‘From thy bounty’

“Bless us O Lord
and these thy gifts
which we are about to receive
from thy bounty
through Christ, our Lord. Amen”

 

The other night at dinner, after my family said our traditional Catholic table prayer, my 10-year-old asked, “What’s a ‘bounty’?”
Me, caught off guard: “It means, like, wealth or riches. Like on a ship, if a pirate has big storage chests of gold or riches…”
My husband, interrupting: “That’s booty, not bounty.”
Me: “Oh… OK, well then if a king has a big warehouse full of money and treasure and bars of gold, that’s his bounty. God’s bounty — those are his gifts to us, like this food we are going to eat. We say, ‘from thy bounty’ to acknowledge that what we are about to receive is a gift from God.”
My 10-year-old: “OK.” Eating resumes.

That conversation stayed with me, probably because I feel like I botched it. (Pirates? Really?) So today I did a little bit of research. (Yes, I Googled it. Isn’t that synonymous with “research” these days?) I found out that “bounty,” of course, has more than one meaning. It does mean gift or reward, especially from a higher power/government, and the word implies that the gifts are bestowed generously. It also means “a sum paid for killing or capturing a person or animal,” but I don’t think I’ll be bringing that definition back to our kitchen table discussions…

I gave myself a break for fumbling over the answer to my daughter’s question for this reason: God’s bounty is vast and limitless. It’s hard to describe because it’s impossible to fathom. If it were easy to put into words, that might somehow diminish the awesome wonder of it all — how a higher being could love us mere mortals so much that He gives us not only everything we need here on Earth, but He also sacrifices the life of His only son so that we will be able to live with him for eternity. No short answer there, clearly.

I also did some more research (yes, Googling) of the traditional Catholic table prayer. It turns out “Bless Us, O Lord” dates back thousands of years and contains distinctive parts of a prayer of gratitude, supplication, praise and contrition. That’s a lot of powerful history packed into a short little prayer — one that even a 2-year-old can recite from memory.

Last thing — in case you haven’t noticed, I love to look up quotes from other authors. No matter what I’m writing about or what topic has caught my interest, there has always been someone before me whose profound thoughts on the subject seem to resonate with me. Today in my research on bounties and harvests, I came across this little gem:

“Not everyone takes action to harvest the experiences of the seasons of life in order to enjoy their bounty.”
~ Andrea Goeglein, ‘Dr. Success’

Now I know I have been guilty of this in the past. Unseized opportunities, roads not taken, times I should’ve spoken up but didn’t … I could write a whole book on those things alone. But not this time. In this season of my life, I’m taking action. And with God’s help, in a few hours I hope to be done with the first draft of my novel — 55,000 words and counting. Thanks be to God for bringing me this far!
LB