Every year in November, North American
tradition, culture, and society contemplates the celebration of THANKSGIVING: “Thanksgiving
Day”. On this day, the most beloved and the most anticipated, the most
important and the most celebrated by the American people, we recall a
foundational historical event of the United States as a Nation: the first
harvest and first meal shared between the natives and the pilgrims in the year
1621. I cannot fail to recognize that those who revise history tend to have
another interpretation to this so-called celebration.
The emotion evoked by this historical event provides all of us who
live in this Country with a reason to travel and gather together with our
families and with those who are dearest to us, to indulge, to rejoice, to break
bread together, but, above all, to GIVE THANKS for all that we are and all that
we have.
And within this opportunity to GIVE THANKS, at this
pause, meeting and annual holiday that, as a Nation, we observe to BE
THANKFUL, lies the importance and worth of this celebration. It is a
celebration that summons us to a GIVING OF THANKS to be happy.
Because the original vocation and the primordial and
unceasing search of humans is to be happy and only he who is able to be
thankful, who is able to live finding reasons in everyday life to be thankful
can be happy. Therefore, Thanksgiving is a day for happiness, it is a
day when we feel happy and when we are happy, because it is a day to
evoke, collect and bring out all the reasons we have to be thankful, all
the reasons we have to be happy.
But gratitude cannot be relegated or limited to one day, to one
date every year, because daily life is itself a gift ... so GRATITUDE,
beyond this annual celebration, must be a permanent attitude in our
lives and in the work of each one of us and of all of us as a
family and a Nation.
It gives us the possibility to be thankful, to be happy, a
historical existence seen, conceived and lived with a sense of transcendence:
with the possibility of discovering life and everything within it as a gift and
as evidence of the presence of God's love: the possibility, definitively, to
live life as a space-time of blessings…. But, while also remaining
vigilant against the gratitude for, and the possibility of being happy in, a
life lived in the immediacy of money, in the ephemeral nature of buying
and selling, in the tangible utilitarianism of supply and
demand, in consumerist materiality and in exhausting, innate, and
passing mercantilism.
All of us who live here have many reasons to be thankful and
to be happy. Because all the good that we are, have and that happens
to us is something for which we can be thankful, or at the very
least, something good from which we can learn and then move on.
Our lives, our families, our loved ones, our health, our
educational and work opportunities, our dreams and goals, our daily efforts and
our personal and community achievements reflected in the greatness of
this Nation and in the quality of life we can enjoy ... these are all
reasons we see daily and for which we can be thankful and live with a permanent
attitude of thankfulness.
But, we do not ignore and we all know that here and in all of
humanity there is a lot of room for improvement, a lot to humanize,
many reasons for pain, anguish, and suffering, many experiences of
injustice, of violence and of death, many frustrated dreams and many failed
hopes, many ways in which evil manifests in human selfishness.
Then, on THANKSGIVING and on every day, we are presented and
offered an opportunity to give thanks
but, also and especially, we are offered a challenge to be happy, to
build reasons to be thankful. Gratitude is a daily attitude and
conquest: an attitude that is conquered.
Gratitude, then, is an attitude, a challenge, and a permanent
construction. THANKSGIVING gladdens and challenges us, brings us
together, but sends us out to build reasons every day to keep thanking, to remain
happy. ... We have much to celebrate, but we have many more reasons to keep
living and constructing every day the existences, families, relationships,
communities, and abundant living spaces around us that will allow us to
continue giving thanks. ...
Without this ongoing search for happiness, to find,
build, give, and offer other reasons to GIVE THANKS, Thanksgiving is just
another day on the calendar that, on the next day, is gone and forgotten. ...
Because there cannot be a true and authentic THANKSGIVING when there are still
people in the world who suffer and languish because they lack the minimum
conditions to live, believe, love, wait, thank and be happy ...
THANKSGIVING DAY is an annual holiday of our homeland, a day on
the calendar to GIVE THANKS, but especially a celebration to remind us that
this must be our permanent attitude: an attitude of gratefulness to be happy
and to relaunch ourselves not into the egotistical and frantic search and
selfishness of another passing holiday, but into the construction of a better,
fairer and more humane world; a world in which all inhabitants of the earth—not
only those of this Nation—live and have the opportunity to celebrate and give
thanks.
Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving Day! May you always find and
build many reasons to give thanks and be happy!
