For what we are about to receive

Photograph by Matilda Clifford

Pray as you can, not as you can’t.

                                                                        Abbot John Chapman

For a while now we have had a certain discomfort with our prayers at meal time.

Set prayers become words of habit. My grandfather used to pray in Dutch, in all probability because his father, who might have actually known Dutch, prayed that way. My father prayed the same prayer before every meal as my grandfather did, but only in Afrikaans. Something might be said for tradition but somehow too much is lost in the process.

In that sense an informal or free form prayer is better. However, that still left us uncomfortable on a certain level. We feel that we are conveying a certain message by praying that way. As if we are the point of origin in this case. We have done the planning and preparing with the food that we indeed feel privileged to have and with that done, we call on God and say thank you. Our discomfort lies on the level of the prayer directed to the God out there. It implies a certain separateness, aloofness, distance. And that is not at all how we experience God in daily living. He is always present, absolutely present. As we have said on numerous occasions in our posts –God in all things. This form of prayer does not convey this experience sufficiently for us.

What to do then?

At a few meals we did nothing. It did not work. It left us empty. (Not the meal! The not praying.)

We have to admit that not praying made us feel guilty as well. After all, we’ve been praying for every meal since we managed to string words in a sentence.

What I personally found very enriching and wonderful in this whole process was how we spoke about all the aspects of it all the time and worked at it – how we longed for something deeper and more substantial; a form of prayer that is a truer reflection of our spirituality. What rang true as we tried it and what did not. And our feelings of guilt when we did not pray. It was lived spirituality in the true sense of the word.

It was startling to realise how deep certain perceptions and habits are engraved in us. Here we are, educated people living in the 21^st century feeling guilty for not saying a prayer at meal time. Why? Because we are not grateful for what we have? No. We are grateful, but within a much wider context than our prayers suggested. Does not saying a prayer make you a bad person? In whose eyes? And according to what yardstick? When does a certain action or the lack thereof become mere moralism? Do we disappoint God by merely sitting down and digging in? I have a feeling he/she gets much less offended than certain members of his/her flock.

Nevertheless, we longed for a ritual befitting our daily experience of God.

We arrived at the following:

After dishing up and sitting down Matilda (who is mostly the cook) tells me a little about the way she prepared the meal. What ingredients did she use, which recipe did she follow, what did she harvest from our own garden. We look at the food. We smell it.

We look at each other, notice each other. When we have guests we thank them for sharing the meal with us and being with us.

Then we take hands and become quiet. We enter into the silence. We practice the art of stopping. We become aware of being held by God, of this simple meal being an integral part of a majestic whole, of us stepping into a process that was active long before we have arrived. For us, only the silence acknowledges that sufficiently. Words, however beautiful and even for us who love words, make a hash of things. After several minutes I say amen and we start to eat.

Somehow, over the years I developed the bad habit of eating fast. This way of prayer led me to eat much slower and to really taste and appreciate my food. The meal itself becomes an extension of what we did before we started to eat. It becomes prayer in itself.

This feels much better and we are much more satisfied with this way of “saying grace”.

A couple of years ago we read something by Richard Rohr and in principle totally agreed with him. Now, through this whole process, we have lived right into it: “Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, ‘Prayer happened and I was there’ more than ‘I prayed today’.”

George