The Pilgrims, who started our Thanksgiving, of course gave thanks to God, and probably to Chief Massasoit and his Indians for, getting down to the nitty gritty, the corn and the meat (turkeys, according to tradition). But whom do our secularized fellow citizens thank?

Let’s hope they don’t just eat up. It seems that Newton taught us that everything that is or moves has a cause, and there’s a cause to Thanksgiving too, as the Pilgrims deduced. The ancient Hebrew writers wrote of “I AM WHO AM,” the name God gave himself, implying a person or entity who always is (present tense) and is always with us. If he’s the ultimate cause, he ought to be thanked.

Now don’t blame God for everything. Humans were given a role in creation, and while they did some positive things, there are other things for which nobody thanks them. But do thank those who gave you even the least.

Have you ever said the absolutely wrong thing? The human brain is an amazing instrument, and that explains why it takes us so long to grow up. A race horse is on its feet a few minutes after birth, and is on the Belmont race track a couple of years after that. But the human brain takes about twenty years to reach maturity.

And even then it may run astray–just momentarily or for its life goal. We know people who somehow fouled up–Joseph Stalin, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.–long after they matured. We may say they were evil, but they still have their followers. Then there’s the magic moment when you made your gaffe. She never spoke to you again.

What caused that? Maybe your thinking had been on the wrong track, and the mind (the mind is the result of the brain) just uttered what it had been dwelling on. Anyway, it’s to provide for those moments that God gave the world so many beautiful people. You get another chance.

Back in the seventies, before videos on phones, 8mm home films were popular. I was teaching Junior High School, and at that time one of my Swiss uncles made me a present of a Bolex, an 8mm camera. I decided to teach one of my eighth grade classes film making.

We had to improvise for the script. I remember the script called for one of the eighth graders to drive a getaway car. I put my Dodge Dart in the middle of the teachers’ parking lot, turned off the motor, and left the car in Neutral. About five of the boys got behind the car, and pushed while we filmed the driver going past all the parked cars on the way to his destination.

I showed the film to all my classes, but there was no jubilant or enthusiastic response. I stored the finished movie in the English Dept. chairman’s office. About a year later I checked to see it again, but it was gone! Some student had stolen it — who else would want it? — and my doubts about that piece of film artistry had vanished!

Roses don’t bloom in winter, even in Mexico, and when Juan Diego came back down from the top of the hill, the beautiful lady arranged the roses in the tilma, and said, “Now go, and tell the bishop I need a chapel for my Divine Son built here.”

Juan Diego was a Christian convert, and he believed the lady was what she said she was: Santa Maria de Guadalupe. He didn’t know that Guadalupe was a Mid-Eastern name that meant river of light, and it went with her Mid-Eastern garb, unsuitable for the Mexican winter. His heart went out to her in her barefoot beauty.

The bishop was a Franciscan, not given to pompous finery, but he did keep Juan waiting. He and his thirty odd Franciscan missionaries were at a loss of what to do with about six million Aztecs who had survived a smallpox plague and were confused about how to react to their reckless Spanish oppressors. The missionaries spoke almost no Aztec, but then, Juan showed the bishop the roses.

They spilled out of the tilma, and lo! there beneath them was a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, painted right on the cloth of the tilma. It survives to this day, four hundred years later. The bishop was stunned. Juan was no artist. The bishop had the chapel built, not a chapel, but a church, and within nine years, his Franciscan friars had baptized those six million Aztecs into the faith.

Mary speaks only twice in the New Testament: the second time, at the marriage feast of Cana, she says of Christ, “Do whatever he tells you.”