As Christians, every day, indeed every moment, is cause for giving thanks, but tomorrow is our national Thanksgiving Day.
First established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, that is, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln wrote in his proclamation that we should “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.”
After a brutal election that sometimes felt like a civil war, this Thanksgiving may be harder for some more than others. For us Catholics, however, there is one thing that may help us because it helped me on Wednesday, Nov. 6, the morning after the election.
That morning, going on about 2 hours sleep, I poured a coffee and went outside to smoke a cigarette. (I permit myself an occasional pack, and when I realized the election wasn’t going the way I had hoped, I permitted myself a second pack. Mea culpa.) While smoking and downing the coffee, I scrolled through the feed on my phone and amidst all the election coverage, there was a story about the reopening of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris next month.
Forget about the swing voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Nevada. Forget about Trump and Harris. Forget about all of it. Here was something to be happy about. Here was something to introduce some perspective
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With thanks to National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Michael Sean Winters, where this article originally appeared.
