Thanksgiving in Winter
While it’s been a rather mild winter for most of us in the US, Garrison Keillor presented a great poem on today’s Writer’s Almanac (January 2, 2012) about winter. The author Marcus Jackson brings to life some of the images and experiences unique to life in the whiter parts of the world, and places them in a context of expression we don’t often find in our talk about winter: giving thanks.
Winter Thanks
by Marcus Jackson
To the furnace—tall, steel rectangle
containing a flawless flame.
To heatgliding through ducts, our babies
asleep like bundled opal.
Praiseevery furry grain of every
warm hour, praise each
deflection of frost,praise the fluent veins, praise
the repair person, trudging
in a Carhartt coatto dig for leaky lines, praise
the equator, where snow
is a stranger,praise the eminent sun
for letting us orbs buzz around it
like younger brothers,praise the shooter’s pistol
for silencing its fire by
reason of a chilly chamberpraise our ancestors who shuddered
through winters, bunched
on stark bunks,praise the owed money
becoming postponed by a lender
who won’t waitmuch longer in the icy wind,
praise the neon antifreeze
in our Chevrolet radiator,and praise the kettle whistle,
imitating an important train,
delivering usthese steam-brimmed sips of tea.
To put things in theological perspective, here is Luther describing the nature of thanksgiving in his Small Catechism, here expositing the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer:
Give us this day our daily bread.
What does this mean?–Answer.
God gives daily bread, even without our prayer, to all wicked men; but we pray in this petition that He would lead us to know it, and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.
What is meant by daily bread?–Answer.
Everything that belongs to the support and wants of the body, such as meat, drink, clothing, shoes, house, homestead, field, cattle, money, goods, a pious spouse, pious children, pious servants, pious and faithful magistrates, good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.
And he elaborates further in the Large Catechism:
Behold, thus God wishes to indicate to us how He cares for us in all our need, and faithfully provides also for our temporal support. And although He abundantly grants and preserves these things even to the wicked and knaves, yet He wishes that we pray for them, in order that we may recognize that we receive them from His hand, and may feel His paternal goodness toward us therein. For when He withdraws His hand, nothing can prosper nor be maintained in the end, as, indeed, we daily see and experience. How much trouble there is now in the world only on account of bad coin, yea, on account of daily oppression and raising of prices in common trade, bargaining and labor on the part of those who wantonly oppress the poor and deprive them of their daily bread! This we must suffer indeed; but let them take care that they do not lose the common intercession, and beware lest this petition in the Lord’s Prayer be against them.
Whatever we have in the way of trials and temptations this day, we have a God worthy of our thanks and praise, and in Christ Jesus a hope that not even the cold of hell can snuff out.
If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. (I Corinthians 15:19-22)
“Winter Thanks” by Marcus Jackson, from Neighborhood Register
Image: “Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.
