Giving Thanks for Food: A Holy Act of Repentance
Andrew Toney attends Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where he is a second-year Masters of Divinity student with a concentration in Justice, Peacebuilding, and Conflict Transformation. He is also deeply involved with Oakleaf Mennonite Farm at Berea Mennonite Church, where he helped start "Peace and Carrots:" a summer camp for children that equips them with peacebuilding skills while also teaching them how food is grown and harvested. For this week of Thanksgiving, Andrew reflects on the tension between the bounty at our table and our "complicity in a global food system that nourishes some while annihilating others."
Growing up, if our annual Thanksgiving Day meal had been a liturgical service (and it often felt like one), then the climax would have been the moment that my grandfather asked everyone to join hands and bow their heads for the blessing of the meal. He was a plain-spoken man to be sure—a Mississippi Delta electrician for most of his life—but he always prayed with a reverent informality that gave the impression that he and the Creator were as close as old childhood neighbors. Indeed, I imagine that they were. On occasion, he would ask another family member to offer the Thanksgiving prayer. Once I entered theology school, this inevitably became my annual duty.For people of faith, blessing our food is one of the most central acts of recognizing our dependence on the world outside of our own bodies—our inescapable need for the created network of life that brings food to our tables and our bodies. Don’t get me wrong; the custom has often become just that—a trite tradition that we hasten to get out of the way before chowing down on Nana’s turkey dressing. Nonetheless, the very act of posturing ourselves in gratitude before the Creator and the world, when undertaken with some semblance of reverent mindfulness, significantly shapes our faith and ways of being in the world with other created things. It is even a political act, I think, to reverse our predominant cultural logic by admitting that we are sustained by products of labor that do not come by way of our own hands.What chiefly stands out to me about blessing our meals is that it cannot be done as a sole affirmation of personal piety—a pat on our own backs for recognizing that the divine ultimately brings our sustenance to us. No, it must also include an element of mourning—of repentance. We cannot reverently recognize our dependence on physical food itself without recognizing the myriad of complicated realities that come along with it, from the unnatural ways in which food is grown and produced, to the chemical exploitation of the land that forever destroys its vitality, to the all-too-common human abuses that occur in the supply chain of our global food industry. In spending a small amount of time with my friends from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, I have become painfully and necessarily aware of my own complicity in a global food system that nourishes some while annihilating others.So, I find these days that when I bless food, I must also repent: the two are inseparable. In blessing our food, we recognize the gifts of the Creator that are intended to nourish all people and beings. In offering our repentance, we hold up our own complicity in circumventing this plan and enter into the struggle of bringing about a food system that more rightly puts us in equitable relationship with the earth and other human beings—and ultimately, the Creator. In this way, as my Presbyterian friends would say, we pray for “time to amend our life” together. And that is a holy act of worship.Creator of fields, fauna, and morning dew,of green tomatoes on the vineand roots that travel deep into the ground,We ask that you bless this food,The hands that have sown the seed into the dark soil,Those that have pulled it from the earth,Those that have prepared it for our table,And You who have grown it all.We repent of the cycles of violence that our food connects us to,The ways that the laborers are oppressed,The groaning of the land under the weight of chemical exploitation,The processes of distribution that pile food before someAnd keep it away from others.Give us a vision of community that will bring all to the table,Enlightened by your spirit,And empowered by your love and justice.And give us time to amend our common life.Amen.