Making Room
long and meandering thoughts on a complex holiday
Thanksgiving mornings in my childhood home always began the same way: a slice of Mom’s coffee cake, warm from the oven, a big glass of orange juice, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on the television… and newspaper spread out on the dining room table so we could polish the silver.
The scents of cinnamon and tarnish remover blended into an oddly comforting mélange of warm tininess, made more complex by the sautéing onions and thyme that would go into the stuffing, which would go into the bird. Which of course was huge – more than we and the family of our parents’ best friends could ever eat. There were enough sides to fill a plate twice over with small helpings, and practically a full pie for everyone.
The whole house smelled amazing, the décor was perfectly autumnal, and the long dining table had so many leaves in it we had to angle the table so Dad was stuck in one corner and Mom practically ate in the kitchen.
To say my mother went all out for Thanksgiving is an understatement.
I never really thought about why Thanksgiving – and all the holidays really – were so important to my mother. I never thought much about why there was always room at the table…until now.
My mother and her family weren’t recent refugees from another country, but they did seek refuge. At some point during the depression, my grandfather walked out on his wife and two adolescent girls – and Grandma Grace pragmatically left the too-big house in Yonkers. Grace and the girls stayed with one relative, then friends, then other relatives or friends, until the girls had graduated high school and met their first husbands.
My mother was, in a sense, a refugee from poverty and abandonment, grateful for the space someone else made for her. And when she had a family of her own, with far-flung relatives, and friends, and friends of friends, Mom always made sure there was always room for one more.
My mother and her family weren’t recent refugees from another country, or refugees from states that seek to cause them harm; in fact, as she researched our genealogy, mom discovered our roots in America go to those first English to claim this land as their own in the early 1600s. And while those ancestors might have thought of themselves as refugees from a political and religious environment that was not welcoming to them, they in fact were not invited to take refuge here.
Yet they found a tentative welcome, in the form of assistance when the going got tough, from the people whose land these colonizers had taken over: basically, not letting them starve, and teaching them what crops work in the rocky soil. The Wampanoag and Nauset and Massachusett peoples may not have liked them or known what was to come, but they did show the English compassion.
We can shed the myth of the first Thanksgiving, and instead lean into the lessons a national day of giving thanks teaches us – gratitude, compassion, the abundance of the fall harvest, and our commitment to welcome all, to make room.
We often say we are welcoming, but are we making room? Or is welcome just an abstract concept, something we like to say but don’t enact?
Because welcome takes action. I’ve been talking a lot lately about what our faith calls us toward – how we resist tyranny, combat hate, protect the vulnerable, fight injustice, and through it all show the healing power of love. And we know love is not just a feeling, it’s an action. If we are to love those who seek safe harbor, a second chance, a new life, we can’t just proclaim it, we have to do it.
Which is something our nation used to be known for.
It seems a bit ironic that the debates on the national stage right now continue to be about people wanting to be safe – whether it’s immigrants fleeing untenable conditions in their home countries, or women fleeing states willing to prosecute them for taking care of their reproductive health, or trans folk fleeing states willing to outlaw them for existing as their true selves.
Of course, the debate in part is the legacy of those pilgrim settlers, the “refugees” of our national myth. The reality is that these European colonizers were pretty clear about shutting the door after them, extending welcome to only those who looked like them and believed like them. But the myth remains - that we have always been open and welcoming, from the start…and thus the current debates seem antithetical to who we say we are as a nation, antithetical to Emma Lazarus’s words, memorialized on the statue right there at the front door of the country:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
lift my lamp beside the golden door!”1
How much room do we really have? Can we make room for one more?
When I was about 15, my family set the thanksgiving table for 16 people – the most we’d ever had around that table, a number that meant we had to be very conscious about elbows and where to place the lefties. And as our family and our friends poured in, one more unexpected guest arrived. And my mother scrounged up another place setting, another chair, moved things around, and there was room – and enough food – for seventeen.
As it turns out, that seventeenth person was seeking a kind of sanctuary; this teenager – a couple years ahead of me in school – had been turned out of his family’s home for being gay and was in fear for his life. By making room at our table, we were able to give him a hot meal and sixteen people to help him figure out what to do next. Our abundance of resources and compassion provided some sanctuary.
How does that idea translate for us today?
How do we show our compassion and share our resources, and provide safe harbor for those who need us?
Forty-five years ago, my parents and their best friends were modeling what it looks like to put faith into action, to not just feel pity but to act compassionately. It has so many levels, right? Offering a meal, helping with housing, assisting with the legal system, protecting from harm. We know this work, and we have no doubt that the need for this work is growing ever larger.
It’s not always easy, this call to not just affirm but enact our values – values of justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, generosity. Love. We know it’s not always easy, and it can get demoralizing, especially when we feel small and insignificant compared to the loud voices opposing us at every turn. But what we do matters. Enacting our values matters.
And when your spirit sags, we will be there to help lift your spirits. Just as you will be when I can’t find the wherewithal to go on in the resistance and my spirit sags.
And maybe that’s the most generous gift my mother’s table offered: an open door, a seat at the table, a meal, and a community to lift our spirits.
Lord knows we need all the help we can get.
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Yeah, I think that’s it for now. I have to prepare the cranberry sauce!
Every single time I read this poem - aloud or to myself - I cry. Sometimes it’s just a a chin wobble and a catch in my throat, but sometimes it’s a full on ugly cry. It gets me, this promise - and how angry I get to see it ignored. Goldman must be regularly rolling over in her grave.