Embrace Thanksgiving with ‘one heart, one voice’

Readers anxious about the possibility of having their turkey dinner tainted by politics can find hope in the quest of a single, working mother of five.

After becoming a widow in 1822 at age 34, Sarah Josepha Hale supported her family by working as an author, poet and influential women's magazine editor. Her career-long obsession with making Thanksgiving a permanent, national observance capable of uniting the country was most prominent in the editorials she filed each fall.

In 1860, just months before the bombardment of Fort Sumter began the Civil War, Hale wrote:

'Everything that contributes to bind us in one vast empire together, to quicken the sympathy that makes us feel from the icy North to the sunny South that we are one family, each a member of a great and free Nation, not merely the unit of a remote locality, is worthy of being cherished. We have sought to reawaken and increase this sympathy, believing that the fine filaments of the affections are stronger than laws to keep the Union of our States sacred in the hearts of the people.”

Even the war, heaping with carnage and loss, did not quash Hale's steadfast belief that a day of community contemplation and gratefulness was necessary. She wrote directly to President Abraham Lincoln in September 1863, urging 'permanency and unity.”

Days later, Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as national Thanksgiving Day. noting that while war raged on battlefields, the nation and its citizenry continued to grow and prosper. 'With humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience” such steps forward should still be 'solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people,” Lincoln noted in the proclamation. And he encouraged the citizenry to pray for the nation's healing 'to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.”

Fissures exposed in this year's contentious presidential election cycle cannot be realistically compared to the bloody trenches of the Civil War. Nonetheless this past call for healing and unity fits the present. Local relationships, beaten and fractured in our most recent political battles, still matter.

Just as before, Thanksgiving offers a pause, a moment to take stock of the goodness and greatness that always surrounds us and inextricably beats in our hearts.

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