Happy Thanksgiving from Dr. Moreno-Riaño
Forty-two years ago, my family and I celebrated our first Thanksgiving in the United States. We had just immigrated to and arrived in the U.S. when we took part in this national holiday. I still remember our first Thanksgiving dinner and all of the time everyone took to prepare for this special day. Hours of preparation were invested in recipes, food prep, cooking, wardrobes and table settings. And there was a seemingly ceaseless buzzing of energy and conversation amidst everyone in the home in which we were both strangers and guests.Psalm 106 so too invites us to “give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.” President Abraham Lincoln in his Oct. 3, 1863, proclamation that enshrined Thanksgiving as a national U.S. holiday also invited the Civil War-torn nation:
Then came a moment of complete silence and simple words—the Thanksgiving prayer before the meal. All of this was new to my family and me. The setting aside of a day for giving thanks to God, for sharing with others that for which we were thankful, a moment of prayer before a meal, holding hands around a table and—dare I say it—all of the yummy food! We were strangers and guests in a new land, our new country—the United States. Yet we were included, embraced and invited to participate in a time-honored tradition of the giving of thanks to God. The writer ofto set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union. (Lincoln, 1863)
Gerson Moreno-Riaño, Ph.D. President