Thanksgiving's Fundamentals

For Americans, Thanksgiving comes along every year no matter what's going on around them. It's a unifying national holiday and an opportunity to step back and recognize that some very important things - chief among them family and a trust in God - are secure, even if we don't yet know who the next president will be.

This holiday draws us back to life's fundamental things. Yes, there's all the preparation - from mashing potatoes to basting turkeys to making the right flight connections. But most of all, there's the act of simply coming together to share.

The necessary counterpart of that is remembering that many families, here and abroad, don't have much in the way of material bounty, or even social stability, to share. Thanksgiving should be as much a recommitment to bless others as a celebration of our own blessings.

One hundred years ago, this newspaper's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, shared her thoughts on what the last Thanksgiving of the 19th century should signify. Her comments are no less relevant at the dawn of the 21st century.

She said, in part, "It signifies that love, unselfed, knocks more loudly at the heart of humanity and that it finds admittance; ... that civilization, peace between nations, and the brotherhood of man should be established, and justice plead not vainly in behalf of the sacred rights of individuals, peoples, and nations."

What could be more fundamental?

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