ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 27, 1996 TAG: 9611270003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SCHAEFER KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
Next to the roasted turkey, you would expect a prayer of gratitude to be the mainstay of Thanksgiving Day.
Isn't that what the holiday is all about - giving thanks?
OK. Gluttony is the sad and over-sated reality. Still, many of us are able to recognize that gratitude is an important attitude that continues beyond Thursday's last helping of pumpkin pie.
Thankfulness begins with the recipient's recognizing who the true giver is. For many of us, that began with the simplest of prayers: saying thank you to God at the dinner table.
Such a prayer is not unique to Christianity. Every major religion expresses the idea of gratitude for life and for that which sustains it. Moreover, other rituals often are part of that time of daily prayer.
As a child, I learned two table prayers from my parents: one said before we ate and the other after.
The first was a prayer that long ago made the transition from my great-grandparents' German tongue to my grandparents' and parents' more familiar English:
Come, Lord, Jesus, be our guest and let thy gifts to us be blessed. Amen.
At the end of the meal, before anyone could leave, we would say:
We thank thee, Lord, for meat and drink, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Admittedly, it was a ritual that often was spoken more in haste to get on with the meal - or to get away from the table - than to think about the one being thanked.
Nonetheless, both prayers set a family tone of gratitude and established a personal foundation for understanding that God's relationship with each of us was as basic as the food we ate.
(As I later learned, food, health, spouse, children, material goods all were gifts from God to believers and non-believers alike. Thankfulness, in other words, is a way of reminding ourselves of that truth.)
While the ritual of table prayer may have fallen on hard times in some of today's on-the-go families, more and more are setting aside time at the dinner table for such rituals. They see the importance and fundamental need of nurturing the ties that bind them together. And prayer is, after all, the first language of the heart.
By starting one simple ritual, or a daily prayer, you could establish a foundation on which to strengthen your family's ties that can go well beyond the annual day of Thanksgiving.
And that can have lasting benefits.
Tongue-tied? Try starting here
To aid those who want to strengthen their time together during the Thanksgiving meal here are a few table prayers and other rituals that you might use at your celebration:
Prayers
* ``God is great and God is good, and we thank him for our food. By his hand we all are fed. Give us, Lord, our daily bread.''
* ``In thanks to God for all his benefits, let us have a moment's silence for the hungry of the world.''
* ``I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee. I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth. There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting'' (from ``Baha'i Prayers'').
Other rituals
* Invite each person at the table to say what she or he is grateful for and why.
* Before the meal, ask each family member to recall one good experience he or she had in the past year.
* Take turns reading a section of sacred Scriptures or other devotional books.
* Agree on one charity to which each in the family will contribute during the holidays. If small children are involved, have them make holiday cards that can accompany your family's donation of money or other gifts.
Tom Schaefer writes about religion and ethics for the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle
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