A gem of blessings and prayers suitable for many occasions!

books:


	• A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles Conari Press, 2002 - 280 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

family bonding

The book provides an excellent way to start conversations with your family about being grateful. We've also found it interesting to discuss the various authors. Love the fact that not all the quotes are religous based.

A Grateful Heart

A wonderful book full of gems of wisdom and gratitude.
"Gratitude is Heaven itself."

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More coffee table than dinner table

This is a nice collection of poems, blessings and short devotionals and they are categorized. I was looking for a book with more traditional blessings that appeal to a house with three teenagers and these selections are just a little too "devotional" and not quite what I was expecting.

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Perfect.

This was exactly what I was looking for...
I am a devout agnostic, part-time Unitarian, with a young son in whom I wish to instill a sense of spirituality, even religiosity. One way I wanted try to do this was by starting a tradition of prayer at meal-times with him. Having no real experience in this activity, I ordered this book...

Organized by season, the prayers evoke an appropriate sense of time and place. The authors are widely varied, and all of the writings utilize wonderful imagery. I believe almost every prayer can be appreciated by people of all faiths, and even atheists who feel a need to express appreciation for what they have before them.

My 3-year-old son has memorized his favorite evening springtime prayer, which goes like this:

Come out! Come out!
From bogs, old frogs
Command the dark.
And look...the stars.

(not sure about the punctuation and I don't remember the author - I'm writing from memory...but you get the idea).

There are of course more traditional prayers than that. And I should mention that even though the title refers to blessings for the evening meal, there are several for morning-time as well, greeting the new day.

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A gem of blessings and prayers suitable for many occasions!

I received this book as a gift in 1996 and have used it on many occasions. The last time I read from this at a small dinner party, everyone wanted to know the name of the book and where I got it. That in itself is a testimonial. Most interesting was that all agreed that the three separate blessings I chose (before dinner, after dinner, and wishes for the new year 2008) were appropriate. Enough said!

reviews: page 1, 2

Now in paperback, A Grateful Heart is a tool to help readers reclaim and enrich the tradition of pausing before the evening meal to give thanks. Drawing from a range of religious and cultural practices, these 365 blessings celebrate friendship, love, peace, reconciliation, the body, nature, joy, and appreciation of the moment. This illustrated feast for the mind includes quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, Rumi, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Denise Levertov, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching.

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