To Feast, or not to Feast?

To Feast, or not to Feast?

That is the question. So, let me give you my answer. On the appointed day of Thanksgiving: FEAST! Kill the fatted bird and FEAST!

But, if you wish to maintain the fast: Glory to God! If you wish to lessen the fast (like a church feast day falling during a fast): then enjoy your fish, wine, and oil and Glory to God! If you wish to feast with the vast majority of your neighbors, family, friends, and countrymen: kill the fatted bird and give thanks unto the Lord.

Some of you will no doubt suggest that all of this needs to be taken up with you Spiritual Father...and that's fine, I'm sure. But frankly if your Spiritual Father is dogmatically insisting on any one of these "options" I think I'd be a little concerned.

Let me give you my reasoning, FWIW, as to why I think we SHOULD or at least CAN celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional American way. First and foremost, were it not obvious, we are Americans. Thanksgiving is one of the few traditions we still all largely celebrate together - despite an ever growing propensity for celebrating diversity. When do we ever get to celebrate unity, by the way? And we are not talking about a political holiday (of which many have been incorporated into old world Orthodox feasts), but a holiday intended to exhort us Americans to give thanks to God. (That is one of the early States proclamation...Lincoln - fittingly - would offer the first national one in 1863).

I have a hard time imagining St. Herman finding a very important tribal and family tradition amongst the Native Alaskans and then telling his converts that they must abandon it (or even portions of it) in order to satisfy the letter of the fasting law. Sow discord and disunity for the sake of avoiding meat for one day? Rather would we not expect to see our Saint baptizing the Feast? I would expect so. I mean, think about it: why do we celebrate the Nativity of Christ when we do? Because we Baptized a pagan festival. Why do we drag trees into our houses? Because we baptized a pagan practice - which still makes little sense. Amongst my Slovak family there are MANY traditions (e.g. dumping water on girls) centered around Pascha that absolutely have a pagan origin and yet have been retained. Fact is, Thanksgiving OUGHT to be an EASY celebration to baptize in comparison to hauling dying trees into our houses. (I've no doubt there are some fundamentalists - Orthodox and protestant - who refuse to have Christmas trees...and to them I say: BAH HUMBUG!)

I believe it was a visiting priest from Kenya who told us the story of a Bishop who went out to a remote village to visit a bunch of new believers. The Bishop had his usual entourage and as they all sat down for a meal they were SHOCKED to find hardly anything but meat provided. They all waited anxiously to find out what the Bishop was going to do. He blessed the food and then told his entourage in Greek: "Now it is fish." The notion that we can get around the "problem" of Thanksgiving by employing the acceptance of hospitality by seeing that we are invited to someone else's house seems to me to be profoundly disingenuous. How is this different than telling everyone in the Orthodox Church that you are now to receive the hospitality of American culture: Thanksgiving?

Consider the issue of the New Calender. Despite whatever practical reasons, in switching we now find ourselves celebrating Christmas with the majority of the people we live around and we converts have one less thing to worry about with regard to family problems and celebrations. Alas, our Old Calendar convert brethren may escape the dilemma of Thanksgiving during the Advent Fast, but they gain the bigger dilemma of western Christmas during the Advent Fast. Additionally, by adopting the new calender, Old Calenderists rightly note that we have laid waste to the Apostle's Fast - in some years it doesn't even exist at all. So, my point is, if you are going to say we should not break the Fast for Thanksgiving, then I'm thinking you ought to apply the exact same legalistic logic to the adoption of the New Calender.

Ah yes, but James, Thanksgiving has lost so much of its meaning. It's now merely an excuse to be a glutton, a drunkard, and to watch football. Well, welcome to reality! Do you reckon Christmas and Easter have not lost much of its meaning to the popular culture as well? More than that, do you doubt that were you to make a run of Lent/Pascha in the old world that you would see the exact same loss of meaning for so many people there? You suppose you might find a fair number of Greeks or Russians who did nothing with the Fast and everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) with the Feast? Don't deceive yourself, there is no great religious Feast in this world that is not diluted in its meaning to the point of becoming little more than....well...what we assume we see most Americans making of Thanksgiving. And to be fair, I have indeed seen my share of gluttony and drunkenness on Pascha in the world of convert Orthodoxy...though not so much football. We bring meaning to everything...without our input, nothing has meaning. And we may input for good or for ill.

Have you ever broken the Fast? You know, snuck a bite of cheese or chocolate at work? Ever just break down and go to Burger King during Advent? Ever seek an invitation to a non-Orthodox friends house for dinner because if you have to creatively devise one more soy, beans, and rice dish for the family you are going to literally implode into a quivering mass of PETA propaganda beaten wimpiness? I will be the first to confess that I do not keep the fast perfectly, but if anyone tells you that the goal of the Fast is to keep it perfectly then I would suggest you run, do not walk - do not pass go and do not collect $200 - to the nearest exit. Fasting is FAR more about the state of your heart than about the food you put in your mouth and as such, if you find fasting is making you into a legalist than I would advise you go and eat an entire gallon of the richest ice cream you can find...NOW! I once heard Metropolitan JONAH relate a story of an Abbott bringing ice cream to his monks during one of the Fasts...I cannot recall the details, but the moral of the story was simple: don't become a pharisee. What you eat during Lent or Advent is far less important than many other things. Anyway, my point here is simply to suggest that breaking the Fast for a good cause is in no way an innovation and I'd be far better spending my time concerning myself with the fact that I sometimes break the Fast to truly feed my own private, secret and day to day gluttony. There are many bad reasons to break the Fast, I do not believe Thanksgiving is one of them.

Can I use Thanksgiving as an excuse to do the same (feed my passions)? You bet. But I can also do the same with weekends and Feast amongst Fast days (fish, wine, and oil) and indeed the Feasts themselves.

If we are going to be the Church in America, we really need to consider what is the heart of our Traditions. Think about all the lifestyle and cultural changes we make when converting to Orthodoxy...many of us converts know already how strange we seem to others. How often we are in Church during Lent...taking time off from work during Holy Week...fasting on most Wednesdays and Fridays...vespers on Saturday night...often celebrating easter at a different times than our friends and family (ah yes the joy of our families having Easter in the midst of our Lenten Fast!) and very often adopting cultural customs surrounding various Church holidays that are utterly foreign to many of us. We embrace them and we deal with some of the problems surrounding them that can sometimes isolate us from our more popular culture, not to mention friends and family. Some will no doubt say: "Good. I want to be isolated from our predominant culture." Okay, fine...I can understand that, but we must also understand that at some point we may as well be asking gentile converts to be circumcised. It is one thing to do this with regard to our moral teachings (remember given our society today we are more and more asking a great deal of people - they would say - and I would not dream of changing a wink of THAT), but I think it is another with regard to our practical Traditions.

Is one day of fasting worth isolating ourselves from our friends, neighbors, and families? Should we not embrace this which is good in our society? Recognize it for the worth it has - or rather the worth we can impregnate it with - and celebrate it? It needn't be an occasion for drunkenness and gluttony...there should never be an occasion for such things.

Thanksgiving is a part of our predominant culture that can still be a very good thing - no, I take that back...it IS a very good thing. We ought to fully baptize it. Yes, were we an Orthodox culture at the time of the founding of this feast we would surely have chosen a different time for it...but we must deal with reality as surely as we deal with the the reality of the New Calender. Baptizing Thanksgiving has been happening already. Many Parishes offer the Akathist of Thanksgiving and I've also heard of some doing a Divine Liturgy. Why not?

We bring so many customs and traditions from Russia, Greece, the Middle East, Ukraine, etc...and they can be wonderful things that many a convert will embrace. But we are not utterly devoid of good customs here in America. Thanksgiving is full of precious memories for so many of us - heck MOST of us!

Who cannot recall the wonderful smells from Grandma's kitchen? The handing down of recipes, the formal prayers before a meal (sometimes not heard any other time in some homes), the laughing and story-telling of Thanksgivings past, "Over the river and through the woods...", some even have dinner time customs such as dropping dried corn kernels into a jar while telling everyone else about something they are thankful for this year and then the jar remains on the table during the meal as a reminder. Thanksgiving is a good thing. It is bad only to the degree that we make it bad and I simply refuse to believe that the unfortunate collision of cultural calenders suddenly renders the Feast bad or unimportant.

Good luck becoming the Orthodox Church in America if we tell converts that they must abandon or seriously curtail this wonderful American Tradition. I believe if we ever see an American Orthodox Church, it will in some way include Thanksgiving.

That's my 2 cents and I offer them without judgment to anyone who feels inclined to practice otherwise. I'd be interested to hear what you and your family will be doing.

As a side. I'm raising a couple of Turkeys for next year. The MRS has been freaked out to see the ingredient lists on store-bought turkeys. And to think, we figured it ought to say simply: Turkey.