From Plymouth Rock to Pragmatic Hope

One must simply adore the Pilgrims. They brave the unforgiving Atlantic, land in a place utterly devoid of central heating, and proceed to define “suffering for one’s beliefs” with an almost theatrical flair. A truly inspirational story, assuming you’ve conveniently overlooked the parts involving mass mortality and, well, indigenous people who were already using the land. But I digress. We’re here to talk about gratitude, aren’t we? That quaint little emotion we occasionally remember exists, usually around a heavily subsidized turkey dinner.

The original journey, the whole Pilgrim’s Progress thing which, let’s be honest, sounds like a truly dreadful board game was less about sunny optimism and more about the grim determination of people who just couldn’t stand the liturgy back home. Their hope wasn’t pragmatic; it was theological, rigid, and utterly unforgiving. Our journey, however, from the damp, legendary Plymouth Rock to our current state of over-caffeinated, existential dread, has been a beautiful evolution into something far more interesting: pragmatic hope. It’s the kind of hope that still expects the worst but shows up prepared for a slightly better outcome. A very humanist kind of hope, wouldn’t you say?

The sheer theatricality of the colonial endeavor the crossing, the survival, the eventual feast has been polished over centuries into a Hallmark special, entirely divorced from the genuine, grinding reality. It was less about feeling grateful and more about not dying. My 13th great-grandfather, William Brewster a man who, I imagine, rarely cracked a smile had a certain clarity about the whole endeavor. He wasn’t exactly selling motivational posters. Instead, he simply stated, and rather stoically at that, “It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.”

There’s the key, isn’t it? Not joy, not unbridled optimism, but sheer, stubborn refusal to quit. The modern version of that sentiment isn’t a declaration of faith; it’s the quiet fortitude of someone facing a Monday morning after a truly wretched weekend, or perhaps surviving an entire afternoon of forced familial conviviality. This is where the modern Thanksgiving reflection becomes truly fascinating. We sit down, surrounded by relative abundance and, for a few hours, suspend our customary cynicism to express thanks. But what are we really thanking? The cosmic architect? The robust supply chain that got the cranberries here? Or the fact that we finally get a day off work? The Pilgrims were expressing gratitude to God for survival against overwhelming odds. The odds, it should be noted, were often stacked by their own poor planning and stubborn adherence to ideals over practical shelter building. Yet, their deep, foundational religious faith powered them through. They believed in a grand, divine plan. We, today, tend to focus on the immediate, the tangible. We celebrate the absence of immediate disaster. We are grateful for things. This is the ultimate victory of the humanist perspective on this holiday: taking credit for the good fortune and hard work that allows us to gorge ourselves, without needing to defer the thanks to an absentee deity. Our spirituality is found in the connection around the table, not necessarily the prayer before the meal. Brewster, that endlessly practical man, recognized the sheer effort involved. He knew that the only thing keeping them going was their shared commitment, their belief in a collective purpose greater than personal comfort. He spoke of the Mayflower Compact and the necessity of unity, observing, “May not we then, by the good hand of our God, hope to enjoy comfortably the rest of our days, if we can be but faithful?” He’s talking about faithfulness to the venture, to the covenant they struck with each other. A powerful, optimistic declaration, but one rooted in the immediate human action of “being faithful” not just to a deity, but to the collective.

So, let’s ditch the saccharine Thanksgiving narrative. Our modern gratitude isn’t for a miraculous harvest; it’s for the sheer, ridiculous luck of surviving another news cycle. It’s for the small, tangible graces: decent coffee, a comfortable chair, the temporary absence of chaos. That’s the true spiritual inheritance of Plymouth: not a predetermined religious destiny, but the humanist conviction that we must find our meaning and our light ourselves, right here in the messy, secular now, perhaps with a second slice of pie.
And if that isn’t worth a slightly sarcastic moment of profound reflection, I honestly don’t know what is.