Thanksgiving is for Heathens Too

There is nothing un-Heathen about Thanksgiving. Giving thanks is as old as time itself, since the first humans looked to the inhabitants of the Otherworld, or of the heavens, or of the forests and rocks and streams around them and gave thanks for all they had. The Pilgrims were merely treading an already well-trod road.

Christianity may have remade the world, but it can be remade and remade again by each person and each religion. We do not have to dance to the tune others have called, not in the free societies of modern liberal democracies. We have certain rights, including rights of belief (or non-belief) and among those rights is to lay claim to our ancestral customs and to practices and holy days co-opted by monotheism.

Giving thanks is one of these rights, and turning those thanks to where they are rightly due is another. I am thankful to Thor for warding my travels this past month and more, for seeing my family safely to Maryland, and seeing us safe back and forth on the beautiful but well-traveled Baltimore-Washington Parkway. I sacrificed to Thor before and after, giving thanks for his protection. It would be impossible to be in better hands.

I am thankful to my friends at PoliticusUSA for giving me a home away from home and for giving me a voice, a particularly Heathen voice in the liberal media, and for the patience they have shown when health issues have called me away, not to mention their advice and encouragement when my muse is disinclined to answer the call.

I am thankful for Jason Pitzl-Waters for being such an excellent voice for Pagans and for giving me the opportunity to contribute at Pagan + Politics.

I am thankful for my many Heathen and Pagan friends here who have been my companions for five-plus years, even when I have not held up my end well. I hope to do better by you, though it is not yet the time for resolutions to be made.

There are many things to be thankful for and it is well to dwell on these and to set aside our troubles when opportunity offers. I have always lived according to the credo that the evil of the day is sufficient unto itself; don’t go looking for trouble. I have been called a master of self-distraction (and probably of self-delusion by my critics) but I think of it as focus. As with so many other things, the decision to focus on one thing over another is a conscious act.

Giving thanks for what we have is a conscious act, giving thanks for a positive rather than lamenting a negative. I think the gods hear both types of prayer; after all, we do not only give thanks for things like our health and safety and so forth but we ask for things we do not have, like rain or fair weather, and there is nothing unusual or unreasonable about this. But when we ask and receive we should remember to give thanks, one necessarily implying the other.

So when I set out and sacrifice, when I return I also sacrifice, offering those thanks just as I made those requests. It is a simple formula: ward my journey to Baltimore/thank you for warding my journey to Baltimore. It is not always easy; our modern and largely monotheistic world is not set up for Heathen travelers. There are no handy shrines or temples to Thor in the Washington and Baltimore areas. We cannot always stop to make proper sacrifice or to accompany our prayers with sacrifice, as we ought.

We can only do the best we can and make up later for what we could not offer earlier. I think Thor understands our constraints and sympathizes with our attempts to rise above them. Our gods, after all, are beneficent, not condemnatory. And that, too, is something we should be thankful for.