As we prepare for one of this country’s most beloved holidays, I have been reflecting on what makes it so special. We gather with friends and family, excitedly prepare our favorite dishes of the year, and eat our hearts out. While feeding my kitten this morning, for the second time in one hour, I had an epiphany about what makes Thanksgiving so divine. At least it was an epiphany for me.
I think the reverence many of us feel toward the Thanksgiving celebration has to do with the blessed nature of “the act of being fed.”
The kitten I was feeding is one I’ve been fostering for the local shelter for five months now because he failed to thrive and has never been well enough to be put up for adoption. Needless to say, I will soon be adopting him myself, permanently, and I call him Samson because of his amazing inner determination and strength.
Samson’s problems have been primarily respiratory, and there have been many days where his sense of smell was gone and his nasal passages clogged, so on those days he couldn’t really eat at all. It took him forever to go from 12 ounces at 10 weeks of age to 3 lbs. Although Samson still wheezes and frequently has a little-kid snotty nose, we’re past the worst of it now, and his weight and size are normal for his age. But “the act of being fed” is still the most important moment of his day—or moMENTS, I should say, as he still has to eat about six times a day. And you can tell when he asks, that it is his spirit requesting the nurturing act as much as his body requiring the food.
There is something spiritual and sublimely nurturing about being fed, especially by someone who loves us and cares about our welfare. The syndrome “failure to thrive” in infants or the elderly is associated with a lack of this type of caring, and its victims, like Samson, are usually underweight, will not or cannot eat, and usually end up dying. In that respect, I like to think Samson has made it because of all the love lavished upon him by those in my household, as well as being indulged in “the act of being fed” as many times a day as he could handle.
We are now all familiar with the premise (promise?) that the food we eat contains the energy of the person who prepared it and how they were feeling while doing so. The movie Like Water for Chocolate does a wonderful job of illustrating this—sometimes with humor, sometimes with devastating drama.
So no wonder we love Thanksgiving. We are feeding and being fed by those who we love most and who care deeply for our welfare. We strive to eat at least a few bites of every dish presented because of this innate awareness. The bounty before us may truly turn the table upon which it is laid into a “groaning board” by the time everyone has contributed their dish. And we may overeat that day in spite of promising ourselves we won’t. But we can never over-love. Especially while preparing food for others or partaking of what they have so caringly made for us.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, my dear family and friends, and to all you may share it with!
Recent Comments