Saying Grace

Humanists tend to be very grateful people. We feel grateful to be alive considering the mind-boggling odds which indicate no one of us should be here at all. We feel grateful to be human and to have the ability to experience and to contemplate and to create. We feel grateful that love exists and that it is something we can produce and participate in. And as humanists who live in the developed world, we feel grateful for our lives of comfort and plenty in comparison to the much harsher realities of so many other people in our world. Cultivating this sense of gratitude helps us to understand our relationship to the world and our resulting responsibilities. So it shouldn’t surprise me that a pretty substantial number of folks who come to my blog find it by doing a Google search for “humanist grace.” Unfortunately, that takes them to my post on Easter, which really has very little to say about cultivating gratitude or saying grace; thus, this current post.

In our house we don’t believe that a supernatural being has brought us our meal and will bless it or bless us, but we do believe that a lot of people and processes worked together to make us and our food possible. We believe we are right to feel grateful for the hard work that goes into food—and we are right to feel awe at the marvel of existence!

We’ve started a tradition in our home of raising our plates at dinner and saying thank you to everyone who made our meal possible. And we’ve made a game of figuring out who all is involved in the meal. Obviously the people who cooked it—but it goes so much farther. Innumerable people worked very hard to grow and harvest our food, to transport it, to market and sell it, and so on. Innumerable people were involved in the research to develop agricultural techniques that make it possible for food to be plentiful. Innumerable people were involved in the design, manufacture and sale of our plates, our pots and pans, our appliances, etc. It goes on almost infinitely—and this exercise reminds us how reliant we are on so many others for even the most basic things. We need to value each other—because we're dependent on each other for the good life.

Another grace my daughter sometimes sings at dinner is a naturalistic version of the traditional “Johnny Appleseed” grace. This is a sweet little grace that reminds us how much we need the natural world, and perhaps inspires in us a sense of responsibility to take good care of an earth that we depend on so completely. It goes like this:

The earth is good to me

And so I thank the earth

For giving me the things I need

The sun and the rain and the honeybees

The earth is good to me.

Saying grace at dinner certainly isn’t essential to humanism, but it is a nice opportunity to meditate as a family on the many wonders and gifts that surround us in our journey through the human experience. It is important to feel connected to nature, to the science that helps us survive nature, and to other people. Living in awareness of these connections helps us to be kinder, more reasonable, more just, and overall better.