Do you consider gasoline to be a gift from God? You should.
Andy Crouch, editorial director of the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today, writes in a recent
Books & Culture piece, “As our family sits together, eyes closed, we say grace. Today it’s Timothy’s turn. ‘God, thank you so much for all we have,’ he begins in what turns into a typically prolix nine-year-old’s prayer. Eventually he is done—’in Jesus’ name, Amen’—and I turn the key. We have just filled up our car with gasoline.”
The Crouch family has introduced a tradition of praying at the pump, to recognize the gift that is the ability to fill up with gas and drive around. I think that’s a great thing to do.
But even still, Crouch seems to have a hard time fully admitting that petroleum products ought to be seen as manifestations of divine grace.
“Unlike a well-prepared meal, gasoline does not prompt gratitude unbidden. The stuff is smelly, dangerous, and not at all self-evidently good in itself. It is a means to my ends, juice for a momentary sense of power and control. It is surprisingly hard to remember to stop and say thanks before I pull out, a little too quickly, into traffic,” he writes.
I have to say that I’ve had some meals of my own that were pretty smelly and/or dangerous, and the parallels between food fuel for the human body and gas fuel for the car could perhaps be expanded further. But seriously, it seems to me that, despite the new family tradition, Crouch is having a hard time admitting that something like gasoline is just as much a gift from God as our daily bread.
I’m not quite sure what this means: “I can reasonably expect that the food I eat today will be replaced by a fresh crop next season. But the gallon of gas I burn today is gone for good (though it does leave behind 19 pounds of carbon dioxide for the biosphere to absorb). In this fleeting historical moment that will be remembered as the petroleum era, saying grace seems like the least we can do.”
Maybe we all should think about thanking God for gasoline, not only when we are at the pump, but also when we’re sitting down to our “well-prepared meal,” which was made possible by the foodstuffs delivered from all over the world by petroleum-powered vehicles.
Sat, 11/22/2008 11:34
Wow. I had no idea Catholics were adamant about "the common good." I did know that “altruism” was coined by Comte as [...]