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    Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything
    Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything
    Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything

    By Donna Schaper

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    About this ebook

    Grace at Table advocates prayer at table as a way to solve everything. By everything we mean the dismay, dis-ease, and fear of the future that permeates way too many human souls. Addiction is one response to the moment, fear another, and despair a third. Widespread immobility and lack of focus come to mind as indications of over-stimulation by the negatives and under-stimulation by the positives. Prayer at table stimulates the positives. It is a pause that refreshes the spirit, reorienting us to a sense of gratitude and grace for whatever we may face. Prayer doesn't have to be hands folded or knees bent--although there is nothing wrong with folding hands or dropping to our knees. Instead, prayer here is understood as pause to give thanks, to look around, to interrupt constant action with reflection, allowing the table and our food to be our nudge. Changing the general atmosphere of despair and decay to thanks and appreciation is a big change, made in a small way. Like a wheelbarrow, prayer carries the heavy load, lightly, giving us the lift we need to manage what we fear we cannot. Prayer at table resolves the appreciation deficit disorder, which goes on to make us strong for climate change, recession, and a mounting sense of debt. It replaces shame and blame with gratitude and grace.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateJun 5, 2013
    ISBN9781621897057
    Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything
    Author

    Donna Schaper

    Donna Schaper serves as Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. She has also served churches in Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. She is the principal in a consulting firm called Bricks Without Straw, which shows not-for-profits how to raise energy and money and capacity, and has been involved with a series of turn-around congregations and a host of social-action issues. In addition to serving as pastor, she has written several books. Donna lives in New York, New York.

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      Book preview

      Grace at Table - Donna Schaper

      1

      At Gatherings

      glimpse 1

      The Dinner Party

      At about half the dinner parties I attend, there is an awkward beginning. The glorious food is presented and plattered, tickled and drizzled. It is meant to dazzle and often does. A high percentage of my friends are foodies. In addition to their identity as foodies, they are a great mixture. Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Moslems, and puzzled Protestants, all eat and laugh together while garnished with a sincere respect for pluralism. They imagine their prayer might offend a possible atheist or agnostic at the table—and so they refrain from prayer altogether. Maybe they are as afraid of prayer as offending? I don’t know. I just know prayer has disappeared from most tables, resulting in awkward beginnings.

      If we dinner guests are lucky, the hosts will offer a word of welcome. Even better, the hosts will offer a toast, and glasses will click in a pagan form of prayer. We will drink to our health, or each other, or to life, or to the chef. Every now and then, someone will mumble a prayer in a gesture of appreciation to something larger than the host, or each other, or the farmer who made the food.

      I prefer an alternative: a large enough prayer to comprehend all at the table.

      In this prayer, the Source who is thanked will have a name that is not the private property of anyone at the table—not the agnostic, atheist, Catholic, Jew, Moslem, or Protestant. If I am asked to pray, I will use my favorite public prayer:

      Holy Spirit, you who are beyond the captivity of any name—even Jesus, even Christ, even Allah, even Ruach, even Force, even energy, even spirit—draw near. Open our hearts to what we don’t know and can’t see. Extend our gratitude from first seed to last seed, shore to shore, in a vast appreciation of what has been given us, and may every one on the planet eat as well as we will tonight. Amen.

      I know the prayer is too long, but I get so few opportunities. I so prefer my long one to rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub, although I admit it has a certain earthiness. I was once on a campaign to eliminate the Johnny Appleseed grace until one of my Sunday School children sang it fully and by heart at age three. I changed my mind.

      Saying thanks is something my dinner party set rarely remembers to do. We think it lacks the cosmopolitan flair we enjoy when we click our glasses and say Cheers. What it lacks is consciousness, not flair.

      I now interrupt my own dinner parties and the many others I enjoy by asking if we can say grace. People always say yes. I then say, Will all who are grateful please raise their right arm? Everyone’s hand goes up. I point to God, and so do others, without the punishmentalist packaging. Just because so many have abused God for so long and so well doesn’t mean those of us who like God can’t enjoy God at table. We just have to have manners.

      We are in a deep shift in this magnificent twenty-first century. We can no longer trick ourselves into thinking there is one cuisine or one God. We must learn to pray again, if for no other reason than to banish the awkwardness of table graces.

      Can We Pray: Will all who are grateful please raise their right arm? Amen.

      glimpse 2

      At Second Glance

      More Ways to Pray at Table

      If a meal can start with a prayer, it can be spiritually digested. By digested, I mean taken in, comprehended by the body as nourishment, relieved from anxiety. If a meal can’t start with a prayer, it is likely to cause anxiety, only provide physical nourishment, and taken in, only to be burped up. Consider the shelves of antacids in the drug store, and you will know what I mean. Alka Seltzer is often the alternative to prayer, and is both more popular, and more expensive.

      What prevents prayer at the start of a meal?

      We are in a hurry to eat. Or we are hungry. Or we are anxious at the spread before us, knowing somewhere in our gut that there is too much food in front of us and that a child somewhere is moaning for what we will end up throwing away. Scientists now agree that the American obesity epidemic is related to there being too much agricultural success: our very abundance and the relatively low cost of our food gases us up. Whatever the root cause, many of us eat fast, using shovels as our utensils. We refuse to pause.

      Grace at table could be as simple as a breath, air taken in with consciousness and expelled with the same. It could be as meaningful as setting the table well and lighting a candle when the set was set. It need not be words. It could be breath or light. It could also be something that belonged to you or your family; it could be ancient words that gather strength the more they are repeated. The day the first member of our family or group dies, and we say our repeated prayer without them, we begin to touch our grief. We weep, the same way we mumbled for so long.

      In our interfaith family, where I am Christian and my husband is Jewish, we landed on a prayer that had motions, early in our children’s lives. God be above us, God be below us, God be all around us, and God be inside us, and God be with those we love. Often we would name people at the end who we especially cared about. The night Jacob, age seven, added Randy, we asked why. Because Randy’s Mother died, Jacob said, that’s why. As a family, we have a ritual at table we can use when we don’t know what else to do. It increases in meaning and power to hold every time we use it on an ordinary day.

      Grace is a pause at the marvel of a table being set before us. You can pray even if no one else wants to. You do not make an impolite spectacle of yourself

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