Following is what Vanessa and I have come to understand as "Thanksgiving". For us, the day had become a sort of assumed, detached ritual that had lost its meaning so we sought to rediscover what a celebration during this particular time of the year might look like.
The idea of a "Harvest Festival" has always been a part of humanity's history. Whether it be our modern Thanksgiving, the ancient Jewish 'Feast of Sukkot' or the thousands of ancient harvest festivals that have existed in all sorts of different cultures; stopping in the Fall to reflect and celebrate just seems to be a natural human experience. So this is our attempt to rediscover that experience. We've taken our understanding of the seasonal celebration and put it into something that works for us.
We've called it "The Feast of Participation".
So if you have also found yourself in a similar position then maybe this will help you do some reframing and reinterpreting in order to again infuse the day with meaning.
Enjoy the Celebration.
____________________________________________________________________
We are
entering into a season where the cycle of the year is transitioning.
The entire earth
is moving from growth to hibernation; from movement to pause. And as humans, we
have the natural inclination to acknowledge these sorts of moments of change
and transition. We have an innate need to celebrate them. So as the world
around us is changing, we remember it. We remember the growth and how we have
guided it. We reflect and celebrate how the world has moved and produced and
flourished and that, in participating in this, we have flourished as well.
But in the
midst of that remembering and celebrating, we embrace the other direction of
the transition. Beyond looking back, there is also an anticipation of the next
cycle to come; that the way God created the earth to move and to flow will
continue. We anticipate that the growth and production and flourishing we have
experienced will go forward as the story of the world goes forward; that
creation will continue to do its thing and that we will get caught up in it
with the Creator.
During this
time of transition and harvest, we make sure to stop and look both backwards
and forwards, acknowledging what we are handling and celebrating the world we’ve
experienced and the world we continue to enter into.
But even
during this celebration we must also be sure to recognize and expose all the ways
we’ve gotten in the way of what God is doing in the world. Within this festival
room must be made for returning and for the experience of repenting from all
the ways we and our culture have failed to participate. Because even in the
midst of all the flourishing, much of our navigation in the world has actually
disconnected things and something needs to be done about that, too.
So we stop,
we reflect, we remember, and we hold in our hands what is happening in the
world around us.
_________________________________________________________________________
In the story
of Israel, there was once a time when the Jewish people had nothing to
celebrate. They lived a life of dehumanized slavery with no rest, no comfort,
and no flourishing. They lived a story of oppression in which festivals would
have seemed misplaced. But God entered into their story and did something about
it. And once liberated, part of God’s vision to restore the world using these
former slaves, something to distinguish them as God’s people, was for them to
celebrate. Festivals and the rhythms and cycles of life were reintroduced to a
culture that they had been taken away from; one of which was that which came at the end
of the harvest season.
They called
this festival “Sukkot”.
The Jews
would bring some of the harvest fruits and crops to the temple and the entire
nation would gather together and bless God as provider and sustainer and
creator. Together as fellow beings, the Hebrew people stood before the God who
created the world and who continued to carry it out cycle after cycle after
cycle and they celebrated.
After
gathering and bringing their crops and remembering the past year, the thousands
and thousands of people would take various branches tied together, representing
the different fields in Israel with a large palm branch stemming up from the
middle, and all together they would begin waving their branches shouting,
“Hoshana! Hoshana!” technically meaning, “Save us God! Save us!”
Essentially,
it was their way of anticipating that God would continue to bring forth the
produce from the earth. Because thousands and thousands of branches being waved
together at the same time would make the sound of rain. And in the Middle East,
once the harvest was finished, in order to have any crops the next Spring, you
would need the rains of winter to come and persistently fall throughout.
Therefore, this sound of rushing palms cascading from the Temple was a way to
look forward to these rains in hopes that God would bring them forth.
But it was
more than just asking God to give them rain or to give them food and it was
more than just praying for God to bless them. It was the anticipation that God
will keep the earth doing its thing so that they can continue to participate in
it. That the processes of the earth that God established would continue moving.
Because in the beginning God blessed creation that it would multiply and
produce and continue to create more and more and more. God blessed humans to be
co-creators with God and also to guide the earth that was moving so
beautifully. So when they yelled “Hoshana” and waved their palm branches
rapidly through the air, this is what they were referring to. Hoshana was the
call for this world to continue in the way God created it to be.
Also during
this time, after harvesting from this land that God had given to them, they
made sure to remember what it took to get there. This is why the festival is
called ‘Sukkot’. It literally means “booths” or “tents” and during the festival
the people would make ‘sukkahs’ and live in make-shift tents in order to
re-live the story of their ancestors living in the desert and traveling through
the wilderness. Doing this allowed them to participate in this story and make
it their own. Building a ‘sukkah’ reminded you what it was like and it brought
you into solidarity with your fellow sojourners, even the ones that still found
themselves in a sort of wilderness. Through this festival of celebration and
anticipation, you took the time to reflect on what it takes to survive in this
universe and the gift that life is.
This is
what we are joining in on as we celebrate our festival today.
Remembering,
celebrating, thanking, and experiencing the movement of the world and how we
fit into it.
Because
we’ve participated in the world. And despite much disconnection it has still
somehow beautifully flourished.
So we remember
that. We celebrate that. We are grateful for that.
But we also
gather in anticipation that this flourishment will continue.
And that
our participation in it will continue as well.
This is the
Harvest Festival: The Feast of Participation.
