Who said grace at Thanksgiving?
If it was a Republican prayer-sayer, then you might have had the best performance, as they’ve had more practice:
“[T]here are few other behaviors that so neatly cleave the body politic in half than the habit of saying grace before meals — and there are few other behaviors that so clearly telegraph your partisan preference.
According to David Campbell and Robert Putnam, authors of “American Grace: How Religion Divides And Unites Us,” a sweeping new survey of faith in the United States, 44 percent of Americans report saying grace or a similar blessing almost every day before eating while 46 percent almost never say it. There is hardly any middle ground on this issue, and, they write, “few things about a person correspond as tightly to partisanship as saying grace.”
“The more often you say grace, the more likely you are to find a home in the Republican Party, and the less likely you are to identify with the Democrats,” Campbell and Putnam write.
As Campbell explained to me, it’s not that saying grace makes you a Republican, or not saying grace makes you a Democrat. It’s that abortion and homosexuality, the hot-button issues that drive so much political coverage and religious behavior, are also the same issues have driven Americans into two separate camps on personal devotions like saying grace before meals.
On the other hand, if it was NASCAR Republican, you may have had this keeper:
Bless us oh Mammon, and these our riches, which we have inherited or exploited, through the labor of others, Amen.
Said grace AND sang!!! Now thank we all our God (though not Gene McCar’s anti-god).
Wait, so the charge that Catholics can’t sing is also a myth?!
Are you sure this research is well-founded? Seems far fetched to me. Plenty of liberal Catholic democrats I know say grace. It’s the Republicans who have turned it into a form of works righteousness! :)
Anecdotal evidence, but it’s true that our GOP relations say grace, and the rest of us just dig in in front of the TV news with our plates on our laps except during penitential seasons when we tend to feel guilty about not sitting in the dining area or saying grace the rest of the year.
My Baptist brother-in-law eschews written prayers–rote and not reflective of the personal relationship with Jesus Christ necessary for salvation–and, while his graces have never been as nutty as the Bobby family prayer, they do get long, rambling, and, in my view, a little unseemly.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of his gratitude.
My Uncle Dick used to say the sing-song, “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these guests with us be blessed,” to which my brother used add in an undertone, “Shave and haircut, two bits.” Gramma must have heard him, b/c she used to give us both the hairy eyeball over the creamed limas while Dick was praying after that.
As we indoctrinate my daughter into the rituals of Christian practice, we have started slowly with the “God is great, God is good…” grace. I’ve come to like it as a standard for any stage of life.
The issue of grace is, I suspect, a pretty interesting marker of cultural/religious difference between Catholics and Evangelical Protestants, I suspect. The Campbell/Putnam research also shows, not surprisingly, interesting variances geographically in saying grace in public, as such public displays are welcomed in the South and considered oddball in the Northeast. Religious fervor or social desirability?
Alas, Rita, the dangers of taking our own cohort as the norm! Most everyone I mention the research to is offended or can’t see how that can be, as they are Democrats or liberals and always say grace! Outliers, I guess.
Catholics can sing! when their guests include adherents of another Christian tradition who led off. We followed with gusto.
“God is great, God is good…” Careful here; this may raise the theodicy question much sooner than need be… Come by for dinner, David, and we’ll recite the traditional Catholic grace.
Deal. But which is the traditional Catholic grace?
Our Plymouth Brethren-cum-evangelical home always deployed the “Bless us O Lord, for these thy gifts…”
No funny crossing yourself, of course.
It’s always a Republican who says grace at our Thanksgiving dinner because the only Democrat at the table is the turkey– tender, stuffed and sleep-inducing.
Grace? Grace! was ist grace?
Wait a minute: “Our Plymouth Brethren-cum-evangelical home always deployed the “Bless us O Lord, for these thy gifts…” That’s how the traditional Catholic grace begins…. Can it be???!!
When I was a teenager at Girl Scout Camp Laughing Waters, we would sing grace at lunch and dinner. Here were the two most popular:
Johnny Appleseed Prayer
Oh, the Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me
The things I need
The sun and the rain and the apple seed.
The Lord is good to me
Back of The Bread
In back of the bread is the flour.
And back of the flour is the mill.
And back of the mill is the sun and rain,
And the Father’s will.
The Girl Scouts were non-partisan.
We Vat II Catholics of an advanced age learned/acted and believed that we [the 99%]are the Church and as the oldest and most Democrat we initiate the grace and it’s not the rote .’ Bless us Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive’. And also we do so in restaurants and we hold hands which is verboten in big R republican circles.. They think holding hands is too kumbaya…O and we always welcome a loner to dinner who seems never to be a Republican..
“And also we do so in restaurants and we hold hands which is verboten in big R republican circles.”
Maybe Republican Catholics who tend to be the ones who don’t want to hold hands at the “Our Father,” (and I’m with them there). But my fundie-gelical GOP in-laws are happy, clappy, huggy types, especially the ones from down South.
Margaret, yes, “Bless us O Lord” is the prayer my Catholic friends said when we were children.
Irene, I think we must have gone to the same Girl Scout camp.
Isn’t the first line: “Bless us O Lord AND these thy gifts”?
This isn’t a Thanksgiving prayer, but it is holiday praise of the Lord. Rocco presents the YouTube clip of the 600 person Opera Company of Philadelphia surprising the noon-day customers at Macy’s today by bursting into the Hallelujah Chorus, backed by the Wannamaker organ.
http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/
Totally charming, especially watching the shoppers joining in :-)
What does scripture say about giving thanks. Jesus deplored that out of ten who were cured only one, a Samaritan no less, gave thanks. Paul implores that we give thanks for all things. While the Pharisee gives thanks that he is not like the rest of humanity, especially the lowly tax collector beating his breast asking for mercy. The Eucharist means give thanks. Is this what lighting a candle means? The greatest thanks I believe is in forgiveness because it makes us true children of God who lets the sun shine on the just and the unjust. Happy are the merciful for they will receive mercy.
Peggy, yes, you are of course right: “Bless us, Oh Lord, AND these Thy gifts…”
I recall it as clearly and correctly as I did our church hymns (“Gladly, The Cross-Eyed Bear” and all that).
That blessing in fact is of a piece with the Pledge of Allegiance in my brain:
“Bless us, Oh Lord, and these Thy gifts, and to the Republic, for which it stands…”
I come close to agreeing with your thesis, David.
What divides religious conservatives and religious liberals these days is primarily this: is religion something revealed and received? Or is it something we do and make?
If religion is something for us to advance according to our own lights, then questions of life and sexuality are free game for change. If on the other hand religion is received, if we think we have a revealed religion, given by the living and close-abiding God, who wants life for us, then there is a certain permanence to what good human living is all about. “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deut 30:19)
The attitute of receptivity is key to religious conservativism, insofar as it is religious rather than political. Receptivity and obedience go together. It’s not just that I don’t make the rules–I don’t make the world. There is One among us who makes and governs all.
IIRC, there’s a Simpsons episode in which Bart says grace, sort of, but doesn’t thank God because “We bought this food ourselves.” Do most religious liberals in these polarized times really feel that there is a divine Presence to whom they are accountable? A conviction along those lines would seem to me to underlie the impulse to say grace. Or do they feel like adult children of a mostly absent God?
***
The other aspect of the question is why people who care about life issues and sexuality issues are political conservatives. I think you’ve got to blame that on the Democratic Party platform.
I’m afraid we confound the research, as my family says grace not only before meals at home but also meals at restaurants. It is generally the traditional Catholic grace (“Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts…”).
However, for Thanksgiving this year we were at my wife’s sister’s house. Her husband is Scottish and offered up the following grace–known as the Selkirk Grace–from the poet Robert Burns:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
The food was delicious, by the way.
Ann–
Thanks for that link. What a wonderful way to start Advent. Being from Philadelphia, I hope it becomes a tradition.
This one comes from the Methodists, I think:
There once was a cock and a hen,
Who gave lunch to a goose in a pen.
“Good Lord” said the goose,
“Bless this food for our use
And us to thy service. Amen.”
“Do most religious liberals in these polarized times really feel that there is a divine Presence to whom they are accountable? A conviction along those lines would seem to me to underlie the impulse to say grace. Or do they feel like adult children of a mostly absent God?”
Interesting question. I do not purport to speak for any religious liberals but me, but the answer is “both.”
The old-time Unitarian God I was raised with is an absent judge whom you will probably never meet, but who will have your fanny kicked in this life and the next for what you have done and what you have left undone.
The God I was raised isn’t going to be impressed witha cute prayer for my beef-a-roni and grilled cheese. That God wants apologies at the close of every day and an acknowledgement of what I have done and what I have left undone for the poor, the suffering, the grieving, and the weak.
So, no, I do not say grace before meals, but I say the Episcopal confession before going to bed every night.
Being accountable is the reason for saying grace?? I thought it was about being grateful!
I’m a bit jealous that you all have those traditions. We the French prefer complaining to thanks-giving, I guess. I barely know what it means to say grace before meals (what I know is from pilgrimages and retreats), and it certainly does not rise to the level of a tradition.
Same thing for some rituals such as using incense. I love the smell but it’s so rare as to be mostly foreign to me. And rosaries: that’s what our chaplain used to poo-pooh. I learned how to say it just two years ago while eavesdropping at RCIA. You seem to all have all those customs that echo memories from your past: not me. I am a bit nostalgic for a past that I don’t even know.
Two years ago I took my parents for an overnight stay in a Benedictine monastery, hoping to give my mother the pleasure of hearing her beloved Latin chants from her childhood. We attended Vespers and Sunday Mass: not a single word of Latin! That was disappointing. My mother expressed to the parish priest the wish to attend a traditional way of the cross on Good Friday: he answered that they now do it on TV, that it offers so many more possibilities, that the children love it, and that it saves people from the trouble of moving from place to place. So, the traditional way of the cross no longer exists in our parish: another disappointment.
We won’t go to the Trads’ because they represent the worst of the ideas of the Catholic church of my parents’ childhood, but in other places it’s difficult to find any of the lovely sounds and smells and rituals and liturgical traditions of the Catholic church. It seems to be a package where Latin and incense are intimately tied with anti-semitism: since we reject the latter with our whole being, we have to sacrifice the former as well.
Rita,
The question is whether the One to whom we offer gratitude is One who is present, or who has pretty much left us on our own. If the latter, why would we be grateful? Why not just pull a Bart?
Time to put this whole thread in the shredder, via ABC and Barbara Walters:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-barack-obama-michelle-obama/story?id=12244027&page=3
It’s great that they can live “long and strong.” Not everyone even gets the chance to live.
Hello All,
I became used to holding my neighbors’ hands during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass when I was a teenager, and I still love the practice, though I know some participants here will disagree with me. Since I reverted about three and a half years ago I’ve learned that a number of parishes I have attended are trying to discourage this practice. Not surprisingly, I learned our friends at EWTN strongly oppose holding hands during the Lord’s Prayer. But I think their reason is specious. On the air, some EWTN hosts claim holding hands is “bad” because this is a practice we Roman Catholics picked up from Protestants after Vatican II. If it’s true that we Catholics learned this practice from some of our Protestant neighbors, then I think that’s one of the best arguments in favor of continuing the practice.
Peter, I have never seen any mainline Protestants hold hands, and I think it would be a hard sell among Yankee Presbyterians and Episcopalians, especially. I don’t doubt some Methodists might LIKE to do it, I’ve never seen it.
Fundamentalists hold hands during family prayers and grace around the dinner table, but I have never seen them hold hands at church. Evangelicals and Pentecostals might, but the few “services” I have attended in those churches seem to have more swinging and swaying than hand holding.
Raber is a hand-holder. He believes it forces us to confront our neighbors as real, in-the-flesh people.
The hand-holding strikes me as forced and fake intimacy. I sit in the back with the retired farmers who also refuse to do it and meet up with Raber after Mass in the parish hall for weak coffee.