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Toward tomorrow

Do those cardboard cut-outs of Pilgrims still decorate elementary school classrooms all over the country this time of year? But in their time those Pilgrims at the center of tomorrow's holiday were anything but cardboard cut-outs. They were believers. And more impressive, they acted on their belief. It was a belief in something beyond themselves. Something spiritual but quite worldly, too. Not a stained-glass kind of faith but one that impelled sacrifice, risk, commitment . . . and movement. Always movement. Not just in the metaphorical sense but actual, physical movement. Go where I will send thee.

First they left Mother England for the Netherlands, where they would be strangers in a strange land, but at least be assured of toleration. Perhaps too much of it, for they saw their children adopt the ways of the stranger. They would have to move again a decade later, this time removing not to one of the world's more advanced countries at the time, but across a treacherous ocean to a wilderness where savage beasts roamed--and savage men. This is called faith. Active faith. A continual pilgrimage.

Politics and religion were not just rhetorical exercises for the Pilgrims, talking points that could be used to influence others or win an election. Their ideas would to be their guides, their compasses, their marching orders. Which may be why their thanksgiving became the American one.

The well-indoctrinated Southerner knows the first Thanksgiving took place in Virginia, but it was the Pilgrims and the Puritans whose feast became the national holiday. Why? Because the Puritans' beliefs would become ingrained in the American psyche and character in a way that religion in the proper, established-church Southern style never did. For those wanderers wove a single web of spirit and action that remains a part of the American current--whether economic, cultural or political. Theirs was a dynamic, not established, faith. Their ideas did not stand still any more than they did. Which may be why their ideas became American ideas, and their dream of a city upon a hill an inseparable part of the American Dream.

Yes, there was a time when the American Dream didn't mean just a higher income bracket. There will be such a time again. Because this pilgrim faith has been planted deep, and there's no telling when and where it will flourish again. See the civil-rights movement of the last century, or the pro-life movement of this one. If you should ever be tempted to think that faith has died, that hope and change are just campaign slogans, look at the hopeful faces of new immigrants to this country. And be renewed.

Those old wanderers and sojourners, the Pilgrims, couldn't look at a field, a crop, a storm or anything else without seeing in it the Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Savior in New England, to quote the title of a book they made popular in their time. And they were there to bear witness to that act of Providence; they felt called upon to attest to it every day, every hour. And the greater their trials, the greater their faith became, and the more nuanced their articulation of it.

There is something about being a stranger in a strange land that makes one very aware, very much alive every minute. Aware of differences and similarities, opportunities and dangers, and, perhaps most of all, aware that things not only change, but can be changed. Listen to William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth Colony and author of the History of Plymouth Plantation. Here is how he explained why the Pilgrims chose to leave the good and hospitable country of Holland, and see if you don't detect a familiar theme:

"That which was more lamentable, and of all sorrows most heavie to be borne, was that many of their children, by . . . the great licentiousnesse of youth in that countrie, and the manifold temptations of the place, were drawne away by evill examples into extravagante and dangerous courses, getting the raines off their neks, and departing from their parents . . . tending to dissolutnes and the danger of their soules, to the great greefe of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posteritie would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted."

You can hear that same message today, especially in the black church. Perhaps because it is the black family that has borne the brunt of our oh-so-advanced culture with its own "manifold temptations." Daniel Patrick Moynihan wasn't the first to point out what happens to a society when young, unfettered males are left to form their own Lord-of-the-Flies society. Anybody who thinks this country doesn't have a politics of meaning hasn't read the Puritans, who may have been the most articulate immigrants ever to influence the course of American ideas, and therefore the course of American events.

Daniel Boorstin, the American historian, described the Puritans as "the first, and perhaps the last, sizable community in American history to import from Europe a fully developed and explicit social dogma, and to try to live by it on this continent."

Thanksgiving isn't only about giving thanks; it's about the day before, and all the days before. It's about the struggles and sacrifices that precede thanksgiving. It's about being called, and heeding the call. It's about today as much as tomorrow. For without all that went before, without this day before, Thanksgiving would have no meaning.

How do you think those first pilgrims in this still new world, with their modest beginnings and immense faith, would look upon all that has been wrested from the wilderness they found? The Pilgrims could always find reason for thanks, and they were never unimpressed by material achievement. Seeing what has been wrought on these shores, would they proclaim a thanksgiving? Or, looking beyond outward things, would they just be puzzled?

Would they want to know why there are no more Pilgrims and Puritans? Why a belief in providence gave way to that pride which goeth before a fall? Would they wonder what today's Pequod are doing running gambling casinos? What would they make of the unending, ever shifting parade of nothingnesses on our omnipresent television screens? Or, peering inward at the American soul, would they be chagrined to find only a reflection of outward things there?

They were an introspective people, Pilgrims and Puritans, for they examined themselves continually--an American habit long before psychoanalysis and public opinion polls became a national preoccupation. And they were unsparing in their judgment of what they found there.

A people that traces its heritage back to the small group that left Delfshaven that uncertain day in 1620 cannot have forgotten all the simplicity and strength that goes with being a pilgrim, or the self-awareness. Or the concern for posterity. Strange: The more we talk about the future, and the more we are obsessed by it in this internetted age, the less we speak or think of posterity. The word itself grows rare. It has such an old-fashioned sound now, much like Pilgrim or Puritan.

Posterity? What a quaint word. As if it weren't what the future is all about. The Pilgrims understood some things we seem to have forgotten, or remember only on ceremonial occasions. But with each passing Thanksgiving, it becomes clearer that it is time to set sail by an older and truer compass. And, like the Pilgrims, begin again.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 11/26/2014

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