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Books Offer Words Of Grace For The Holidays

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By LIESL SCHILLINGER, The New York Times

Published: November 22, 2007

When I was growing up, a large, churchgoing family across the street used to say a rustic, rhyming grace every night before dinner that went: "Rub-a-dub-dub. Thanks for the grub. Yea, Lord."

At one of my own family's secular yet traditional Thanksgivings, as aunts, cousins and grandparents sat expectantly at their seats awaiting the all-clear to grab their forks, my mother asked my brother (he was 5) to repeat the words our pious neighbors said before dinner. Not understanding what she was after, my brother said, "Justin, go home."

If you belong to one of the American households where grace is said before dinner (fewer than one in three in 1999, according to the Gallup Poll), then coming up with words of benediction before the Thanksgiving meal may not be a challenge. But if you're an infrequent grace-sayer (or, more realistically, someone who doesn't rally the family 'round the dinner table often), you might appreciate some help coming up with words of thanks.
Two new books provide direction. The first, "Sister Wendy on Prayer" (Harmony Books, $21.95), is by the mild but emphatic Carmelite nun and art historian Sister Wendy Beckett, known in the United States for her televised surveys of world art.

Sister Wendy was apparently not always a believer; it was food that started her spiritual quest. At a Sunday breakfast when she was 3 or 4, "A glorious aroma of hot sausage filled the house," she recalls, "and I became conscious of God."

Sister Wendy popularizes prayer the way she popularizes art: by reassuring her audience that it's not as hard to understand as they fear. Look at prayer as "a conversation between friends," she suggests.

While her book is devoted to private prayer, she embraces wider questions that can instruct holiday toastmasters.

But don't sweat it if the blessing you come up with is ham-handed, she cautions: "Regarding prayer as 'our own' is prideful folly."

The very existence of the second book, "Hours of Devotion" (Schocken Books, $24), is a minor miracle. A few years ago, a California editor and poet named Dinah Berland came across a book of prayers she felt compelled to share. While grieving over the 11-year estrangement from her adult son, she wandered into a bookshop, seeking solace. In the Judaica section, she "noticed a slim, well-worn volume tucked between larger tomes." Inside, Berland found a prayer for "a woman whose child was absent from her life, a woman like me."

She bought the book and soon found herself dipping into it on a regular basis. After Rosh Hashana that year, when a rabbi gave a sermon saying, "You know when it's time to reach out to someone who has hurt you. ... The sign is a broken heart," Berland sent her vanished son an invitation to a family gathering.

Two weeks later, he accepted the invitation, and after their reconciliation, she began solving the mystery of who wrote the book that helped heal her family.

Its author, she discovered, was a 19th century mother named Fanny Neuda - the wife of a rabbi in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic. When the rabbi died in 1854 at age 42, his widow composed these devotions.

A sentimental Rothschild baroness helped get them published in Europe, and the book proved so popular that it went through 28 editions from 1855 to 1918. When Berland's father died, on Thanksgiving 2003, she decided to honor his memory and Fanny's by bringing the book back to life.

You don't have to be a rabbi's wife to find inspiration in Berland's lovely verse translation of "Fanny's humble little book, with its fervent expressions of true feeling." Family crises, financial anxieties and emotional tumult are as relevant in the 21st century as they were in Lostice, Moravia, in the 19th century.

Here's an offering of Fanny's, a prayer of Thanksgiving that reads, in part:

"Praised be you, my God,

Who has provided for me out of your plenty

And filled my house with your prosperity."

Too holy for you? In a pinch, try "Rub-a-dub-dub."

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