Thanksgiving reminds us: Life is a feast.

Thanksgiving is also a moment to consider a commensal ethics.

The earth is a banquet table full of scrumptious delights to nourish us and to give us pleasure. It is full of animal, vegetable and mineral living in ecological harmony for the sake of sustenance and joy. Mountains tower. Trees stand. Grasses grow. Rivers run. Lakes and bays and oceans ebb and flow. Birds fly. Fish swim. Herds run. Predators kill. Humankind thinks and builds. There is enough for all except when the world disturbs the balance. Our religion, culture, politics and economics too often upset the equilibrium.

The purpose of faith, religion, ethics is to restore balance. The purpose is to promote flourishing. It is easy to forget this purpose. It is easy to forget our essential selves, the part of our humanity without which we would not be human. We forget our own power of creation and recreation, even and especially the power of self creation. We forget our power to reason, to love, to forgive, and to begin again. We forget the power of our own potential.

We give too much meaning to accidental attributes — sex, color, class, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion, tribe, nation. We seek to gain and to maintain advantages we perceive are due to us because of some accident. And the world becomes dangerously out of joint. Economic disparities ensue. Such disparities create the underlying conditions for violence. Such disparity is itself structural violence. It is a structural violence that exists across the whole globe. This violence triggers war.

Yet, this is a problem with a solution. I say: a commensal ethics can restore the earth’s societal and ecological balance. Commensalism is a relationship where living things live in close association. They benefit from each other without causing parasitical harm. The concept is kin to the idea of communion. It is mutual participation. It is Eucharist. It is a reciprocal indwelling of the divine in the human. It is gratitude. It is grace.

A commensal ethics contains the ethics of hospitality and of compassion. Such an ethics welcomes the Other to a common table of sustenance and joy without reservation. At the same time it allows us to feel the sorrows and happiness of the Other at the core of our own souls. It is a passionate compassion that laughs and weeps and demands action.

The first action is to see the world again, to know the world anew, to re-think, to re-cognize our humanity and our relationship with other human beings and with the rest of creation. Air, earth, water, fire makes our bodies. All the living creatures are part of us. Moreover, we re-cognize the measure of success. We know the meaning of our lives according to what we are able to give rather than what we are able to take. We understand that excess is immoral. Having much too much is self destructive. Meaning is measured in terms of a radical love that is so expansive that it leaves no space for fear. This is a heart/mind effort.

The earth only gives its bounty through effort. The fruit may fall from the tree, but it requires work to gather it and to turn it into something wonderfully beneficial. The harvest only comes after the work of sowing seeds, weeding, pruning and protection from the other animals. The harvest only comes to our table after a complex of economic exchanges. The stuff of the feast that life is requires cooperation and division of labor. There is great satisfaction in the effort. Work freely chosen, compensated or not, is a blessing. A commensal ethics re-cognizes the importance of each one’s contribution in setting the banquet table. It re-cognizes the work of the artist and the athlete and the philosopher, and the poet, and the warrior and the musician and the one who stays with the stuff and the dreamer and the one who sits and waits. It corrects the distributive injustice where we reward some lavishly and others barely at all.

Thanksgiving reminds us that every element of our lives is bound to something larger. We are connected to the Other. Our lives depend upon the connection. Thanksgiving reminds us of our obligation to envision a world and to work to create a world where we all share in the feast of life. Happy Thanksgiving.