Homily: Gratitude and Sorrow, All in One
On Thursday, many in the United States will gather around tables to give thanks. On that same Thursday, on Cole's Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Native people and their supporters will gather to mourn. They have done this every year since 1970.
That was the year the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited a Wampanoag man, Wamsutta Frank James, to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. When organizers read his speech, they asked him to change it. It told the truth about what the landing cost his people. He would not give the edited version. Instead he gathered with others on the hill above the harbor, and the National Day of Mourning began. The United American Indians of New England, the group he founded, still organizes it today.
And two days before tonight, on November 20, communities around the world kept Trans Day of Remembrance. It began in 1999, when Gwendolyn Ann Smith organized a vigil for Rita Hester. Rita was a Black trans woman killed in her home in Allston, Massachusetts, in November 1998. Her murder has never been solved. Every year since, people have gathered to read the names of the trans people killed that year.
So here we are. In the season of thanks. In the season of remembering the harmed and the dead.
Gratitude is not a cover story
We have all been taught a kind of gratitude that asks us to look away.
Be grateful for what you have. Count your blessings. Don't dwell on the bad. Someone always has it worse.
That kind of gratitude is not a spiritual practice. It is a distraction. It tells us that to be thankful we must stop witnessing. It tells the grieving that their grief is ingratitude. It tells the harmed that their anger is rude at the dinner table.
Wamsutta was asked for that kind of gratitude. Give thanks, but leave out the cost. He said no.
And I want to suggest that his refusal was not the opposite of gratitude. It was a deeper form of it. You cannot truly thank anyone, the land, the ancestors, the people who fed you, while pretending you do not know what happened to them.
Not gratitude that forgets. But gratitude that remembers.
Sorrow as faithfulness
And what about the grief?
We are often told grief is something to get through, to move past, to resolve. But the people who gather on Cole's Hill every year are not failing to move on. The people who read names every November are not stuck.
They are being faithful.
Not hopeful, necessarily. Hope can be hard to come by. But faithful. Faithful to the dead. Faithful to the truth. Faithful to the living who still need the truth told.
Grief, held in community, is a kind of loyalty. It says: you mattered, and I will not let the story be rewritten without you.
Three small ships
Last month, for our anniversary, my husband and I took a short car trip to stay a few days in Spain. One day we climbed aboard replicas of Columbus's three ships. They are moored at La Rábida, on the river where the voyage began.
They are tiny. Standing on those decks, I felt real awe for the sailors. Crossing an unknown ocean in a boat that size took courage. Maybe desperation, too.
And at the same time, I knew where those boats were going. I knew what they would bring to the people already living on the other side.
Around us, schoolchildren ran and shouted, being taught to be proud of the men who sailed from that harbor. I recognized it. I was taught the Pilgrims the same way.
On the drive home we heard an interview with the historian Matthew Restall, who has written about Columbus. He described his Spanish translator, a skilled professional, who refused to translate one passage. To the translator, it repeated what Spaniards call la leyenda negra, the Black Legend: the old story that paints Spain as uniquely cruel. In the end, Restall agreed to leave that passage out of the Spanish edition.
Later, I looked up the Black Legend. It began with a Spaniard, the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who in 1552 wrote a searing account of conquistador cruelty, hoping to shame his own Crown into reform. Spain's English and Dutch rivals translated it, sensationalized it, and used it as propaganda, while saying nothing of their own colonial violence.
So I was raised on both legends at once. The cruel Spaniards. The kindly Pilgrims. In grade school I learned what the conquistadors did. I learned much later what my own ancestor did: Myles Standish, Plymouth's military captain, against the Massachusett people. It is always easier to see the other people's legend.
I keep thinking about that. Massachusetts asked Wamsutta to cut his speech. A translator asked Restall to cut a page. Those are not the same. One was a state silencing a people it had dispossessed. The other was a person protecting their country from an old slander. But both show how much every people wants its own story to come out clean.
And throughout the Spain trip, we were simply happy. Sunshine, good food, an anniversary. Meanwhile I was fighting, from across an ocean, to make sure my ballot counted, after my address had somehow been changed.
Awe, grief, joy, worry. All in one weekend. All on one table.
All in one
So what do we do with a week that holds both?
We do not have to choose. We can set both on the table.
We can be grateful for food and know who harvested it, often underpaid and unprotected. We can be grateful for our families and grieve the trans kids whose families turned them away. We can be grateful for the land we live on and learn whose land it is, and what they are asking of us now.
The gratitude does not cancel the grief. The grief does not cancel the gratitude. They sit together, and holding both is the spiritual work.
A table that can hold truth is a table worth sitting at.
Practical faithfulness
If you want something to do, here are a few small acts.
Say the names of the people whose land you live on, and learn one thing about them now, not only their past.
Say Rita Hester's name. Reach out to your trans and NB acquaintances and ask how they are doing.
At your own table, make room for one truth-filled sentence alongside the thanks.
None of this fixes anything. It is not meant to. It is how we stay in relationship.
Closing
The grief of this week is not finished. The harms are not over.
So let us give thanks with our awareness open. Let us mourn without apologizing for it. Let us be the kind of people who can hold both.
May you be grateful without forgetting.
May you grieve without being alone.
May your table have room for the truth.
May you remember the names.
And may your thanks become a promise, to the land, to the living, and to those who are not here.