Giving Thanks in Truth: An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on Thanksgiving and the Wounds of Our Land

Each year, as November draws near to its close and households across the United States prepare their tables with beloved foods, family traditions, and heartfelt prayer, we Orthodox Christians find ourselves invited into a moment of profound reflection. Thanksgiving, even though it is not an ancient feast of the Church, stands at a crossroads of our spiritual life. On one hand, it is a day that calls us, quite beautifully, to gratitude. And on the other, it compels us to confront the deep sorrows, injustices, and wounds that followed in the centuries after the so-called “First Thanksgiving.”

Orthodoxy holds both truths at once. We stand in gratitude, and we stand in repentance. We bless God for His mercy, and we mourn what humans have done to one another.

“It Is Meet and Right to Give Thanks unto the Lord”
Every Divine Liturgy opens the altar of thanksgiving before us. When the priest lifts his hands and proclaims, “Let us give thanks unto the Lord,” the people respond with words that shape our very identity:

“It is meet and right.”

Thanksgiving is not seasonal for the Orthodox Christian. It is the shape of our life. Gratitude is not merely a virtue, it is the proper posture of the human heart before the Creator. As St. John Chrysostom teaches, “A grateful heart stands at the doorway of Paradise.”

Whether we receive abundance or scarcity, whether we find ourselves in joy or hardship, it is indeed meet and right, proper and fitting, that we thank God for His providence, His mercy, His sustaining love, and every breath He grants us.

This is the “Orthodox Thanksgiving”, a daily Eucharistic existence that recognizes every good gift as coming from above.

And yet, to give thanks truthfully means we must also see truthfully.

A Complicated History: The First Thanksgiving and What Followed
Many Americans grow up with a simplified, almost mythological picture of the “First Thanksgiving”, a peaceful feast between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people in 1621. And yes, there was indeed hospitality shown by Indigenous peoples who helped these newcomers survive their first bitter winter. There was shared food, conversation, and a brief season of cooperation.

But as Orthodox Christians, who seek to speak truth with humility, we cannot stop at the tidy version of the story.

The decades and centuries that followed were marked not by harmony, but by profound injustice. As more European settlers arrived, Indigenous peoples faced:

• Forced displacement from their lands
• Deliberate destruction of their crops, villages, and way of life
• Epidemics brought by colonizers that decimated native populations
• Broken treaties made in bad faith or abandoned when convenient
• Cultural suppression, forced conversions, and the trauma of boarding schools
• Violence, war, and systemic policies that aimed, explicitly or implicitly, at erasing entire peoples

These are not distant historical footnotes. The wounds remain in the soil of this land, in the stories carried by Indigenous families, and in the spiritual memory of the Americas.

Our Hermitage and the First Peoples of This Land
For the Saint Basil of the Desert Orthodox Hermitage, this reflection is not abstract.

Our very home, our chapel, our prayer paths, our gardens, our desert silence, sits upon the ancestral land of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a people who have lived in the Sonoran Desert from time immemorial. They are truly the First Nation of this region, long before borders, long before maps, long before the concept of “Arizona” or “the United States” ever existed.

As European migration moved west, the Tohono O’odham were systematically stripped of much of their territory. Families were displaced, sacred sites were disrupted, and tribal life was forced into ever-smaller fragments of what was once a vast homeland. Even today, the nearest reservation land lies less than a ten-minute drive from the Hermitage, a living reminder that the history of this land is not ancient or forgotten. The First Peoples are still our neighbors, our elders on this soil, and the rightful inheritors of a heritage that predates our churches, our communities, and our modern nation.

Recognizing this is not political, it is simply truth, and truth is the foundation of repentance, healing, and love.

Holding Thanksgiving with a Contrite Heart
So how do we approach Thanksgiving as Orthodox Christians?

We approach it with gratitude, yes, but with honest remembrance as well.

We give thanks to God for His blessings while acknowledging that others were deprived of theirs. We rejoice in the harvest while remembering that others had their fields taken from them. We enjoy the freedom to worship while recognizing that others were once forbidden from speaking their language, practicing their traditions, or living upon their ancestral homelands.

We must be capable of two things at once:

1. Giving thanks to God with our whole hearts, for this is indeed meet and right.
2. Confessing the sins committed on the very land where we now live, even if we personally did not commit them.

The Orthodox understanding of sin is communal; we confess together, we repent together, and we seek healing together.

For we cannot ask God to bless us while refusing to acknowledge the pain of our Indigenous brothers and sisters, especially those whose land we now occupy.

The Thanksgiving Table as an Altar of Reconciliation
Imagine for a moment if every Orthodox Christian household, every parish, and every monastic community embraced Thanksgiving as not just a meal, but a liturgical moment of reconciliation:

• Offering prayers not only of gratitude, but of repentance
• Remembering the tribes who once lived upon our local land
• Asking God to heal wounds both seen and unseen
• Supporting Native communities through acts of charity and solidarity
• Teaching future generations the truth, not the fairy tale
• And praying that God would restore the dignity and flourishing of Indigenous peoples, now and always

Thanksgiving then becomes not merely a cultural holiday, but a Eucharistic act grounded in truth, humility, and love.

The Orthodox Way: Gratitude That Leads to Justice
True gratitude changes us.
True thanksgiving opens our hearts to compassion.
True Eucharist sends us back into the world as agents of healing.

The Church does not ask us to feel guilty for being alive today, it asks us to be responsible. To be truthful. To be loving. To remember that every human being bears the image of God, including those whose ancestors were wronged and whose communities still struggle because of wounds inflicted long before our birth.

If Thanksgiving is to be authentically Orthodox, then it must be:

• Eucharistic
• Thankful
• Honest
• Humble
• Compassionate
• Just
• Rooted in Christ

We cannot rewrite the past. But we can choose to live differently in the present.

A Prayer for Thanksgiving in Truth
O Lord Jesus Christ, Giver of every good and perfect gift,
We bow before Thee in gratitude for Thy mercy,
for the blessings we see and the blessings hidden from our eyes.
Teach us to give thanks with true and humble hearts.

Remember, O Lord, the Indigenous peoples of this land--
especially the Tohono O’odham Nation,
whose ancestral homeland surrounds us still.
Heal their wounds, restore their dignity,
and bless their families, elders, and future generations.

Forgive us, O Lord, for the sins of forgetfulness,
for the temptations of comfort,
and for the histories we have ignored.
Plant within us the courage to seek truth,
the humility to repent,
and the love to work for healing.

Bless our tables, bless our families,
and bless this land with Thy peace.
For Thou art the Giver of Life,
and to Thee we give glory, thanksgiving, and worship,
unto the ages of ages. Amen.
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