It is interesting to learn that on the Mayflower there were 24 families that arrived in the New World on  November 11, 1620, first stopping at Cape Cod, MA, after 66 days of sailing across the Atlantic.  A couple of weeks later they sailed to Plymouth, where they began to build their rustic homes.  It was the beginning of Winter, and it was not long before the settlers began to get sick and die.

By Spring of 1621, of the 24 women, 4 survived; of the 24 men, 11 survived.  All of them were from the working class, town laborers ~ people who knew nothing about farming and cultivating the land.   They were faced with the task of growing enough food to last a year.  They would have failed had it not been for two people who came to their aid.  Two Native Americans came out of the forest to help the dying settlement.

The astonishing thing for these pilgrims was that these Indians, Samoset and Squanto, spoke English!  If we probe how it was that these two Indians coming from the forest could speak English, we get to one of the important meanings of our Thanksgiving celebration. 

Samoset and Squanto had been captured by English soldiers and made slaves on a British warship.  The history books do not tell us how they escaped.  What we know is that there on that inhospitable shore, two strands of humanity met, both of whom had been much defrauded and abused.  These two peoples the dying group of pilgrims and the escaped North American Indians found each other, as brothers and sisters, in the same human family, recognition born of their common experience of tragedy and misfortune.

The first Thanksgiving was a thankfulness not for abundance, but that God had kept their settlement from extinction through the gift of two strangers who shared their knowledge and their friendship.  The power and the gift here lay in the respect for equality and mutuality of two races, two peoples, who needed each other in order to survive. 

This story tells us that survival and nurturing on our Earth is a function of our relationships. When people come together, reach out to one another in the spirit of mutual care and concern, it is in that Spirit that our world will endure and from which thankful hearts will be born!