Thanksgiving and the Donald Duck Principle

  

Thanksgiving and the Donald Duck Principle

            We have entered into another Holiday season. Today is Thanksgiving Day, and we are rapidly moving toward Christmas. In this current COVID world, we are desperately moving toward normalcy, but as we see in the media and other sources, that reality seems to be a wish more than a reality. The past two years have been very difficult for most, and some will find it difficult to be in a spirit of thanksgiving.

            We observe our world through a lens. That lens is dictated most often through our circumstances, status, or what reality appears to be. What I want people to read is simply that hope has not died yet. The author of Lamentations writes, “Remember my affliction and my homelessness, the wormwood and the poison. I continually remember them and have become depressed.  Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s faithful love, we do not perish, for His mercies never end. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness! I say, ‘The Lord is my portion, therefore I will put my hope in him.’” ^[1]

            There is always something to be thankful for, and there is always hope. The reality is that faith springs from home. The famous verse from Hebrews says, “Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.”^[2] I would submit that before we can have faith, we have to have hope.

            Now, the question that may be running through your mind is what is the Donald Duck Principle and what does it have to do with thanksgiving? This is a good and valid question considering the title of this essay. I was perusing through the Library and the good old interweb and came across the title for a foreign documentary titled The Donald Duck Principle in an article of the same name. The Donald Duck Principle is never defined, but the article says, “Failure is not all bad as long you have the ability to overcome!”[3]

I have to assume that maybe the principle defined for the article. I then went to search to see if I could find another source. To my surprise, there was nothing else that I could find. So, if one of my faithful readers has a source for this, I’d greatly appreciate it. Until then, I think I will have to create my own principle.

Donald Duck is a clumsy, unlucky, and angry waterfowl that does not give up, even when he should. I read in the above article that “the 80 year old hero made his first appearance in a cartoon film in 1934 and since then has been a symbol of hope that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.”[4]

So, if I had to define the Donald Duck Principle, it would go something like this: The Donald Duck Principle is that an individual’s perseverance is directly related to the amount of hope that the person has in a successful outcome. If a person were to examine just about every Donald Duck cartoon, they would see the short begin with Donald embarking on some mission or idea that he has. Usually, along the way, we meet an antagonist such as the nephews or a cat or some other diabolical character.

That antagonist will get in Donald’s way, but he will continue on with his task because he has hope that assures him that he can accomplish it. At the end of the cartoon, it often works out for him in some fashion. I examine my own life, and I see that countless times where I continued in a pursuit, often far beyond when I should have because I had hope in a successful outcome. What does this have to do with thanksgiving? The Hope factor.

If we examine the history of the Pilgrims, we find that the Separatists of England were much like Donald Duck. “The story of the Mayflower is one of hope in the face of relentless difficulties. It is a story of survival, of fighting back against insurmountable odds.”[5] The Pilgrims left England to escape the tyrannical king that was militant against their particular brand of Calvinism. This was the denominational leaning of Oliver Cromwell, who brought the king down and established a commonwealth in England.  The Pilgrims’ religious sect once held the Government in sway.

After Cromwell died, the commonwealth did not last. William Brewster in New Plymouth owned a book that said, “after the example of the Apostles, being shut out of Churches by the magistrate, we have gathered together the faithful into houses, and we have builded the true Jerusalem. It is lawfull in favour of the Trueth to make assemblies against the laws: no lesse then for good Citizens to assemble themselves against a tyrant usurping the commonwealth —PHILIPPE DUPLESSIS-MORNAY, A TREATISE OF THE CHURCH (1579).”[6]

The Loyalist came back to power and placed the good king Charles II back on his daddy’s throne. The soon-to-be Pilgrims fell from power and entered a time of persecution. It eventually became illegal not to be a member of the Church of England. The Pilgrims were of the Brownist sect.

Nick Bunker writes, “in terms of theology, a Brownist did not really differ from a Puritan. Both groups of people wished to create a godly community where piety kept sin and disorder at bay. For this reason, and because of a shared hatred of Spain and the pope, a patriotic squire such as Jermyn might shelter or encourage a nonconformist such as Browne. From time to time, however, events acquired a momentum of their own, as religious dissent took an exceptional form that caused alarm at the highest level of church and state.”[7]

Brownist were of the reformed tradition of the Puritans but much more radical.

The name given to those Puritans who went to Holland, and afterwards emigrated to New England; so named from their leader, Robert Brown. The sect sprang up towards the close of the sixteenth century. As early as 1580, Brown began to inveigh against the ceremonies of the Church of England. Being opposed by the bishops, he and his congregation left England, and settled in Zealand, where they formed a church upon a model to suit themselves. The seed he had planted in England grew so abundantly that at the close of the century there were about 20,000 Brownists in the realm.^[8]

They eventually left England for Holland. They had to sneak out of the country because it was illegal for them to leave.  

Holland should have been a paradise, religiously speaking, because the whole nation was considered Calvinist. “It was difficult to keep the children free from the temptations of an alien city; it was above all distressing for those who were English in feeling and sympathy to see no prospect but that of gradual absorption in a foreign population; and for Christian men such as these not the least element of dissatisfaction with their lot was that it afforded so few opportunities to extend the knowledge of the gospel in its purity beyond their own circle.”^[9]

They found that the pious life they wanted would not be had in Holland, so they left. They had applied with the Virginia Company to get permission to settle a new land. Which they did  and “there, on soil yet unbroken by the plowshares of civilization, but nevertheless in a real sense English, they hoped to plant the institutions of the gospel for which they had gone into the exile in Holland, and live as Englishmen, though free from the ecclesiastical Establishment which enforced uniformity in every hamlet of their native island.”^[10]

The Pilgrims, by all accounts, should have resigned themselves to a fate in England or stayed in Holland, but they pushed through and endured with the hope of  religious freedom. As I study the subject of the Pilgrims and their coming to American, it seems more and more like a Donald Duck cartoon that, in the end, the character’s hope and perseverance yields hard-fought desired results.

For the Christian, we often labor for the unseen, and many times what we hope for is not on this side of eternity, but we also have promises that “the Lord is the one who will go before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or abandon you. Do not be afraid or discouraged.”^[11] We can rest in the Word of God and expect the grace to endure. God is also faithful, and we can see his provision and loving hand every day if only we choose to look.

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^[1] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), La 3:19–24.

^[2] Ibid, Heb 11:1.

[3] “The Donald Duck Principle .” The Donald Duck Principle. Accessed November 25, 2021. https://www.autentic.com/61/pid/1/The-Donald-Duck-Principle.htm.

 

[4] Ibid

[5] Captivating History, The Mayflower: A Captivating Guide to a Cultural Icon in the History of the United States of America and the Pilgrims’ Journey from England to the Establishment of Plymouth Colony . Kindle Edition.                    

[6] Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, Location 2978.

[7]Ibid, Location 1697.

 

^[8] Benson Lossing, ed., Harper’s Encyclopedia of United States History, vol. 1 (Medford, MA: Perseus Digital Library, n.d.), 422.

^[9] Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States, Third Edition, The American Church History Series (Boston; Chicago: The Pilgrim Press; Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1894), 60.

^[10] Ibid, 60–61.

^[11] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Dt 31:8.