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May awareness be my companion, love my friend and amazement my expectation.

Whatever our beliefs may be or holiday meals that we celebrate, I hope that these “transfaith” blessings may help to nurture focus and gratitude.

We give thanks for the plants,
Give thanks for the creatures
Whose flesh supplies this meal.

We eat and drink these fruits of earth that love may grow

between us all, between us all.

May the food that we eat
And the friends that we share
Give us strength for spreading
True justice and peace.

Oh, nurturing God we thank you for the seeds
The source is yours and all in it

When we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” do we mean to say “Come, you malnourished stranger?”

For the mystery that enfolds us and blesses us,
For the beauty that surrounds us and nourishes us,

When Jesus prayed, he found a sense of sacred oneness, when Buddha meditated, he became awake to deeper levels of awareness. No one truly knows the effectiveness of prayer, but one thing is for sure- when we take the time to be still, to slow down, to go inward, we almost always discover something about ourselves and the potential awareness that we are not alone.

For deeper love we spread the bread
I won’t be full till all are fed
Till every soul has home and bed
The rest of us can’t move ahead

“you who delight me” is in two parts:
poems of love—secular and spirited writing about people, places and events; and
words of spirit and faith—inclusive language, contemporary liturgies for individual contemplation and progressive faith communities.

American retailers have essentially pre-announced that the annual Thanksgiving observance — when we presumably pause to gratefully remember everything we have — has been cancelled so bargain shoppers can get an even earlier jump-start on their holiday shopping for all the things we don’t have yet.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world a typhoon of record proportion hit landfall only a few weeks ago; nearly wiping an island nation off the face of the earth, and leaving those who survived with virtually nothing. Then last week an unseasonable swarm of twisters flattened whole towns across the Midwest. By comparison, it all makes the plight of those first pilgrims facing the harsh realities of their first Thanksgiving in a brave new world look like a walk in the park.

And, all the while, the airwaves and media have been filled with docu-dramas and documentaries commemorating the half-century mark of those events that shattered an age of relative innocence for those of us old enough to remember it; ushering in an age of extraordinary upheaval and anxiety, starting with what social critics and historians alike attribute to the assassination of JFK. Juxtaposed and taken together, these events represent a seeming un-reality that hasn’t really abated much in the last fifty years. We live in an age of anxiety.

Jesus masterfully taught in the philosophical tradition known as Jewish cynicism, with such parabolic tales and quaint-sounding imagery as the “lilies of the field.” And he did so at a time and age that – while seemingly ancient to our modern way of thinking – may not have been all that different from our own anxious age. Consider then our fretful, misbegotten ways, and the wild lilies of the fields.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy, I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.   Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

God bless this food we are about to receive. Give bread to those who hunger; and hunger for justice to us who have bread.  Amen

For each new morning with its light…