Empty Chairs: A Pandemic Thanksgiving

I have three favorite nature writers: Terry Tempest Williams, whose Desert Quartet has graced my bookshelf for decades; Kim Hoff, an up-and-coming nature writer who touches my heart with every essay she writes; Margaret Renkl, the Nashville-based New York Times’ Contributing Opinion Writer who faithfully supplies an op-ed column rooted in nature and what it teaches us every week. 

Nature is, of course, a tenured professor at the university of humanity. It behooves us well when we listen to her. 

Ms. Renkl’s essay in this morning’s Times laments the empty chairs at her Thanksgiving table. However, she notes that there are always empty chairs every year, chairs that were once filled by the hopes and dreams and disappointments of our elders, those who have left this Earth experience. 

I’ve been an ordained minister for more than twenty-five years. Along with that position comes a responsibility to mark, remark upon, and note the stoppings and startings of human experience, most often in ceremony of some kind. 

Thanksgiving was always a ceremony in our house growing up. It was my mother’s favorite of all holidays, and every year, she did it up proud. A beautifully-set table. Traditional foods, some that we ate only on holidays. Always a demand of each one of us to speak aloud something for which we were grateful. 

Ms. Renkl sounds an awful lot like my mom. A year after her great-grandmother died, she writes, “As with every death before or since, I could not get over the shock. How can love not be enough to save someone so deeply loved?” 

And here is the crux of it, Beloved. Love does not save all. Love in itself wafts a promise of a cocoon of safety, care, blessing. But love in itself isn’t enough. This is a lesson I’ve learned in this life again and again and again. 

No, shocking as it may sound, love isn’t enough. If it were, I honestly believe the course of this pandemic in these United States would have been entirely different. 

Here is what makes love enough: action. 

Without it, love is indeed lovely, but not anywhere near as effective. Love in action means that the one purveying the love goes out of their way to care for those whom they encounter. Love in itself is a giver—and no, I do not mean a sacrificer a.k.a. a martyr—a giver. That is its nature. 

Ms. Renkl is sad that she won’t have a table to decorate this year. My mama would have been sad, too. But she will have her husband and her adult children with her outside in the backyard with plates on their laps. Dinner may be simpler, but the nature of the giver, the lover in Ms. Renkl, will be taking all the actions she can to show her love. 

Often, we do this automatically with family. Family are who you love, and you show them, and, sometimes, even tell them. Not always so with other things, in other contexts. 

The OED usually picks a Word-of-the-Year around Thanksgiving time. This year, they didn’t … because they couldn’t. Instead they picked a smorgasbord of words related to Covid-19. As it says in The Times, “The 2020 report does highlight some zippy new coinages, like ‘Blursday’ (which captures the way the week blends together), ‘covidiots (you know who you are) and ‘doomscrolling’ (who, me?). But mostly, it underlines how the pandemic has utterly dominated public conversation, and given us a new collective vocabulary almost overnight.” 

Interestingly, despite the sad origins of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., it, too, has a collective vocabulary. It’s a vocabulary of gratitude, of praise, of blessing, some of the inherent attributes of love. It’s a day to pause and appreciate, and for those who provide the ceremony and the celebration, it’s a day of action. 

This got me thinking of love in the context of country. Here is where I’m supposed to bandy about the solipsistic differences between nationalism and patriotism. To borrow from an earlier ceremonialist, Humbug. Love of country, in the sense I use it, means that we act as though we love our country. 

Sigh. But isn’t that exactly what has been missing for a long, long time? Love that takes action because that is its nature. Aren’t those the empty chairs at our collective table this year?  

Here again, a drop of compassion wells up in me for the sad, mad, bad man in The White House. Why? Because there’s no love there at all. Certainly, none from him for the American people. 

Say what you like about Joseph R. Biden, Jr., the man knows about love. He also knows about loss, and empty chairs. Mr. Biden, despite the unconscionable behavior on the part of the executive branch, is already taking action in love to fill those chairs. 

Can each one of us, in all honesty, do any less at this point? 

Perhaps with love again at the helm of our country, we will all rediscover the love that resides deep within each one of us as our very nature and begin to take the small, consistent actions that have always been the only way to change the world. 

One blessing, one prayer, one grateful, loving action at a time. 

Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.