Giving Thanks

[frauline]

Well, it is weird for me to start meals without prayer. So today I announced to the family that I wanted to "give thanks" before we ate. My husband looked at me like - I thought we gave that up? Then I turned to him and said, "Thanks honey for having a good paying job that buys us food! Amen" Then we all ate happily.

It feels so good to have pride and trust in the arm of flesh instead of the unseeable, changeable, hard to hear spirit.

I really think that if people had pride, they wouldn't need religion! Maybe that is why they teach us to not have pride. If a family has pride, then the children will want to be good people to maintain the family name etc etc.

[Born Free]

Well, it is weird for me to start meals without prayer. So today I announced to the family that I wanted to "give thanks" before we ate. My husband looked at me like - I thought we gave that up? Then I turned to him and said, "Thanks honey for having a good paying job that buys us food! Amen" Then we all ate happily.

It feels so good to have pride and trust in the arm of flesh instead of the unseeable, changeable, hard to hear spirit.

I really think that if people had pride, they wouldn't need religion! Maybe that is why they teach us to not have pride. If a family has pride, then the children will want to be good people to maintain the family name etc etc.

I am reading Karen Armstrong's book The Battle for God at present, and a few days ago I read a phrase there that grabbed me. It made reference to a 'God-sized hole left in the human psyche'.

It came to mind as I read what you wrote. One of the healthy values that was identified in Martin's Seligman's work on Learned Happiness, was gratitude. The research he quotes showed that people that took/made some time to be appreciative of all that was good in their life, had much better health outcomes and were more creative in problem-solving. It appears that gratitude increases the levels of a whole range of 'feel good' and 'function well' chemicals and hormones in the body.

Meals are one of those times, for me, when I enjoy taking a few moments to be appreciative that I/we have food to eat, and friends and families that can get together and enjoy each others company. It is a form of a check-in, in some ways, that everyone is fully present to the experience of the meal and the company; a ritual that can shift our consciousness and harness the power of memories of previous good times together.

Your email has reminded me that that is something I would benefit from having more of in my life, and I will be putting extra effort into recreating a pre-meal ritual along those lines.

There is a gap between 'giving thanks' and being 'thankful'. I think the 'giving' notion tends to reinforce the idea that we are small and God is huge, and everything we have is thanks to Him. That is a model that could ignore that having food on our table has a price: a price in effort, in investment, possibly in the environment.

It also could ignore whether we are being wasteful and greedy, thrashing and abusing the environment, over-grazing our environment because we refuse to look at whether we are overpopulating the planet. Just as God does not turn off the tap when we have had enough children, God does not 'create' our meals.

Daryl

[runfromsafety]

It feels so good to have pride and trust in the arm of flesh instead of the unseeable, changeable, hard to hear spirit.

I really think that if people had pride, they wouldn't need religion! Maybe that is why they teach us to not have pride. If a family has pride, then the children will want to be good people to maintain the family name etc etc.
Pride in the case can be equated with self belief and the follow on of self esteem... when people live their authentic self without chasing the "unseeable, changable, hard to hear" as you aptly put it. If a family has that as individuals, and collectively in their support for each other as a family then true happiness and family unity will follow. Family unity does not mean everyone thinking the same way and doing the same thing, it means everyone having respect and support for other family members striving to be the best person they can be by being true to their own life values.

Thanks for your thought provoking post.

[peter_mary]

Thanks for your thought provoking post.
I agree. This is a very interesting notion, recognizing (as Daryl pointed out) the greater good of pausing for a moment of thankfulness at various times throughout the day or week or just periodically. We quit doing that in the context of meals a long time ago...but not until after having had a long discussion one evening with our children over the awareness of all that goes into making a meal possible (not the least of which was the death of some critter and a bunch of plants).

Some kind of ritual probably just helps focus the attention on the matter for a moment, keeping it present. We don't do that any more.

For me, I find that sometimes I simply HAVE to stop when I'm in the back country somewhere and look around me, and my heart swells with gratitude to the universe for being such a damn cool place to be. There is no more ritual in it for me that just standing still and being aware -- and present -- in the incredible moment and space in which I happen to be. The internal expression of that gratitude is infinately more meaningful to me than the rote prayers we asked the kids to mutter over dinner.

Anyway, I think it's astute to note the importance of SOME kind of gratitude ritual in order to orient ourselves and our families in a position of humility before all of creation rather than taking it all for granted. I think there is grave danger to ourselves and our planet in the latter...