Bless us O Lord, and these thy Gifts

I've said it for years. I try to say it every day. It needs no introduction. Grace before meals is actually a good analogy to explain the meaning of the word "ubiquitous".

It's closest association for me is Thanksgiving.

Preparing a Thanksgiving dinner is a big task. On Thanksgiving day, it seems at times that the kitchen could be better described as "Mission Control". It wouldn't surprise me, in the years to come, as the hyper-techno generation comes of age, to see mothers with wireless headsets in the kitchen with a palm-top PC-type thing on their hip giving them a full readout of the temperature and "taste status" of up to 24 different dishes being prepared simultaneously, perhaps in different rooms of the house, with real-time updates of "estimated time to completion" and audio alarms in event of corn-bake boilover or Turkey meat low moisture levels.

Thanksgiving (or really any meal for that matter) these days is largely a matter of opening packages - cut the turkey out of the bag, open the can of corn, open the can of cranberries, take the potatoes out of the bag, open the cheese package for the potatoes, etc. When we sit down to say grace, the language seems somehow apropos "Bless us O Lord, and these thy gifts". Everything came in package, just like a gift.

But grace before meals predates food packaging, and the modern of conveniences of plastic "safety pop tops" and shelf lives lasting months may have cost us a spiritual lesson. I try to imagine thanksgiving dinner 100 years ago. Dad is out hunting, the whole day, for a turkey (I've never turkey hunted, but I'm told it's challenging, even with modern rifles). It's November, and cold. Maybe he gets a turkey on the first shot, maybe not. If he does, he carries/drags it back to the shed. Then he has to cut the head and feet off, "gut it" and pluck all the feathers (I used to listen to my dad talk about his mom doing this). Meanwhile, mom has got water boiling on the stove (which is fired with wood dad has been chopping all summer long) continuously. She boils the corn and shaves the kernels off the cob by hand before mixing it with flour from the mill and milk which dad has milked himself earlier in the morning in order to make corn bake. She's peeling the potatoes she picked herself out of the garden by hand. She's been soaking cranberries all night long along with beans before sitting down and making side dishes with them by hand. And not to mention the bread and pumpkin pie that she is making from scratch.

And when this is all done, and everything somehow makes it onto the table at the same time, they all plop down and say "Bless us O Lord, and these THY GIFTS which we are about to receive, from thy bounty (means: "riches"), through Christ our Lord."

Wow.