By Elizabeth A. Marcil
Director of the Office of Religious Education
Anniversaries are important to our lives. They do more than mark time. Some, like birthdays, class reunions, and wedding anniversaries strengthen the bonds of friendship and family life. Anniversaries help us reflect on what we have shared and how this sharing has affected our journey. We also mark the passing of those who were part of our lives but are no longer with us. The feast days of saints are often chosen to mark the day when they were born into eternal life.
In his 1998 apostolic letter Dies Domini (On Keeping the Lord’s Day Holy), St. John Paul II reminds us that “Sunday recalls the day of Christ’s Resurrection. It is Easter which returns week by week, celebrating Christ’s victory over sin and death, the fulfilment in him of the first creation and the dawn of ‘the new creation.’ It is the day which recalls in grateful adoration the world’s first day and looks forward in active hope to ‘the last day,’ when Christ will come in glory and all things will be made new.” (DD #1)
Civic anniversary celebrations are also important – especially centenary ones. The country unites to focus on events that lay the foundation of our values, our purpose and our identity. One 400th anniversary that went unmarked last year because of the pandemic was the landing of the Mayflower in November 1620.
While these pilgrims had a number of objectives in undertaking this perilous journey, they recognized that, in the New World, they would have to depend on one another to survive. The Mayflower Compact which they all signed as they planted a new colony reads that they “solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation … and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”
While they prized freedom and were willing to leave behind the comforts they had known in order to secure it, they also recognized that, if they wanted to succeed, such freedom would have to be exercised in the context of the general good. Today, we too must recognize that while we are individually free, we are also bound to one another and have responsibilities for one another.
As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, that Pilgrim feast, let us reflect on the value – indeed the necessity – of community. We reflect on the sacrifices that are necessary to strengthen community, but also on the blessings community provides.