Thanksgiving Message

Dear Seattle University Community, 

In a few days, we will celebrate Thanksgiving. It can seem incongruous to express gratitude at a time when many people are not feeling particularly happy with the state of the world. But the practice of giving thanks becomes more (not less) essential in challenging times. 

One of the trademark spiritual practices of the Jesuits is the daily prayer known as the Examen – a structured review of our day – of the sources of light and darkness we have experienced, of our need for forgiveness and renewal. The first step of every Examen – no matter how hard the day has been – is always an expression of gratitude. When we search hard enough, we always find something to be grateful for. And the more difficult the day has been, the more essential that first step becomes. 

The same is true of our national Thanksgiving holiday. Although the iconography of Thanksgiving often harkens back to the colonial period, the origins of the modern holiday have nothing to do with the Pilgrims or the Wampanoags. While there were sporadic Thanksgiving holidays before the 19th century, the current practice of marking a national day of gratitude on the last Thursday in November traces its origins to a period of unmatched civil division and strife. 

The holiday was the brainchild of Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor. For almost two decades, she tirelessly lobbied public officials to establish a national holiday of gratitude to bring the divided country together. Amidst the darkness of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln embraced Hale’s call for the establishment of a day of prayer and Thanksgiving.  

On October 3, 1863, just a few months after the Battle of Gettysburg signaled a change in the momentum of that conflict, President Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving proclamation filled with both sorrow and gratitude. In it, he offered thanks for 

the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. . . I recommend to [Americans] that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience . . . fervently implor[ing] the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it . . . to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.  

A few weeks later, on November 19, President Lincoln would deliver a short speech dedicating a cemetery on the battlefield in Gettysburg that perhaps inspired him to declare the first modern Thanksgiving.  

I would like to share just a few lines from that speech, which most of us read in grade school but which (perhaps) we have not revisited in many years. President Lincoln was a poet, and his use of repetition (particularly the word “here”) gives the Gettysburg Address a powerful immediacy, even 161 years later: 

[W]e can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I wish you and your families and loved ones a happy Thanksgiving. 

Respectfully, 

Eduardo M. Peñalver
President