In the months after my miscarriage, I thought often of a quote from C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: “The sun is darkened in my eyes.” I had never experienced anything quite like it before—no matter how bright the leaves on the trees or how brilliant the afternoon sunlight, the world looked dim to me, as if someone had drawn a black veil over everything.
My miscarriage happened at the end of October, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. We celebrated the holiday with friends and family as usual, but that day felt dark in my eyes, too. The vivid decorations, the rich food, even the warmth of being surrounded by loved ones all felt like it was happening in another dimension, one that had nothing to do with my actual life.
Maybe that is how the impending holiday celebration feels to you this year, in the aftermath of another strife-ridden election season, as war continues to rage around the world and talk of mass deportations increases from a chatter to a roar. Amid so much uncertainty and suffering, sitting around a lavish table clinking glasses and thanking God for your blessings can seem ignorant at best and callous at worst.
Or perhaps the chaos and suffering are taking place in your own home, whether because of sickness, loss, or fractured family relationships—in which case celebrating Thanksgiving might feel out of touch in a different way, an exercise in going through the motions.
In recent years, I’ve watched more and more friends on social media declare their refusal to celebrate Thanksgiving. It is a colonizer’s holiday, they say, a gluttonous, jingoistic ritual steeped in oppression that we would all do well to avoid.
In the past, I might have dismissed these critiques as cranky and self-flagellating. Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, with its focus on gathering and gratitude, and it’s less in the way of materialistic distraction than Christmas. True to my Chinese American heritage, I also have a profound attachment to food—to the love and care it symbolizes as well as its life-giving deliciousness.
Part of me still feels like dismissing these critiques, so reluctant am I to let anything mar my enjoyment of a day I hold dear. But although the dark veil of those first few months of miscarriage grief has dissipated, the memory of it is still with me. My heart feels more porous to the pain of others; the families in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and beyond being displaced and watching their loved ones die do not feel so far away. The knowledge that in some cases my own nation is supplying so much of the weaponry being used against them—and that soon, we may also begin displacing millions of vulnerable people from within our own borders—feels more difficult than ever to square with any type of celebration, much less such an American one.
This isn’t the first moment in recent memory that Thanksgiving has been politically fraught. In 1970, some Native American activists instituted a National Day of Mourning as a protest against the way the holiday’s origin myth downplays the painful history of Native people. And in the years since Donald Trump’s first election, many an article has been written about family members so disturbed by each other’s political views that they no longer celebrate Thanksgiving together.
Yet there has also been tension at the heart of the holiday for centuries—almost since its inception. Thanksgiving as we know it today originated not with the 1621 harvest feast between the Pilgrims and Wampanoags but with public days of fasting, meditation, and prayer in colonial New England, during which the Puritans repented for their sins while giving thanks for the ending of a natural disaster, like an epidemic or drought.
Later, when US presidents and Congress began declaring national days of thanksgiving, they characterized them as “solemn” days, urging people to “express the grateful feelings of their hearts” while “join[ing] the penitent confession of their sins.”
And in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in the middle of the Civil War, he urged Americans to offer up “Thanksgiving and Praise” along with “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend[ing] to [God’s] tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.”
It seems that, historically, Thanksgiving was not meant to be a purely celebratory day, a time to luxuriate in self-satisfaction, but rather a day to hold gratitude in tension with sorrow, suffering, and sin—to acknowledge the brightness and darkness that always exist simultaneously in the world.
I experienced many emotions in the aftermath of my miscarriage: excruciating pain (both physical and emotional), rage at everyone who’d never had a miscarriage, despair at the thought that I might never get pregnant again, regret at telling so many people about the baby—for my parents, we’d ordered a cake that said “Congrats, Grandma and Grandpa” and videotaped them jumping for joy. Most of all, I felt a deep sense of meaninglessness.
When I was pregnant, I made sure to exercise, eat healthy food, take my prenatal vitamins, and examine every label on every product that came into contact with my body. After the miscarriage, all of that seemed pointless. So did prayer. When I announced the pregnancy to our friends, many of them said to us—some with tears in their eyes—that they had just been praying for us to have a baby. If all those people had prayed and the baby had still died, what was the point of praying at all?
I thought I’d never stop feeling the stabbing pain of the loss. But as the weeks and months wore on, the pain became less of an open wound and more of an ache, until eventually, I only thought about it sometimes. Then came the one-year anniversary of the miscarriage.
I hadn’t been tracking the date consciously, but as soon as the weather changed and the leaves began turning orange, my body seemed to know what time it was. By then, I was pregnant again. But in the days leading up to the one-year mark, I began to feel a heaviness in my stomach that had nothing to do with the baby growing inside of me.
It was like being dragged backward in time. The sun began to look dark again, and the meaninglessness began to suffuse the air around me once more. I knew things were bad when I found myself unmotivated to take my prenatal vitamins or even eat lunch—as if my current pregnancy did not matter, did not exist.
When I told my husband, he insisted that we pray. It was morning, and fresh sunlight was streaming through the windows into the kitchen where we sat. I stared at the light dully as he took my hand and asked God to grant us comfort, hope, and vision. When it was my turn to pray, I sat in silence for a long time, unsure of what to say. Then, remembering how my pastor begins every prayer meeting with a time of thanksgiving, I started to thank God. “Thank you for a new day. Thank you for the sunlight. Thank you for our friends.”
The words felt strange and clunky coming out of my mouth. I didn’t feel particularly grateful, but I pressed on. “Thank you for another baby. Thank you for our families, thank you for our community.” As I continued, my thanks became more detailed and specific. I still felt heavy and detached—yet I had the sense that the words were already working to call me back to myself.
That night, I reached out to my friends and family, asking for prayer and letting them know that I was struggling. Their support carried me through the week until eventually I began to feel like myself again. My healing process had begun with thanksgiving.
In Succor and Silence
It occurs to me now that perhaps the darkness I began to see in the world after my miscarriage was not so much a product of my grief as it was a grief-induced revelation of the darkness that had been there all along. My loss made me more sensitive to the pain and suffering that exists continually in the world, such that for a while, it was difficult—almost impossible—to see any goodness at all.
Giving thanks in the midst of my grief did not dispel or deny my pain, but it did allow me to remember that joy and beauty still exist, and furthermore, that I need to acknowledge them in order to keep living well in this world. In naming what is good and giving credit to God for those things, we remind ourselves that God is at work in our lives and in our world—not just in spite of suffering and chaos, but right there in the midst of it. Giving thanks expands our imaginations so that we can do more than dread the future—we can also hope.
We celebrate Thanksgiving at the end of the fall, a time of bright darkness if there ever was one. In autumn, the colors and the light become so intense they are almost blinding, while the days grow shorter. It is as if light is performing its swan song while darkness crouches in the corner, ready to fling itself over everything. We can think of Thanksgiving as a celebration in defiance of darkness, or we can embrace the true roots of the holiday and treat it as a time to acknowledge the darkness and light together and to present them both to God.
Christina Gonzalez Ho is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries.
The post I Give Thanks in the Bright Darkness appeared first on Christianity Today.