Ordo Praedicatorum

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. preached the following homily during Mass for Thanksgiving Day:

In 1630, standing on the deck of a small wooden ship called the Arbella, John Winthrop, a student of Reformed divinity, uttered words now famous to his confreres with whom he was about to embark in the new world of North America: “For we must consider, he said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us until we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.” A good land, a city on the hill, a place of new covenant with God on a new continent, and a land for which we should give thanks. The puritan’s remarks are in one sense too theologically exaggerated, both in their optimism and pessimism concerning the importance of the fledgling colony. But they are also a great word that we turn back to repeatedly in American self-definition and idealization. A city built on a hill.

Without seeking to efface this image altogether, we ought also to note that the Scriptures we are given today (Rev. 18:1-2, 21-23; 191-3, 9a; Lk. 21:20-28) in this eschatological season also speak of a city, of two cities in fact. Of Jerusalem, the holy city, which has refused the time of her visitation, turning her back on Christ, and who will be trampled underfoot by the pagans. And the city of Babylon, the great city of the end times, of a humanity that has become godless in its soot and commerce, a city that will evaporate before the judgment of God, to be thrown down, and never found again.

And of course behind both of these cities, or above them, there is the city of God, the new and heavenly Jerusalem, A city in which there is “no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” (Rev. 21:22-23)

The city on a hill that is America is of course, none of these. Or she is perhaps some mixture of the three: a mixture of noble aspirations toward God’s kingdom, of godless humanity, and of a sincere but in large part blind populace, that clings to its religious self-interpretation in seeming ignorance of the One who alone can deliver her. And America is all these things in a mix of freedom, and natural beauty, and creativity, and ordinary, happy plainness.

Presumably this city on a hill is not lifeless, but lively, and therefore communal, and so in this city there must be a meal, a communion meal, so to speak, that is also part of its primitive symbolism; According to the customary history, Thanskgiving began approximately 9 years before John Winthrop’s sermon, not with Puritans but with Pilgrims, and at Plymouth. Whatever its exact origins, this autumn harvest festival had already become a widespread custom throughout the colonies prior to the revolution, and took on an official form in 1777 when the newly formed continental congress declared a day of:

“Solemn Thanksgiving and Praise: That at one time and with one voice, the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor; and that, together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join the penitent confession of their manifold Sins, whereby they had forfeited every favor; and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance; That it may please him graciously to afford his blessing on the governments of these States respectively, and prosper the public council of the whole.”

At the heart of Thanksgiving in 1777 was an act of the state commending to its citizens a consideration of the merits of Jesus Christ. Oh congress, far have you fallen.  In the end of course, the reparation of the public order is about getting your food straight. Freud was wrong. In the end it’s all about food. The true thanksgiving meal that unites the city in gratitude, must simultaneously hold the city on a hill before God, and allow the light of the Lamb to shine upon her, and even through her, that she will have no need of a lamp, or the sun, so that the Lord God will be her light, so that the merits of Jesus Christ can be her deepest and truest source of thanksgiving, and the truest and deepest beacon of hope that thrives in her members. So that all the earthly benefits of America, in her freedom, and natural beauty, and creativity and ordinary, happy plainness, can be consecrated to God, can be covered with the veil of holiness, with true contrition for sin, and with the beaming, authentic joy of grace.

Let us conclude with a bit of revisionist history, that we can consider typologically. Since history is on the side of the Catholic Church, we might as well appropriate it to ourselves. Some fifty five years before John Winthrop’s famous sermon, the first publically recorded harvest ceremony in America took place, not in the English colonies, but in the La Florida colony, under Spanish rule. On September 8, 1565, when 600 Spanish settlers, landed at what is now the city of St. Augustine. There they promptly held a Mass of Thanksgiving for their safe arrival in the New World; and this was succeeded by a feast and celebration. Perhaps as a qualification to the Puritan image of a city on a hill, we should also see St. Augustine as a worthy patron for America, a man who had dwelt in the city of man, but who also set out in grace for the city of God, a man who truly embodied thanksgiving, that is to say, supernatural gratitude for supernatural grace received, not because of his merits, but despite them. And so, however theologically aware the inhabitants of this first city in the new world were, they lived out under the patronage of Augustine this holy and sacramental gratitude that was the appropriate context for their civic thanksgiving. They got their food straight.

Oh America, if you would be truly great, give thanks to God, for the many good gifts of a fair and rich world of nature and human civilization, but give thanks above all for the blood of your Redeemer. Eat the flesh of the Lamb, who is the light of the city on a hill, and then do what you will.

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