‘It’s interesting to consider what you count as a blessing’

You might not expect controversy to erupt while saying grace before a meal, but then, you probably don't know my family.

Many Christians celebrate Carnival, a festive — sometimes excessively so — season before the penitential season of Lent. In New Orleans it culminates in Fat Tuesday. My family continues the Slovak tradition of Fasiangy with a family dinner the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.

As the eldest, I was expected to say grace. Hoping to forestall criticism from my son, I omitted genderbased references to God, avoiding personal pronouns and referring to God as Creator rather than Father.

I began by remembering those who had gone before us, and then thanked God for the many blessings bestowed upon us, among them our family, our health, and our prosperity. I closed by asking God to bless our meal and to continue to bless us.

Most of those around the table responded, “Amen.” But not my son. He said, “It's interesting to consider what you count as a blessing from God.”

Wondering what he meant, I asked, “Don't you consider our family a blessing? And all of us enjoy pretty good health despite advancing age. And all of us have either good jobs or secure retirements.”

“Of course,” he said. “I don't deny any of that. But attributing these advantages to God? Think about other Sunday dinners taking place right now where the breadwinner works for the just above the minimum wage and the family can't afford decent housing. They may not go to bed hungry, but they don't have a financial cushion in the bank in case they need a major car repair, or sick leave in case of illness. If you're going to credit your prosperity to God, don't you also have to credit their precarious finances to God?”

“Look,” I said, “that's not fair. In every economic system there are winners and losers. After all, Jesus said, ‘the poor you will always have with you.'”

“That's exactly my point,” he said. “All of us, as professionals with college degrees, are winners. A lot of others are losers. Don't blame that on God, blame it on the operation of late capitalism in the United States.”

He continued, “I'm not up on biblical hermeneutics, but I doubt that Jesus was endorsing systemic poverty. He was commenting on the fallen nature of humans and human institutions. After all, you love quoting Reinhold Neihbuhr— ‘original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.' ”

“So are you suggesting that we shouldn't be grateful for our prosperity?” I asked. “Grateful to whom?” he responded. “When you get going about the good old days, you tell me you bought your first house for $34,000 on a salary under $15,000. Today it's worth $430,000 and you'd need an income over $150,000 to buy it. Should the various owners of that house thank God for the way its price has appreciated over four decades — in the process helping to enrich them?”

“Those were good old days for you,” he continued. “Your investments over the years paid off in a comfortable middle-class retirement and you're grateful for the way things have turned out for the whole family. But look at the situation objectively. You all — we all — prospered in part because housing has become unaffordable for the poor and working class.”

He went on, “And it's not just housing. In 1976, a year after you bought your first house, the average income for the bottom quintile was around $3,000 and for top quintile, $32,000. In 2021, the bottom quintile's average increased to $15,000, while the top quintile's average skyrocketed to $269,000. Our family's prosperity is due in large measure to this increasing inequality. Do you really want to attribute this to God?”

I had to admit he had a point. Some people seem quite confident in their conceptions of God's will, while others admit a certain hesitancy in this regard. Should we thank God for our standing toward the top of an economic system that visits injustice on the poor while enriching elites?

Some believers pragmatically argue that gratitude to God leads to charitable giving, evidenced by increased donations around Christmastime. Charity is wonderful, but let's extend my son's argument. Treating prosperity as a divine gift exempts us from social analysis. It props up various rationalizations for the astounding and growing inequality in American society, among them meritocracy, innovation, hard work, character, and my own favorite, deferred gratification.

Maybe we need to be less grateful and more critical — of a tax system that advantages the wealthy and professionals at the expense of the working poor; of public education systems that reinforce the privilege of white suburbanites over city residents; of exclusionary zoning practices that ban the poor not only from wealthy enclaves, but entire municipalities.

Charity is wonderful; we need more of it. But the need for social justice is greater. And some forms of gratitude blind us to our participation in an economic system that systematically disadvantages the poor and working class.

So, maybe less talk about gratitude, and more about complicity? Like my son, just askin'.

Joseph Gerics, who resides in Stratford, is a retired Catholic school educator who was a principal of Stamford and Danbury schools.