Give Thanks

I’ve heard that the key to happiness is twofold: wanting what you already have and living in a state of thankfulness. Sign me up!

My friend Vicky (front) with me at Virginia Seminary when we were 2 ~ we’re still friends 🙂

My father, John Booty, was an Episcopal priest and a seminary professor. I grew up on the campuses of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, and the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You might assume that a seminary would be a staid and stodgy place, but I remember seminarians as a lively bunch. In Virginia, the students referred to us faculty kids as the FBI (Faculty Brats Incorporated), meant kindly, I’m sure. In Cambridge, I remember one student having a pet raccoon, and on Ascension Day one year, a group of students let loose a bunch of helium balloons on the quad and chanted, “Go, Jesus, Go!”

Then there were the blessings, or grace, offered by seminarians before dinners in the refectory. These two were particularly memorable: “Milk, Bread, Fruit, Meat, Thanks God, Let’s Eat,” and the best of all, “Good Food, Good Meat, Good God, Let’s Eat. Yaaaaaaaaay God!” I don’t think of such blessings as sacrilegious but rather as enthusiastic. The main point, though, is that before every meal there was a pause when all present gave thanks together.

In the last act of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” Emily dies and is granted her wish to return to experience again one day of her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday, and at the end she cries out, “Goodbye Grover’s Corners — Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking — and my butternut tree! — and Mama’s sunflowers — and food and coffee — and new-ironed dresses and hot baths — and sleeping and waking up! Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

Kitty Lou loves a cookie!

My mother does.  Stricken with multiple sclerosis and a widow in her eighties, she regularly humbles people with her extraordinary outlook on life. She can no longer do so much of what she loved —  hike, swim, and dance — and she has lost a son (our dear Peter) as well as her husband of more than sixty years, yet she is ever cheerful and effusively thankful. Mom (A.K.A. Granny) can seem simplistic at times — such as when she goes on a walk outside in her motorized wheelchair and stops multiple times to thank the trees, the stream, the blue sky, you name it — but she is choosing to live life as she finds it. Abundantly. Joyfully.

So, what can we do to tap into this state of grace? Try this: say grace. When Todd and I share a meal together, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, we always start by holding hands and saying, “For these and all your blessings, oh, Lord, may we be truly thankful.” Then we give each other’s hand a squeeze. That’s it. Not much, but it matters. I also particularly like this simple grace, which I think came across in a parish cookbook twenty years ago: “Thank you for the food before us; Thank you for the friends beside us; Thank you for the love between us.” (“Friends” can also be “family” or even “friends and family.”)

Elsa with her dad Steve on the tractor

Across the street at the Bartlett house, grace at the farm table is often led by four-year-old Elsa, with hands held, and it goes like this: “Thank you for the wind and rain, the sun and pleasant weather. Thank you for this our food, and that we are together.” When you finish, squeeze hands three times. It means “I love you.” (Rachel taught me that 🙂  )

If you have a grace that you’d like to share, please post it in the comment box.

Click here if you’d like to see and hear my mom (with me and my sister Carol accompanying) sing her morning grace.