Thanksgiving evokes the theme of homecoming, return of the prodigal son. Rejoice, for he and she who were lost are found.
Rembrandt's vision is, for me, the most moving and profound of interpretations.
Look at the father's arms and hands, as expressive as his face. And the son's sandals worn to almost nothing, his head cradled upon his father's chest. Finally, the light upon them both. Jesus's parable — the last in a sequence of three stories about redemption in the Gospel of Luke — is a story of forgiveness, following an archytypal journey of a father's extravagent misjudgment, his younger son's longing, quest, loss, return and in this moment redemption. It is the father's prodigality that starts the ball rolling, the son's that carries it along, and their reunion, transformed, that brings it to conclusion.
This is meant to be a Thanksgiving toast. To offer such without mention of those who are genuinely without adequate shelter, food, health care and educational opportunity — the symbolic 99% — would be uncharitable and cruel. The poor in these United States and elsewhere are invisible enough. We need not compound that absence of vision by ignoring them at Thanksgiving. As today's lead editorial in the New York Times says, "One in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it." Nearly 50 million people are below the poverty line. Seventeen million of them are children.
As the Times concludes, "There is a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem....The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out." A dour but realistic note on which to end this Thanksgiving toast to all. Remember, it isn't the 1% who will inherit the earth.