On Today, Thanksgiving Day, We Can Be Thankful For My Hero, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln proclaims Thanksgiving

It was a son of Kentucky, leading the nation through the worst crisis of its life, who set aside an official day of Thanksgiving for America's people. Perhaps he had learned the leavening benefits of counting one's blessings, of stopping to note what gladdened the heart, when he and his family were carving an existence out of a veritable wilderness. A tough life can teach lessons of unlikely transformation. How else to explain the impulse to proclaim an official day of thanks for a suffering land, in the middle of a Civil War? That's what Abraham Lincoln did.

Spurred by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale to make an annually observed day of thanksgiving “a National and fixed Union festival,” President Lincoln did what he could in a few sentences to bring people together. Just several months after the battle of Gettysburg, and just one month after Chickamauga claimed his own brother-in-law, Lincoln on Oct. 3, 1863, issued a Proclamation of Thanksgiving.

In it, he noted the “unequaled magnitude and severity” of the Civil War and asked God's “tender care” for “those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.” But he also enumerated the gifts visited upon the people and the land. In fact, he started the proclamation, a competing narrative to the ongoing anguish, “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies …”

If Abraham Lincoln could believe that, and declare that, in the middle of a real Civil War, then we certainly may find it in ourselves to follow his example in our own current, very trying, times. More — we must.

We need no cold comfort of numbers to support what we know about our times. So many Americans are out of work. Many more worry about losing jobs. We worry about making ends meet, and how to help our children realize their dreams.

So many uncertainties lead to so many incivilities, and we don't need the cold comfort of specific examples to know what we know about this, either. If we the people have not taken to fighting each other in Pennsylvania and Tennessee fields, as they did in Lincoln's day, we tear each other apart with words and images, and we attack each other over ideas, and we believe the worst about each other. We shout. We fume. We accuse. And maybe we are numb, or immune, or oblivious, to the goodness around us.

Lincoln's Thanksgiving proclamation delivered a land and a people from being defined by the worst of their times and their impulses. It created a special space for spoken grace, for shared grace.

From the depths of the Civil War, Lincoln reminded our forebears of the good in their midst in the Proclamation of Thanksgiving:

“… Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battlefield; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.”

Every year since, good or bad or somewhere in between, that special space shows up for a day.

This year, for many of us, Thanksgiving comes just in time. Maybe we can again learn lessons of unlikely transformation during hard times, and be of one heart and one voice, and mindful of our shared fruitful fields and healthful skies, in this special space.