Also: "M.J. Ryan, whose books on gratitude include 'A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meals from Buddha to the Beatles,' says... 'Taking in the good is a counterbalance to that negativity bias we have in our brains... [Grace is] a built-in moment.... The food is an objective thing to look at that we have and can be grateful for.'"
And Tim O'Malley, the academic director for Notre Dame's Center for Liturgy: "If you think about the modern household, it's efficient - we get together, we eat, we run.... It might be the most damning thing in modern culture, that receiving without gratitude...."
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What are you grateful for?
"How a moment of thanks, religious or not, adds meaning to our meals"
OK, so if you are not thanking God, who or what are you saying thanks to? Racist white farmers in flyer country? Capitalist agribusiness? Amerikkka? Self-checkout machines? Gaia?
Giving thanks makes me smell roasted turkey
Well, if you're convinced you got where you are based on your own effort, what exactly do you have to be grateful for, and to whom?
Corollary, why should you be grateful if you're stuck in a position beneath your effort and intellect?
Always add something about starving children in China to suggest that vegetables ought to be eaten.
My favorite table grace was at a church camp years ago. Sung to the Superman theme: “Thank you God for giving us food, thank you God for giving us food. For the food we eat, for the friends we meet. Thank you God for giving us food.” We made Superman motions while singing too. It was always fun, and kids loved it.
Who eats at the table as a family anymore?
Just watched Stillwater, in which saying grace at meals is a motif.
Being grateful for anything is a simple acknowledgment that not everything is under your control, and that there are things in this world that are greater than you.
It might just keep you from becoming a raging, narcissistic asshole...
Rockwellian?
Oh yeah, now I remember. Norman Rockwell is low status. So, every libtard has to signal that he's not one of THOSE PEOPLE.
Y'know the kind. The kind that tolerates Trump. Or Norman Rockwell. And probably eat at MacDonalds. Don't what to be associated with THAT.
My granddaughter, who I rarely see any more due to a conflict with her father (my son) learned to bow her head and fold her hands together when she was two years old. When we ate at the dining room table together we always said grace before meals. I have had older relatives who always said grace even when we were at a restaurant, which I thought was great.
And between meals, as my mother used to admonish us, "Keep your feet off God's table." Why the dining room table in our house belonged to God was axiomatic, with neither explanation nor discussion during all the years I lived at home. But we kept our feet off the table.
The grace said at our table was standard, "Bless us, O Lord! and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen."
The only variation from this norm was holiday meals, when a thanks for family being together was added. And sometimes one or another of us kids would say "Amen" differently, just to see what might happen. Our parents ignored such minor deviation from appropriate devotion, because with six kids it would be an endless issue, and they knew to pick their own opportunities for discipline, and not to play our games. My own children spontaneously did the same growing up. Of such minor rebellions are adults made.
Whether you credit Almighty God, or sheer good luck, or at any rate an absence of very, very bad luck, it’s good to reflect sometimes that there are people every bit as deserving as you are who have nothing on their table. If you have a conscience it might even motivate you to do something — and I don’t mean agitating to create yet another government bureaucracy so that pennies on each dollar spent on the agency actually benefit the needy.
We pray before every meal. Focusing on how God has blessed us gives us pause and perspective.
James Stewart in 'Shenandoah' (1965):
Charlie Anderson: Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvested it. We cooked the harvest. It wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be eating it, if we hadn't done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you Lord just the same for the food we're about to eat, amen.
"Grounding" or "groundless"? Belief in a God can be quite unsettling.
The food is an objective thing to look at that we have and can be grateful for.
Someone has never tasted my cooking
Wife and I say grace before every dinner at home. Did it as kids, then re-started when we had kids. Not a hair-shirt thing, just an acknowledgement that it's nice to have food.
I have incorporated gratefulness into my daily mind. It really helps in putting life in perspective. If you list everything you can be thankful for, it is a much longer list than the things you resent. A very easy one is to be grateful for your health upon hearing of severe health issues or death of those you know. No one is guaranteed or owed a long and healthy life, so to not be grateful reflects a low level of consciousness.
Some of my and my wife's older relatives said grace at meals, and for all I know some of her brothers still do.
When I was working I sometimes spoke to Civil War Roundtables. I made friends with some people online, including a very outspokenly liberal mathematician, teaching at UA in Huntsville AL.
He graciously invited me to stay overnight with his family, where I learned that they were very serious Lutherans, and still held hands and said grace at dinner.
When in Rome . . .
I don't say grace. OTOH I realize that I won the jackpot by being born when and where I was, and I'm thankful for that all the time.
Grace is a give-and-get blessing.
Amen.
“The family that prays together stays together (probably).
“... religious or not ....” if you don’t thank God, who do you thank, Gaia? QuidProJoe? The Mighty Barack?
Why stop at food. Take Marie Kondo's advice by thanking all your shit and the stuff that holds your shit too. If you overdose on Thanksgiving, you might pray involuntarily to the porcelain G_d.
My family gives thanks every night before dinner. God is never mentioned and I have not asked who they are thanking. I’m a guest, and go along. But I wish we could do giving thanks AFTER dinner because I sit there watching the food get cold. I don’t think that’s wrong.
Drudge?
We have always said one of a dozen prepared table graces or composed them on the spot, and our children learned how to do this at a young age. We also had bedtime prayers, but that is a different matter.
@ Ceciliahere. Right, the food gets cold in the fifteen seconds it takes for grace. You have other issues.
saying grace is valuable within certain social constraints. If you are outside the solution space, forget it, you are infeasible, there is no need to continue.
This post brings out true colors in some commenters.
G
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