My Three Favorite Thanksgiving Words: I Need You.

“On Thanksgiving Day, we acknowledge our dependence.” – William Jennings Bryan

Seventeen people, give or take a few souls. That’s how many folks will sit around my Thanksgiving table this year.  And here’s a confession before the big meal.

I need them. Really need them.

I need every single one of those guests, every last person who will claim chez Hudson for a meal and maybe a game of Scrabble and definitely some football on the TV, Thursday.

I need them all. I depend upon them all. I cannot imagine my life without all of them in it. You might even say I’m needy when it comes to these folks I love, these people who are among the most important in my life. Yes, I’m needy, needful, need-based, a “needer”, though I’m not quite sure if that last term is really a word. It should be.

I’m actually kind of proud of being so needy.  

I certainly need my 84 year old Mom, she who with tender love and deep wisdom to share, has shaped me into the person I am today. Definitely need her. Her pumpkin pie too. My sister is coming to dinner, my older sib who always watches out for me. She’s in my need circle, though I’m not sure I’ll ever like her squash casserole. Sorry sis.

And there’s my friends whom I absolutely need: grad school buds whom I’ve shared Thanksgiving with for more than thirty years. Old, old friends who’ve always invited me to be a part of their families. Friends: I need them because they are forever reminding me that I am so much more than I might think I am, especially when I am hard on myself or just down about life. My friends will all show up heavy laden: with scrumptious homemade rolls and spices for the turkey and fresh brussels sprouts. Note: I may need brussels sprouts but I definitely do not want brussels sprouts. Nope.

There will be lots of kids at the table too. Truth be told they are not kids anymore.  In the cycle of life, they are now young adults, though I admit I wish I could still read to them like I used to…when they’d squeeze in next to me on the couch and want to hear about “Curious George” or Dr. Seuss. I needed them then, still do now, for their unconditional love. Now they are college students taking a break from the grind of classes or work for a few days of rest and they will bring their friends too. I need them all. I am so proud of them all. I get to watch them all grow up too. Wow. Thanks God.

So, go ahead: just call me Mr. Needy. I’ll take that title without hesitation. 

It’s funny how our world takes words like need, or needy or dependent, and so often marks them as negative or an insult or code for human weakness. She is so needy! Every man for himself! Who wants to be dependent on others? Survival of the fittest, others be damned, especially the needy, the poor, the powerless, the lonely, the last ones in line, right?  

Wrong. At least in the world I want to live in. A world where we recognize and celebrate how much we need each other. A world where we remember we cannot live, if not for the folks in our lives, they who raised us up, who stick by us through the thick and thin, in ill health and good health, in days of plenty and days of want; friends and family whom we so need and who need us too.

Come meal time on Turkey Day, here’s what’ll happen.

Every available surface on my dining room table will be covered with a heaping pile of turkey on a platter and steaming bowls of carrots and a mountainous container of mashed potatoes and gelatinous cranberry sauce on a plate. Then someone at the table will ask, “Who’s saying grace?” and I will ask each person around the table to share what they are most thankful for.

I do it every year.

Guaranteed my Mom will choke up and all of us will listen in gratitude and grace as we talk about our blessings, especially the blessings of being loved and knowing love and giving love.  We’ll offer these prayers to the God from whom all blessings flow, the God I know I need, absolutely. Then we’ll dig in, aware of how wonderful it is to need one another.

Need. We all need to need others. We all need to be needed.  

Happy Thanksgiving!

          

    

The Most Important Issue Missing in the Race for President Is....

"We must stretch for our better angels instead of falling toward our lowest instincts." 

--former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

What would you ask the Presidential candidates, if given the chance?

Let’s say you got the opportunity to sit before this posse, this herd, this scrum of 23 candidates now running for the highest office in the land, and that your exchange with these men and women would also be filmed for posterity. Since this is a pipe dream, let’s also assume, unlike much of the time in debates and public exchanges, when candidates dodge a question or give a non-answer or are evasive or vague or just downright ignore a query, this time…they actually have to tell the truth. The absolute truth. No stonewalling. No equivocation.

It’s my fantasy, so I get to set the ground rules.

So, what to ask? What’s most important to you as an American voter in 2020? What national problem perhaps keeps you up at night? What worries you when you think about the nation and the world your children will soon inherit? What do you want your candidate to actually do on day one, January 20^th, 2021, when, at approximately noon, the 46^th President of the United States will take the oath?   

If the polls are correct, Americans are as split on the issues that need to be addressed as they are about everything else. According to one national survey from the end of this summer (Rasmussen.com), that polled 1,000 likely American voters, the top three issues for Democrats are health care, gun laws and the economy; for Republicans, national security, the economy and immigration; and for independent voters, the economy, health care and national security.

Is one of these topics what you’d demand honesty about, from your candidates and future president?  Is it “the economy, stupid”, as one candidate’s advisors once infamously declared; what is in, or not in, your wallet and 401k and savings account? Or is health care and our country’s chronic inability to provide affordable, accessible medical care for all? Or maybe the question of immigration? That’s certainly been at the fore of our national dialogue ever since the current commander in chief took office. Keep ‘em all out! Let ‘em all in!          

Now, if I got to be the one to ask a question, I’d take a different tack, one less about specifics, and more about the tone and the tenor and the essence of the one who governs. As a person of faith, I’m certainly very concerned about how well our nation cares for its people, especially those on the edge the poor, the uninsured, the sick and infirmed, the stranger and the prisoner. That’s on my heart. But there’s one civic challenge I see as trumping any policy question, any economic indicators, any law and order stance.

In 2020, I’m most anxious about character. The character of the person who will lead us.  The character of the woman or man who has the courage and the chutzpah to actually want to govern this wonderful and challenged, this soaring and stumbling republic of some 330 million souls.  The character and essential human decency of the one who leads us and for better and for worse, somehow embodies who we are collectively as a people.

So, here’s my question or questions, actually.

What will you do to bring out the best in us, as Americans?  How will you work to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as citizens and neighbors, as fellow human beings who all call the same place home, these United States of America? How will you make each us want to do better by one another and be better in how we live with each other?  How will you lift us all up and not just tear us apart, for a vote, for an office, for an ego, for a hollow victory?

These are the questions not being asked by the media, by the folks in the press who seem much better at treating the election more like a horse race and less like an actual struggle for the soul of America, for how we see ourselves morally, ethically, civically.

I want a President who inspires me, who makes me want to serve others and not just myself. I want a President who appeals to the angel within me and not the devil, who leads not with a clenched fist of conflict but with an open hand of community. I want a President who calls all of us to put aside narrow interest for the national interest, to love country before party, a President who reminds us that the national motto is not “every man for himself!” but instead “E pluribus unum”, from many one.

Will you bring out the best in us? Please. PLEASE! 

I can dream, can’t I?

    

 

 

One More Birthday, One More Year, No Looking Back

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.”     --Frank Lloyd Wright

Forever 21.

That’s the name of a clothing store I walked by at the local mall last week. Forever 21. Really? Funny: I could not find a store named Forever 13 or Forever 40 or Forever 58 or Forever 77. Which makes me wonder if the owners of that retail outlet actually believe that, if you are going to be one age forever, as in all eternity, it might as well be 21. Right?

But then I thought back to my twenty-first year, my twenty first birthday as well, thirty-eight Novembers ago this month. Who was I at 21?

I was a young man who’d yet to figure just what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, as I plowed through my classes at UMass. Politics? Writing? Ministry? I was scared at the prospect of an unknown future and so excited too, at the life that lay before me. At 21, I loved the posse of folks I ran with, such good friends who loved me too. We had so much fun. Good friends, who like me, often partied way too hard, which sometimes led to mindless impulsivity which sometimes led to very risky behavior. On the night before my 21^st birthday back in 1981, I sat in the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey to watch a sold out Rolling Stones and Tina Turner concert. Loved the music: AMAZING! Hated the fact that the completely drunk guy behind me threw up all over my back, just two songs into the evening. YUCK!

Forever 21? I don’t think so. 

You see, I was exactly who I was supposed to be when I was 21. Anxious and cocky.  Growing up and struggling to take responsibility for my one life. That’s what it meant to be so young. That’s what it meant for me to be there and to be then.

And then I wasn’t 21 anymore. I was 22, and so on and so on and so on and so on. I’m discovering that one of the gifts of aging is that we all get to go through a phase in life and enjoy it fully, and embrace it fully, and wrestle with it when it is so hard and celebrate it when it is such a miracle, such a gift from God. The wild and beautiful truth is, that subject to time as mortals, we are always moving forward, moving into whatever the next life chapter is to be. Childhood. Adolescence. Young adulthood. Middle age. Retirement. Final years.

That inexorable passage of time is non-negotiable. We cannot be Forever 21 or Forever any age. Yes, sometimes I am so tempted to romanticize a past part of my life and wish I could be there again, wish I could go back. Get a do over. I think we all do. That’s very human. Go back to 30, when I could work sixty hours a week and not feel it so much in my bones and my spirit. To 40, when I fell in love so hard and so beautifully and so tragically and so wonderfully. To 50, when I hit my stride professionally and remember thinking, “I’m pretty good at doing this and I like it.” And now almost to 60 when I will…well, I’m not really sure.

That’s the adventure of time, my time, our time, the limited time we are given on this earth by our generous Creator. I’ve absolutely no idea what the next decade will bring. God only knows. And I don’t want to know either. If we got to know just how our personal stories will end up, or how the story of this world will unfold, or the story of our loved ones and what is in store for them: now how much fun would that be? 

Probably about as much fun as being forever 21.

So, as I stare down another birthday, as I imagine how hard it will be to blow out the forest fire of 59 candles, as I get all those best wishes and prayers from the folks I love and some corny cards and maybe even a cake, here’s my birthday hope. That I will try my best to thank God that I am 59 and that I got to live another year in this beautiful and broken and amazing thing called human life.  I will pray for the wisdom to accept that I am exactly as old as I am supposed to, and maybe even as young too sometimes, when I live with the right attitude.

Most fervently, I will pray that God will give me gratitude, deep gratitude, for the 21,541 days I’ve been blessed to be given and for the days that lay ahead too.

Forever 21? Not this year. Not ever. Just let me be who I am. Fifty nine. Just let us experience, with grace and thanksgiving, all the days of our lives as we live them, as they arrive, as they depart, as they become a memory. 

Then, maybe every day will be like our birthday. Pass the cake, please!