It’s no longer fashionable to pray before meals, especially with guests around. Don’t want to offend anyone, invoke a god someone else rejects, or otherwise be seen as old-fashioned or superstitious. I get it, and I too feel the sense that we should all just sit down and start eating.
But you know what? No matter how long the habit of not praying before meals has been with us—is it decades or a half-century or more?—it always seems like something is missing. Something is supposed to happen that does not happen. When we start eating, I cannot shake the sense that we are not supposed to be doing that.
Maybe it is because I was raised in a very religious home, and Dad always used the family prayer before meals to either make a point to the kids or train them in how to practice piety and gratitude.
It long predates the founding. It started in 1630 as a copy of the Indian tradition. It took place in June. It gradually moved from the time of George Washington all the way to FDR when it finally landed as the fourth Thursday of November.
It is intriguing that it ranks among the top favorite American holidays, has no precedent in the religious calendar, and doesn’t seem to be practiced in other countries. Sloane believes that America had a unique appreciation of thankfulness because we built the country from a native land into the greatest country on earth, all the while never leaving our historical roots.
Maybe that is right. Regardless, he is also correct to say in 1973 that the attitude of gratitude toward our blessings seemed to be dying. We stopped at some point even imagining our lives without material plenty and thereby took it all for granted, thus no longer giving thanks. Why give thanks for that to which one is entitled?
It’s true that Thanksgiving has become rather humdrum as compared with when I was a kid. It was a big deal back then because we rarely had big meals. We had small meals and never went out to eat. It was mostly the same thing over and over, not because my parents were poor but rather because they learned frugality from their parents.
So when the whole family would gather around a huge turkey, vast rolls and veggies, and pies everywhere, it was quite a sight and a feast. Now one wonders why we bother except as performance art. We eat great food daily and have huge meals all the time. We order from menus with 30 choices and get what we want. The stores are filled with endless choice.
Where is the distinct experience of this one meal? For our ancestors, Thanksgiving was preceded by a long period of fasting. That does not mean not eating. It means eating plain food, less food, not much food, staying trim and fit, denying ourselves, and otherwise working hard. The meal of Thanksgiving was a symbol of plenty for which people thanked God and his blessings.
The mealtime prayer was an acknowledgement that we deserve nothing—nature is barren and dangerous—and yet blessings have been bestowed upon us. Food is only one of them. It is for nourishment. But there are so many more. We dare not devour it without considering the possibility of its absence. So too with all our material possessions.
Praying is also a way of saying that our blessings will not change us into spoiled and entitled children but rather remind us of to whom we owe real thanks. It is an act of humility. It brings people together. And like a good toast at cocktail hour, a prayer for meals becomes a community activity, something memorable that people can share as one.
Just practically speaking, it signals: time to eat. If nothing else, that serves a genuine function in every gathering.
How do we get around the problem of interfaith gatherings? My suggestion is don’t be shy about your faith tradition. State it up front and then pray in that tradition. All decent people will appreciate it. If you are shy, you can adopt a thing I do, which is pray in Latin so that no one understands it anyway.
Another shift that seems to be taking place in American life is a turn toward healthiness, and that has meant new interest in fasting. Great. We all need this for mind and body. I’ve taken to doing periodic three-day fasts of coffee in the morning (not giving that up) and water otherwise. But many people have had success with OMAD or One Meal A Day.
A friend of mine has lost a quick 25 pounds doing OMAD three times per week, without using any of those crazy weight-loss drugs.
There are also new practices of Dry January and so on taking hold. All to the good. Anything to remind us of what it means to do without, so that we can be more thankful for what we have.
It was only several generations ago that all Catholics practiced strict Lent: no meat at all except on Sundays and only one normal meal and two smaller meals that together do not equal one meal. All that went by the wayside in the late sixties, and robbed Catholics of a distinct cultural identity (they were once disparaged as Mackerel Snappers).
This is a sad loss culturally, as is the loss of thankfulness in general. But all of us can make a change in our own lives. We can make up a prayer before meals, even if it is to no one deity in particular but just forces beyond our control. We can learn to fast. We can learn to feel gratitude for our blessing, which we all can find if we look hard enough.
America still has a major holiday devoted to Thanksgiving, but it is also something our heritage celebrates every day. Granted, it is hard to be thankful for that to which you feel entitled. We can all work on that, remembering that by nature and by right we are owed nothing. All that comes to us is a manifestation of some level of beneficence of some kind, whether from God, family, coworkers, community, or just people who make the world work for us.
One of the nicest traditions is the American commercial habit of saying mutual thank-yous. When you get your groceries, you say thank you. They say thank you back. This is because you have both given each other a gift of your own free will. It could be otherwise. We want to make sure it will always be so by letting others know of our gratitude.
America is a commercial culture, but we have always managed to recognize that this means it is also a gift-giving culture, each of us bringing what we have to others to improve their lot and our own at the same time. Let us be thankful to live in such a country, and work to recall and recover the tradition of Thanksgiving that made it so.
