Saying Grace

When I was a kid, we had an everyday dinner prayer and a company dinner prayer.  The everyday one went:
    Thank you, God, for food and fun.
    Thank you, God, rain and sun.
    Thank you, God, for parents dear.
    Thank you, God, for being here.
    Amen.
I don't remember the company one.  The prayer above is so deeply implanted in me from repetition that it will never leave me.  I think my mom found it in a books of prayers for children.

When I was a child, it became a race to get through the prayer so that we could get to dinner.  My brother and I would say it so fast that eventually we left out the 'parents dear' part (sorry, mom and dad.)  But even if we'd said it the words had all already lost all their meaning.

I didn't want that to happen in our own family practice at meal time so for most of our life as a family we've held hands and spoken aloud things for which we are grateful.  Or when people fail to talk, spend a moment in silence.  But we've come to the speed-through-to-get-to-dinner point.  Holding hands becomes squeezing, becomes jostling.  The little one just says "Amen" immediately and insistently because he knows that means he can eat.  Prayer is no longer prayer, it's a distraction.

So it's time to try something new.  I decided maybe it's time we do have something to recite or read.  But I still don't want to fall into the zoom through to be done trap.  So I'm making some prayer cards.  Kids can choose which one they want or we can draw at random.  I found several good ones in Wendy Claire Barker's excellent and practical book Faith at Home: A Handbook for Cautiously Christian Parents.  Like this one sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques":
    God our Father, God our Mother,
    we thank you, we thank you,
    for this food before us, for this food before us.
    Amen. Amen.She also suggests writing down spoken gratitude to keep a record, a family gratitude journal.  I wonder if my children might pay better attention if they know it's being recorded for posterity.

And I cruised our best friend the internet for other suggestions.  Like the classic:
    Bless us, O Lord, and these gifts
    which we are about to receive from your goodness.
    In Jesus name, Amen.
Based on my searches, Amazon suggested this mealtime prayer cube to me, which I have to admit is pretty tempting.  But also based on my searches I realized, "Oh, I actually know quite a lot of mealtime prayers."  Haven't I been going to church, Christian camps and schools and worked in ecumenical or Mennonite settings basically my whole life?

Here's some of what comes up when I Google my own brain:
    Be present at our table Lord.
    Be here and everywhere adored.
    Your mercies bless and grant that we
    May feast in paradise with thee.
My classmates and sang that gem every lunchtime in my secular public Canadian elementary school.  I'm sure that doesn't happen any more.

And I know this one from somewhere:
    Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.
    Let this food to us be blessed.  Amen
Now that I think about it, that might have been the company prayer.

And this one that I've both sung and spoken:
    God is great and God is good,
    and we thank God for our food.
    By God's hands we all are fed.
    Give us Lord our daily bread.
    Amen.

Or how about the Bible:
The Lord's prayer in one of it's many versions or straight from Matthew 6:9-13 or Luke 11:2-4?  Or a Psalm like the short and sweet 117:
    Praise God all you nations;
    extol God, all you mighty ones.
    For God's love toward us is great,
    God's faithfulness, eternal.
    Alleluia!
And I might add a 'Bless us and our meal' at the end for good measure.  There are lots of Psalms of Thanksgiving though.  And they're easy to find if you have a bible with headings.

There's always the doxology, which can be spoken or sung.  Megan even introduced us to new words recently in worship:
    Praise God the Source of life and birth;
    praise God the Word, who came to earth;
    praise God the Spirit, holy flame;
    all glory, honor to God’s name! Amen.
And there you have it.  In the process of writing about it, I've discovered I have a little set of prayers I can introduce.  And I'll probably include the one from my childhood as well.  A blessing on all of you and your families as you eat together and create your own family traditions.

The Lord's Prayer of New Zealand

This Sunday in worship we are focusing on prayer as a Christian practice. It was certainly a practice important to Jesus.  So we're using the text of Matthew 6 which includes the Lord's Prayer - that is 'the prayer that Jesus taught us'. There are many ways that Christians through the centuries have interpreted and expanded on the Lord's Prayer since Jesus first taught his disciples this prayer, but below is one of my favorites. It is a part of the New Zealand Prayer Book - the common prayer book for the Anglican church in that country.

Eternal Spirit, 

Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver, 

Source of all that is and that shall be, 

Father and Mother of us all, 

Loving God, in whom is heaven: 

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe! 

The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world! 

Your heavenly will be done by all created beings! 

Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth. 

With the bread we need for today, feed us. 

In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us. 

In times of temptation and testing, strengthen us. 

From trials too great to endure, spare us. 

From the grip of all that is evil, free us. 

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever. 

Amen.

God is a boy...

As we were getting ready to leave for preschool this morning, Naomi said to me, “I don’t like God because he’s a boy.” Yikes!

I did not show my dismay, however. I just replied, “God isn’t a boy or a girl. And God is both a boy and a girl. God is everything at once.”

To this Naomi replied, “What’s God’s name?” As if, knowing God’s name would be proof.

“God,” I said. “But God has many names. People know God as Comforter, Yahweh, even ‘Rock’” Saying the first things that came to mind.

“And Cloud?”

“Yeah, and God is sometimes a cloud.” Then, as we were putting on her shoes I asked her if, after school, she’d like to look with me for some of the names for God in the Bible, to which she nodded and that was that.

But, that is not that. How has the daughter of a feminist pastor already learned that God is gendered. And that she can’t like God because God is not her gender? Naomi is at this stage in her development, figuring out what it means to be a girl, and what it means to be a boy. She sometimes also says that she does like daddy because he’s a boy. Or she only likes me because we’re girls. So I don’t really think that the God’s purported gender would ultimately inhibit her loving God, but that’s not the point, of course, is it?

I have not been doing my job. Even with those books about God having different names and God being everywhere and my un-gendered talk about God, Naomi still knew that God was a ‘boy’ because that’s the language that everyone else uses. But, as anyone who’s given any though the question of a gendered God knows, language makes the naming of God tricky because our personal pronouns just don’t cut it.

To me this question challenges me at a particularly relevant time. I’m beginning to prepare a study on the Lord’s Prayer for our small English congregation. The Lord’s Prayer, which begins “Our Father in heaven.” We say it every Sunday, so I decided we should be thinking about it’s contents. And now, thanks to Naomi I’m thinking about how, with my Korean friends, I will address that very first line. It’s how Jesus instructed us to pray, so what does it say about who God is, gendered and otherwise?

I suspect that it might be a little radical for me to suggest that God might be anything other than benign abeoji. In Korean, as in English the word used is the more formal ‘father’. Yet Jesus invites his disciples to begin addressing God as appa, in Hebrew abba, something more akin to ‘daddy’. For Jesus’ disciples this meant an invitation into the arms of an intimate God. A God whose new community is like a family. But now for many using calling God ‘father’ or even ‘Daddy’ is not comforting but a stumbling block.

When I was a camp counselor at camp Valaqua, north of Calgary in Alberta, I butted heads several times over the differing theology I had from another (male) counselor, his being much more conservative than mine. But I was surprised to find that when it came to naming God, he readily accepted mothering imagery. As we talked about it, I discovered that because his relationship with an abusive and neglectful father, he had great difficulty thinking about or praying to a Father in Heaven.

The United Church of Canada congregations that I am familiar with in Winnipeg pray, “Our Father and Mother in heaven.” This is a little messy and confusing but at least acknowledges the complication of gendering God. I think when I address this prayer on Sunday I will talk about the multiple ways that we are invited into an intimate relationship with the Creator of heaven and earth. I believe that is what Jesus wanted for his disciples then and now.

Once again I am grateful to Naomi for helping me to think about who God is. In this case, she has also reminded me to help others think about who God is…Creator, Adonai, Yahweh, Sustainer, Spirit, Cloud, Light Rock…The list, of course, goes on. Thanks be to She.