Thanksgiving Reflections

Remaining Thankful despite our collective grief

Thanksgiving week has started for Americans. It is a day to commemorate the Pilgrims who were thankful to have found freedom from oppression and new lands to live on. They also found indigenous people who were friendly and welcoming not knowing what was to come. Sounds familiar doesn’t it, when you think of the poor Palestinians?

So here we are preparing for our families Thanksgiving dinners. It is so exciting as the whole family gathers from near and far. Plans are being made on text or WhatsApp about the meal, and who is preparing what. In our family, Thanksgiving has been celebrated with aplomb always. After all the planning, the execution we sit down at the table and we share what we are grateful for. We also make sure the grandchildren share this beautiful practice. And this year, there will be a dark cloud and many are fasting in grief on this big feast day.

As a human species, we think of ourselves first…how grateful we are not to be fighting for our very survival. And in the same breath, we feel guilty for not being able to do anything to help trapped people- hostages, refugees- get their freedom. We try to eclipse the horror of reality with a belief and hope that the oppressed people who have struggled for so long will find their freedom from occupation. The whole world is with them thankfully. They are seeing for the first time the barbarity of the latest colonialist settler apartheid government on social media, and the complicity of the mainstream media. That’s something I am truly grateful for. I am truly grateful to the millions who are marching in support of the oppressed and the groups who are serving them at the risk to their own lives, such as Doctors without Borders.

Gratitude is something we have to practice every day.

-It means paying forward all the bounties you have in whatever way you can- feed the hungry, share and donate to oppressed peoples all over the world but especially the Palestinians at this crucial hour.

-It means treating others with respect and care, whether it is family or friends or strangers

-It means focusing on the abundance and not the lack in your life, on the positive not the negative

-It means touching others with your smile, presence, with your care and your love whenever you can.

– It means operating from your soul not your ego, so you can rise above petty stuff and forgive

I have more reason than anyone to be thankful. Two months have passed since my accident, and I have been showered by so much love and care from family and friends. It has helped me transcend the pain and the difficulties, the loss and the immobility, and focus instead on the outpouring of love.

We share God’s spirit in all of us, and we touch each other with it. May our gatherings and prayers reach the besieged, the wounded, the grieving people of Palestine and Israel and other conflict areas of the world.

May we influence the universal consciousness that ties us all together as a human race to become more just, peaceful, equitable, empathetic, truthful and less greedy, selfish, vengeful and supremacist.

May our prayers rekindle the hearts of the powerful and may they stop the barbarism on the weakest and poorest of society.