The Hunter’s Moment: Blessing

Give us this day our daily bread…

I’m the last one out of the kitchen. When I step into the dining room the lump that has been inching toward the top of my stomach suddenly vaults to my throat, and I have to shut my eyes for just a passing few seconds. Let the wave of emotion settle down. This happens every year.
Every Thanksgiving.

Give us another dawn with golden light in the decoys, light that lifts our hearts toward heaven…

Family rings the table–half of us half mad from a half day spent toiling in the kitchen, but somehow laughter still rings across the room. There is an embarrassment of food on the table. But my eyes move over the country ham and collard greens, the sweet potatoes with their crown of caramelized marshmallows. Oddly enough, the food hardly registers. It’s the sheer, incalculable weight of blessing that rocks me back on my heels. Every face reflects a memory of time outdoors: My wife hanging on to the console, the boat bucking in a horrid blow, lightning crackling. A little girl asleep on my shoulder, as the first deer steps out of the woods. My mother beside me at the base of a squirrel tree, white-gray curls barely controlled by a camouflage cap.

Give us a sunset whose promise is tomorrow. Give us a hunger to taste the wild places that yet remain…

And also the blessings left behind by those no longer gathered here, the ones who have gone on to where they are either eternally thankful for a life marked by a pursuit of grace, or eternally not. But they still have their place at the table: In the cranberry salad, still prepared by consulting a ragged slip of paper, the recipe scrawled in faded pencil. In the slight dimple of a granddaughter’s chin, the green eyes of a grandson. Tracks of the ancestors. Seeing this, sensing this, I shut my eyes again.

Give us this day a glimpse of the glory found in the quiet pool of a stream, in the wild cackle of a goose…

Then we join hands, child to child, husband to wife, man to man–generations linked by intertwined fingers and futures–and I sneak in one last look, a quick glance beyond the turkey and the table to the faces lined around. I bow my head to pray.

Give us this day. –T. Edward Nickens_
_