Our National Egoism and Perverseness

An obscure woman, Sara Josepha Hale, is credited for our national day of Thanksgiving.  In 1863, she wrote President Abraham Lincoln, requesting a meeting to propose that the scattered celebrations of Thanksgiving in various states be unified into “A National and fixed Union Festival.”  On October 3, 1863, Lincoln issued the first National Thanksgiving Proclamation. 

That Proclamation called for the people to give thanks for “singular deliverances and blessings,” but also to “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.”  That year, 1863, was a year of deep despair.  It seemed as though the war—brother against brother—would never end.  The Battle of Gettysburg took place in November of that year.  Surely there were “singular deliverances and blessings,” but for most it was a year of deep despair.  Lincoln, in his Proclamation, called the nation to gratitude, penitence, and compassion.  Every President since 1863 has given a Thanksgiving Proclamation—and most have included a call to gratitude and compassion, but very few since Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation have called us to look closely at ourselves as a people—at “our national perverseness and disobedience”—very few Thanksgiving Proclamations since have called us to be penitent (feeling, and showing sorrow and regret for having done wrong).  Can it be that America has done no wrong?  Of course not!  We just refuse to look at our “national perverseness and disobedience.”

As a nation, we do precisely what we do as individual persons.  We avoid looking closely at ourselves.  We see the speck in our brother’s eye, but never the plank in our own.  We point out the faults of other nations, but never seem to see or deal with our own.

Our national pride makes us blind to our “perverseness”  as a nation. Our national ego is inflated to such a degree that we cannot see what is right in front of our nose. We are and have been disobedient to our own Constitutional principles that each individual has certain basic rights.  Our practice in the past and our practice now in the  present is the very antithesis of those principles.  We are morally impoverished or what the Bible cites as “hardness of heart” or as “the impairment or loss of moral discernment; the incapacity to hear, though one has ears; or to see, though one has eyes (e.g. Mark 8:14-21).”

Our National Day of Thanksgiving 2018 must be a balance of gratitude, penitence, and compassion.