I love Thanksgiving.  Absolutely love it.  For me it’s the best holiday of the year – family, friends, food, and football.  How good can it get?   (OK, a lot of my family and friends would drop the football.)  And it’s always a time for me actually to realize how much good there is in the world and in my life. On the other hand, every Thanksgiving has a darkside for me, a sense of guilt that I myself have so much to be thankful for. Isn’t that a bit triumphalist and self-congratulating, given how awful so many people feel, not because of self-pity (though there is a lot of that also) but because their lives really are filled with pain and misery? These two feelings of gratitude and guilt are simultaneous.  That is weird and possibly paradoxical, but I never try to resolve the tension between them, to make one triumph over the other or to reconcile them to one another.  They are both real and true but obviously at odds.   I think that’s worth … Continue reading A Thanksgiving Reflection, 2021