Gratitude practice and secular grace
Naming what is good, at a table or in a notebook, without addressing anyone.
Non-religious households often keep the mealtime pause and change its address: thanks go to the cook, the growers, and the company at the table, or each person names something good from the day. Humanist publications circulate wording for such table graces. Gratitude journaling has a research base; a 2003 experiment by Emmons and McCullough found people who listed blessings weekly reported better wellbeing than those who listed hassles.
Secular grace pauses before a meal to acknowledge the food, the people who produced it and the company, without addressing a deity. Families who have left religion often keep the pause and drop the address.
Written gratitude practice, listing a few specific things at the end of a day, is now widely recommended in psychological literature and is recognisably the same activity. The literature is consistent that specificity matters and that vagueness does not work.
Whether either is prayer is contested and probably not worth arguing about. Structurally they are the same act performed by people who disagree about whether anyone is listening.
Does it have a text?
No fixed wording. Published secular graces exist, mostly recent and mostly in copyright, and this site holds none.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Non-religious and spiritual
- Moments of silence — A held pause marking a death or a disaster, with no religious content.
- Humanist ceremonies — Funerals, weddings and namings conducted without religious content.
- Reflection and secular meditation — Attention practices taught without the religious frameworks they came from.
- Presence and condolence language — What to say to someone grieving when neither of you prays.
- Secular gatherings — Regular non-religious meetings that do what congregations do.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.