for thought. I want to end here where Lincoln, in his

proclamation, began.

“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.”

Here, Advent and Thanksgiving can, respectfully, meet.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].