Brave New Kitty

When I was little and I ate over at my grandma’s house, she always said, “Come Lord Jesus and be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed, amen” before the meal. My parents weren’t religious, so this was my earliest exposure to saying grace. My grandmother said it hurriedly, mouthing the words like meaningless sounds and not as though she actually wanted Jesus to show up and eat with us. I thought it was dumb; it sounded exactly like all the goofy little poems my friends and I said to each other. No wonder my parents didn’t take religion very seriously. Even at that tender age, I could see, or at least intuit, its shortcomings.

I’ve kind of changed my mind since then about saying grace. Not because I came to respect my grandma’s beliefs (I haven’t). I still think the way most Christians say grace seems silly and largely pointless. Whatever they’re trying to accomplish with their hurried words, I don’t understand. (If I were God, I would not appreciate such insincerity one bit, much less reward it with eternal bliss.)

But a few years ago, I did a silent retreat at a Buddhist meditation center. I am no more Buddhist than I am Christian, but the Buddhists do seem to have a better understanding of why they do certain things, which makes it easier for me to look past some of the dogmatism (which is inevitable in any belief system) and focus on the practices of silence and meditation, both things I wanted to delve into. It was at this retreat that I first began to understand the real meaning behind saying grace before a meal.

While mainstream Christians perform rituals out of rote habit or because they’re afraid they won’t make it into heaven if they don’t, Buddhists perform rituals for more rational reasons, such as deepening compassion and dispelling pride. (At least, this is true for most Buddhism practiced by those who grew up in Western cultures. From what I understand, many who are raised Buddhist practice it much like mainstream Christians practice their religion, which is to say, without a lot of sincerity or interest–but that is another topic.)  The Buddhist equivalent of of saying grace, is a ritual meant to deepen understanding about the fundamental connection and interdependence of everything in the Universe.

How does saying grace accomplish this?

Well, much like the Christian version of grace, the Buddhist version is about gratitude. But rather than give thanks to a cosmic father figure, you instead, for those few moments, contemplate everything that was involved in that food being there for your nourishment and enjoyment. You think about all the people involved in the meal: the cook, the grocery store employees, the factory workers, the farmers, the seed growers, the engineers and chemists and biologists who produced the seed, for example. You think about all the elements necessary for that food to be there: the sun, the rain, the nutrients in the soil, the spinning of the earth. If you are having meat, you think about the animal whose life was sacrificed for your hunger, and feel some appreciation for him and for the cycle of life and death of which we are all a part. Maybe you think about the government, with its laws and controls that make it unlikely that any of this food will make you ill. And you think about the people you’re eating with, how they fit into your life and how precious this time, this moment of sharing and sustenance, is for all of you. There are many other directions you can go in as well, but I think I’ve gotten the idea across: that if you contemplate even a few of these things, it becomes difficult to eat the meal without some sense of reverence for the food in front of you and for the vast, amazing interconnectedness of everything in the Universe that makes our being alive possible at all.

The point of grace, then, is to create a pause in the busi-ness of everyday life to re-connect with the higher, deeper, more profound aspects of our humanity, however you define those terms. It fits with any belief system, as its only purpose is to elevate thinking and awareness. Seen in this way, grace ceases to be a silly dogmatic ritual that’s far too easy to dismiss and poke fun at, and instead becomes an act of commitment to deeper understanding of this thing called life. If you want a rational reason for doing it, or at least for seeing its practice in a less harsh light, I can’t think of a better one.

I suppose you could think of giving thanks to a heavenly father as a sort of shorthand for all of this. But that kind of shorthand is a step removed from actually noticing the truly miraculous nature of the present moment, of life, of conscious awareness. In the shorthand version–just thanking god for everything–it is still possible to achieve that sense of awe, but it becomes much easier to avoid it. Which is what my grandma was doing, which is what most mainstream Christians do, and which misses the point about the practice almost entirely. I know it isn’t just Christians, that people of other faiths also miss the point of many of their rituals, and that, conversely, there are Christians who are sincere and who do understand the point of what they’re doing; I don’t mean to pick on Christians exclusively. However, some 90 percent of Americans claim to be Christian, yet from what I’ve read and observed, most of these people practice their faith much like my grandmother did.

And that’s sad, because it means that most people don’t understand their own religion, that they have no meaningful ties to their own spiritual practices.

Anyway, it’s easy to make fun of religious rituals that don’t have deeper ties to values, or scoff at rituals practiced because of irrational beliefs. But most rituals are at least rooted in some rational purpose and, when practiced with sincerity, can have beneficial results. I’m not saying that we should all begin practicing rituals or even that that would be desirable (I don’t know if it would be or not). But if some practice helps you be more understanding, compassionate, circumspect, or connected, shouldn’t you at least keep an open mind about it?