Happy Thanksgiving!

Wishing you a world of this

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers!

I know I’m a little late with this message, hopefully catching you basking in the afterglow of a great dinner with loved ones, and reflecting on your many blessings. As I like to think at Thanksgiving, and with more urgency each year, the personal blessings of our lives are more important than the public curses of our age in the long run, in part because we take the former with us, whereas the latter will always be left behind.

As for why my holiday wishes are slightly late, I can only apologize — and then offer an excuse! You have to understand, this is my third Thanksgiving of the fall. Here in Korea the harvest festival (Chuseok) was in September. Then I pretended to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving — an empty secularization of the U.S. holiday — in October. By the time I get to American Thanksgiving, I am all thanked out. Add to that (piling on the excuses!) the fact that American Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, which happens to be my busiest teaching day this semester, so that by the evening here in Korea (early morning in America), when I had intended to post this message, I could barely put one thought in front of the other, and, well….

Alright, I’ll just apologize and leave it at that. To all good Americans, real and spiritual, I extend my sincerest best wishes and most ardent hopes for the future.

Yours in friendship,
Daren