Thanks for the food

I have been living with my parents again for a month now. The reason is that I will be unemployed until October and so I can't afford to pay rent elsewhere. Living with the parents again is an interesting experience.

In my family, we generally say grace before eating (except when we are in a restaurant, eating in front of the TV or we have a guest who has decided to go ahead and start eating before anybody has had a chance to say grace).

Every time I visit my parents they ask me to say the grace. This is just something they do. They like everybody to contribute and so any family member who hasn't been around in a while is asked to say grace.

In our house, grace is formulaic. We first started saying grace at meal-times when I was about 11 (I think) and we were encouraged to say whatever we felt was appropriate. As a result, the standard grace formula in the McCann household was conceived by a child more than twelve years ago, and yet that is the model that my brothers and sister (and myself up until recently) have followed ever since. I often think that visitors to the house must be either surprised at the fact that we say grace at mealtimes or surprised that the grace is so uninspired and meaningless.

As a result of this, I started playing around with the formula a few years ago. After a while I came up with a new formula, which pleased me because it was so general and ambiguous. Essentially, it was "Thanks, God, for the food, the stuff, the things and the etcetera". Other words, such as "junk", can be added to taste.

The point I was making here was, of course, that it doesn't matter what is said during the grace because it is so formulaic and repetitive that it is completely meaningless anyway. If we were truly grateful for what we had received, we would probably sound a lot more sincere. When somebody buys me a meal, or when a friend cooks me dinner, I am very thankful because I appreciate the effort involved. When my mother makes me dinner, I am thankful to her (even if I rarely actually thank her for it - I'm a bad son, but that's a whole different story) but I am in no way thankful to a deity in a different plane of existence.

Those of you who know me well will consider that there is nothing unusual about this statement as I do not believe in the Christian god, or even in any of the traditional notions of "God". But even if I did believe in the white bearded man in the sky wearing the nightdress, I don't see why he should be thanked merely for creating the means by which we feed ourselves. If you're going to go down the road of thanking him (yes, God is a man and no, it doesn't matter that he's a man because he doesn't exist - call him "her" and "she" if it really makes you feel better) for creating life-supporting elements, then why don't we thank him for every breath of oxygen? Or for every drink of water? I'm not bashing the notion of being grateful but if there is a God, I think he would wonder why we're so pleased about the food and not quite so impressed with, for instance, the gravitational force that is also an essential part of our life (at least, it is for now - a disclaimer for the Arthur C. Clarke fans among you).

So what I'm trying to say is that the very idea of saying grace is pointless and naïve. It is even more pointless to recite a meaningless phrase before you eat. It is of about the same value as tapping a can of beer before opening it - some people believe it helps in an unknown way, others think it is a waste of time.

My parents are Christians and they therefore won't listen to rational thought about matters of religion (a fact that never ceases to amaze me) because they don't need to know why they know something if they know it hard enough (if you catch my drift). As a result, they probably won't accept my preceding argument as a valid reason not to say grace, so I have hatched a plan. It is based on the idea of doing something so incredibly badly that you are never asked to do it again. Essentially, the idea is to say grace whenever it is required of me, but to thank the wrong god consistently. So today, I thanked Shiva for providing us with haddock for dinner. The last time it was Odin and before that Thor. I will go through Lugh, Zeus and Baal and, if that doesn't work, I will test the water with Hades before dropping the bomb: thanking our Dark Lord, Satan.

I expect that at some stage over the next few weeks, I will be quietly removed from the grace-saying roster. If I die from salmonella in the next couple of months, feel free to say "I told you so".