Pastoral Letter
Dear Friends,
November is a time of remembering. November 5th, Remembrance Day on 11th November, and our Services of Remembrance in the Churches of our Benefice on Sunday 9th November for loved ones who have died.
Americans also celebrate Thanksgiving Day in November as an annual day of thanksgiving for the blessings of the past year, observed on the fourth Thursday in November in each of the states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It is a time of remembering the Pilgrim Fathers who struggled to build a new community in America, as well as a national, and religious holiday.
After the survival of their first colony through the bitter winter, and the gathering of the harvest, Gov. William Bradford of Plymouth Colony issued the following thanksgiving proclamation:
"Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as He has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.
Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings."
The Pilgrims had suffered dreadfully in the two years leading up to that thanksgiving proclamation, with many lives lost, and they could have been forgiven for being full of remorse and sorrow for the failures of the past; but they weren't. They saw it as a time of thanksgiving because they could see how God had guided them through the troubles and difficulties and blessed them mightily with a good harvest.
We can choose two ways to remember the past Šeither we can be full of regrets, or we can be full of thanksgiving. We only have to pick up our newspapers or view the newscasts on our Televisions to know that our world is full of tragedies. It is also true that the relatives of those who have died suffer a great deal afterwards from the regrets and remorse that keep attacking the soul. Yet remembering need not be a negative and destructive thing. It can be a positive thing, as we give thanks for the lives of our loved ones, for all that they achieved in their lives, and for the wonderful memories of their companionship and love, which will stay with us for ever.
So let us remember this November, not with pain and sadness, but with love and thanksgiving, following the example of the Pilgrim Fathers; and let us give thanks to God, and let us live in the light of those wonderful words of the twenty third Psalm:
You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;
you have anointed my head with oil and my cup shall be full.
Surely goodness and loving mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
May God bless you all,