Mine Eyes have seen the Glory

A Thanksgiving psalm

I grew up in a resource town adjacent to one of the best ski hills in Canada, nay the world, which had a winding, twisting run called the “Stemwinder”. Abraham Lincoln used to classify speeches using this word, as in “His speech was a real stemwinder.” This essay is going to be a bit of a stemwinder in the fashion of Mr. Trump’s “weave”. Please hang in there!

Early in my working career I worked for the City of Yellowknife in the engineering department. The Works Manager was German with a very thick accent. The Engineering Superintendent was a Filipino with a barely understandable accent. My boss, the Building Inspector, was a Dutchman with, you guessed it, a strong accent. Watching the three of them interact was right out of a Saturday Night Live skit. This story is about the German manager.

Fritz was a survivor of the Luftwaffe who had participated in the bombing of London during World War II. My interactions with him were always in the company of my boss and their conversation would sometimes stray into the war and both would describe a funny incident from the perspectives of once hated enemies. Fritz once described his attempt to join the Canadian Legion and the look on the registrar’s face when Fritz responded “Erste Jagdgeschwader” to a question about his unit. I think they gave him a special pass to drink in the lounge, but he couldn’t become a member of the Legion or march with them on Remembrance Day.

Just as famous enemies, Abimael Guzman and Vladimiro Montesinos, became fast friends in a Peruvian jail, so too did Fritz and the members of the Canadian Legion bury the hatchet and together cry in their beers as they remembered the horrors of the war. It is an astounding thing when you think of it. A shared horror needs a common catharsis when all the prior hatreds are over.

I teach high school students a view of history which posits that there are nodes of events in time which distinctively and universally separate the past from the future. For example, I think that the Medo-Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, was the first step in a centuries-long set up for the birth of Jesus.

More than one hundred years before Cyrus was born, the prophet Isaiah called him “God’s shepherd”. Cyrus created the largest empire in world history and then freed all the people brought in exile to Babylon. Nobody had ever done that before.

A couple of hundred years later, the empire was taken over by Alexander the Great in a winner-takes-all battle against Darius III. Alexander brought a common culture, common language and a dozen cities named Alexandria to the largest empire in the world.

A couple of hundred years after that, the Romans were invited to take over much of the empire and when they finished their civil war and became Imperial, a peace was declared and instituted. Into this large empire with a common business language and culture that was at peace came the Prince of Peace. And for the next forty years, his message was able to spread to the remotest corners of the large empire (and beyond) with little opposition.

And you can read all this in the Book of Daniel written at the time of Cyrus.

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, probably the biggest holiday on the calendar of that country. We Canadians also celebrate Thanksgiving if a month earlier due to weather conditions. But our Thanksgiving is categorically different from that of our American cousins.

Many view the American Thanksgiving through the lens of Indians such as Massasoit and Squanto who gave great aid to the Pilgrims in colonial America. As important and worthy of remembrance as those stories are, I think the American Thanksgiving is better viewed through the lens of the conclusion of another historical node.

That node started when the dead faith of the American colonists was rekindled during the Great Awakening of 1730 – 1760 leading directly to the Revolutionary War of Independence. I argue that, absent the Awakening, the fight for freedom from England would never have happened and the remarkable founding documents of the United States would never have been written.

But the fight for freedom left some threads. As Thomas Jefferson said,

There were ten states present. Six voted unanimously for it, three against it, and one was divided: and seven votes being requisite to decide the proposition affirmatively, it was lost. The voice of a single individual of the state which was divided, or of one of those which were of the negative, would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment! But it is to be hoped it will not always be silent and that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.

He, of course, was speaking of the vote to banish slavery in the new constitution of 1787. Jefferson looked forward to what was to come and Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, looked back to Jefferson’s magnum opus, the Declaration of Independence.

Four score and 7 years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…

I think that the American Thanksgiving of today is founded in the Civil War and not the Pilgrim’s arrival. Many presidents including George Washington made Thanksgiving Proclamations, but the one celebrated today was made by Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1863 following the bloody battle of Gettysburg.

Many historians argue that it was during this period that Lincoln “got religion”. He struggled to understand the enormous sacrifices being made on the battlefield and an argument over state’s rights just wasn’t up to the task. It had to be about slavery… Jefferson’s abominable crime. In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln addressed the issue head on and described the war in Biblical terms. I argue this was the end of a historical node that was started in empty churches in 1730.

In 1913, 50,000 Civil War veterans from both South and North met on the fields of Cemetery Ridge to celebrate the Battle of Gettysburg. I think there was a re-enactment of Pickett’s charge but instead of fighting along the fence line, the veteran’s hugged each other and shook hands. At least those who had arms and hands to hug and shake. Thinking about that moment almost brings me to tears wondering how such a thing could be possible.

The American anthem for this historical node was written in the early dawn hours of a day in November 1861 by a young Julia Ward Howe. On the day previous, Ms. Howe had heard a regiment of Union soldiers marching and singing about the meaning of John Brown’s emancipation rebellion.

“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul keeps marching on.”

John Brown was hanged in 1859 after being captured raiding a military warehouse at Harper’s Ferry for guns to arm the slaves that he hoped to set free. The music to his panegyric were from a popular hymn, “Say, Brothers, will you meet us”, and Ms. Ward felt that there needed to be an upgrade to the sentiments about John Brown’s rebellion. In the early dawn of the next day, and in her words, under the direction of God, she feverishly wrote out the original verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It became a popular marching song for the Union army and remains so to the American military to this day.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Ms. Howe’s terrible swift sword was Jefferson’s silence of Heaven and Lincoln’s drop of blood drawn with the lash… paid by another drawn with the sword. These are the connective tissues of this historical node.

Why is the United States such a larger-than-life country with a level of creativity that dwarfs every other nation? What other nation has paid such a price to confirm so important a human feature. Brother against brother, father against son, cousin against cousin, they were willing to pass themselves through the mighty scourge of war to win the freedom of four million slaves. And then to meet periodically to re-enact the singular moments of that war.

The American Thanksgiving is a big deal. It is a celebration of and thanksgiving for freedom more than anything else and freedom is a dominant characteristic of God’s character in whose image we are made. In my view, it is this core American value of freedom, however imperfectly practiced, that resulted in and continues to drive the most creative and economically successful society in history. It is a worldview thing.

History has a purpose or telos or end. For all that I think the Americans have recently departed from the track of their telos, as long as they celebrate their Thanksgiving and re-enact their battles, they are far from done leading the rest of mankind to its telos.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American cousins.