My headline today comes from a headline, yesterday, on a Thanksgiving Day column by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, and a columnist for both The New York Times and Christianity Today.
Warren said that she and her best friend, named "Woody," have their own (imaginary) holiday. They call it "Interdependence Day." The point, says Warren, is "to recognize how we are all in this together."
That phrase, as anyone who reads my blog postings with any regularity will probably remember, is one of my favorites. We are, truly, "in this together," and we are not either self-sufficient or self-made.
Since Warren holds out scant hope that "Interdependence Day" will ever become an official, nationally-recognized holiday, she wants her readers to consider that the existing Thanksgiving Day holiday is a good stand-in for what she and Woody would like to see celebrated on its own, a day commemorating our profound "interdependence."
Warren has some specific suggestions on how we might notice and honor our interdependence. She suggests:
- Recognize our dependence on the earth
- Focus on all the unseen people
- Honor your political enemies
- Take up the "art of neighboring"
Warren's last suggestion (not included in the bullet list I have just provided) is that we should "practice noticing." I like to think that these daily blog postings of mine, now heading into their thirteenth year, are a way that I am trying to respond to what I think is a very appropriate suggestion.
I endorse Warren's column, and her specific suggestions for us, and I hope that a few of those who might read this blog posting will be able to conquer what is probably a New York Times paywall, and read Warren's thoughts in their entirety.
Everyone should get a "slice of pie," Warren tells us, including those with whom we have profound political disagreements, our "political enemies." Warren harks back, in providing this advice, to the advice of perhaps our greatest president, whose Second Inaugural Address, given shortly before he was assassinated, said this:
With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
"Aspirational politics," a politics that seeks to create the kind of world for which we most deeply hope, a world that binds us together, is the only kind of politics worth having. Let's not forget Lincoln's words (or Warren's advice):
We are all in this together
Image Credit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/opinion/gratitude-political-enemies-polarization.html
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