Grace Before Meals
The anthem we are singing this coming Sunday has been used in the past as a grace before meals. It got me thinking about saying or singing grace and staying connected to Source
I spent four years as a child at a Montreal French private school run by nuns. A feature was that before we would sit down to lunch, we would sing a grace. It was largely my first experience with grace before meals, as I did not grow up in a religious family.
Bénissez nous seigneur,
bénissez ce repas,
Ceux qui l’ont préparé
Et procurez du pain à ceux qui n’en ont pas
Ainsi soit il
I had an additional obstacle besides the fact that I had no lived experience with grace before meals. I didn’t understand French. As such, I just had to memorize it phonetically so I could sing the sounds but I didn’t understand what I was singing.
In spite of the fact that within the first year at the school, I became fluent in speaking French, and by the second year was thinking in French and dreaming with French to the point that I began to lose my English words and was worried, I continued to sing the grace without trying to understand what I was singing, mechanically.
I don’t remember how many years later it was, but it was much later that I was somehow reminded of that grace, and I played it back in my mind to ‘hear’ it properly. For the first time, I understood its meaning.
Perhaps this is an extreme example of how distant grace before meals can be from actual grace or thanksgiving or a prayer. I don’t know. It’s my experience.
Certainly it’s all too easy for religious observance to be performative, perfunctory, and devoid of genuine feeling and sense of connection to God.
Why do we call it saying grace?
This short article explains that in pre-Elizabethean English it was ‘graces’ before meals, and references the Latin gratiarum actio or Italian grazie.
But the practice of praying before eating seems to go back long before the beginning of Christianity. The specific forms of prayers over meals might have come via the rabbis later, but there are references from much earlier in Jewish history of prayer before eating.
What it comes down to is recognizing that however hard or not we might have worked in the preparation of the meal, ultimately God is to be thanked from the heart for the provision of food.
How often do I really consider how dependent I am on the labour of so many people for my food and all other aspects of my life? And that ultimately we are all sustained by the Source of all life?
Taking a moment before eating to remember to thank God seems minimal in the light of that thought.
Practices to connect to Source
Meditation is another way to stop and be thankful. I think that at its best, saying the rosary was meant to be another way to turn to God.
Mindfulness practices like the body scan, mindful seeing, mindful listening, mindful breathing, and the 5 senses exercise are other ways to connect back.
What will it take to stay connected?
What blows me away on a daily basis is how I can begin the day with meditation and a beautiful mindful experience of writing, and go peacefully on to shower and begin my day in a deep centreness, and then how gradually over the course of the day my sense of presence unravels until I find myself as I was near the end of my work shift yesterday, totally frazzled trying to talk to a parent and get out the door in time to go to a philosophy meet up.
It isn’t enough, for me anyway, just to have solid practices to begin and end the day in peace and gratitude.
If I am really going to return to presence again and again throughout the day, it looks like I need practices or touchstones of gratitude and presence throughout the day.
It’s easy to put meditation, journaling, and devotional Bible reading at the beginning of the day before things start to get fraught. But it doesn’t address this unraveling issue.
Let’s see how today goes, with trying to fold in more times to stop and connect …