Thanksgiving: The UnRockwell Version

November 26, 2009

Every Thanksgiving for the past five years D and I have spent the holiday in the small coastal town of Mendocino, California and every year we stay at the same Inn, eat Thanksgiving dinner at the same restaurant, and fill our days doing the same things that we always do. We engage in lively conversation every morning around the breakfast table with the other guests who have been coming here for Thanksgiving even longer than we have. We go for long walks along the headlands that overlook the ocean. We browse at a snail’s pace through the stores. We sit cross-legged on the floor of the local bookstore and flip through cookbooks and magazines. We take naps. We read. We take hot baths two or three times every day. In the evenings we bundle up against the cold and with a flashlight in hand stroll through the tiny town, or pull the two Adirondack chairs on the front lawn together and D points to the night sky amazing me with her knowledge of constellations and stars. Even if she’s making it all up, I’m still equally impressed by her creativity and skilled ability to fib and fool me once again.

I love, absolutely love, this tradition we’ve created for ourselves but another part of every Thanksgiving for me is remembering  all the Thanksgivings that have come before this one. I remember the Thanksgivings in my childhood home when there were only six of us around the table and that by the time the table had moved to another house it had grown to hold more than twenty people as siblings married and had children who grew and had children of their own. I remember my mom’s tempestuous relationship with the Thanksgiving turkey over the years. There was the year the dark meat was so underdone it was nearly gelatinous around the leg bone and so we wrestled over the white meat. There was the year the white meat was so overdone it was as dry as sawdust and we were left to fight over the dark meat. There was the year Mom somehow managed to end up with little more than a cup of gravy and so we battled one another for the chair at the table that was nearest in reach to the gravy bowl. Or how every year by the time the sweet potatoes made their way to the table they were unrecognizable as vegetables from the continual handfuls of marshmallows my sister and I had thrown on top of the orange spuds every time Mom turned her back to the oven.

Today is Thanksgiving and I have not only the warm comfort of this moment with D (and with you) to savor but cherished memories of past Thanksgivings when both my parents were alive and seated at each end of the table with my siblings and I sandwiched between them on either side of the table. When I am old and gray and haven’t a tooth in my mouth to call my own I will these times with the all the fondness and gratitude my wrinkled body can hold.

I also carrying with me into this day the memory of the first Thanksgiving after I came out to my family when my mom and I had a conversation that was equally painful for both of us as I told her I didn’t feel I could spend the day with family while the hurt I had encountered in coming out to them was still so raw and in turn she told me she felt it would probably be easier on everyone if I didn’t join them that year while the disappointment of my coming out was so fresh for them. I spent much of that Thanksgiving Day missing my family and deeply wounded that my mom had thought it best I not be there. I can only imagine the pain it caused my mom to have said those words and to know I had chosen as well to not be with them. I don’t think it was a good Thanksgiving for either of us but it was a Thanksgiving we loved each other through and followed up with other Thanksgivings when I was at the family table again and with my beloved. At this point in my life, all the hurt from that one regrettable Thanksgiving has faded long ago and all I have is gratitude for the Thanksgivings before and most of all for the Thanksgivings that have followed and for the relationships that have continued.

I know some of you must be going through a terribly difficult time with family separation or tension weighing on your heart through the holidays. Some of you will be with your family today but carry the fear deep within you that should you ever come out to them it might well be the last time you’re on the guest list of your own family celebrations. Some of you have been torn in half with the painful choice to spend this holiday with your family or with your beloved because your family has said, “We want you to come but not with him, not with her.” Some of you will sit at the Thanksgiving table with family and though everything would look normal to a stranger peering in through the dining room window, you know the distance that cuts between you and your loved ones and you feel the burning ache of their disapproval even in the polite smiles and table conversations. Some of you are alone today. Whether it’s their decision or your choice doesn’t matter. What matters is that you feel forgotten and alone. Maybe you’re gay. Maybe you’re straight. As I’ve said a thousand times, GLBTQ people don’t hold sole-property rights on pain and suffering or being rejected and outcast even from the very ones they most love, and sometimes it helps ease our own pain, even if just a little, to remember that we are with others in our alone-ness, and that our hurt is a hurt we share with so many others in our world. When we suffer we remember with compassion the suffering of others including the suffering of Christ. Rejected. Denied. Despised. Misunderstood. Outcast.

If you are suffering today, open your heart to the assurance that the Christ who suffered feels your sorrow. The Christ alone in his anguished garden prayers sits beside you. The Christ misunderstood by his enemies as well as his closest friends knows you intimately and completely. The Christ who was rejected and despised, receives and welcomes and loves you.

This may be a hard day for you but this day will pass and until it does know or hope or dream that you are held in the loving embrace of One whose table always has a place reserved for you and One whose joy is incomplete until your chair is occupied by you. Receive Christ’s compassion and in turn give compassion away to others….to those who you gather with today as well as to those who are gathering this day without you.

You are in my remembrance and my prayers throughout this day.

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