Thanksgiving Story

*The Holy Place by Belden C. Lane

Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill. Each night they divided evenly the grain they had ground together during the day.

Now as it happened, one of the brothers lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family. One day, the single brother thought to himself, "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed." So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary to see that he was never without.

But the married brother said to himself one day, "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one. What will he do when he is old?" So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

Then one night the brothers met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and embraced each other in love.

The story is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, "This is a holy place--a place of love--and here it is that my temple shall be built."

And so it was. The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love.

*We borrow this version from Wilkie Au, By Way of the Heart (New York Paulist Press, 1989), p. 46, who cites Belden C. Lane, "Rabbinical Stories: A Primer on Theological Method," Christian Century 98:41 (16 December 1981), pp. 1307-8. Versions of the story also appear in William Bausch, Storytelling: Imagination and Faith (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1984), pp. 68-69, and Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight (New York: Doubleday-Image, 1990), p. 60.