Making the most of family prayers before meals

My most recent obsession is Renaissance butter knives with musical scores of meal blessings engraved onto them. I’ve lived all my life not knowing these exist and now that I know they do, I don’t know how I lived without them. I need them.

I have a reverie, an image in my mind. It’s me, my wife, and our six devoted, angelic children holding up our butter knives and using them to chant a benediction over dinner. We are in perfect harmony. We are well dressed and our hair is combed. There are no crumbs on the table left over from lunch. We are “magazine-worthy,” a perfect picture of an ideal family. These knives will change everything.

In reality, our current meal prayers as a family are hurried, individual prayers each one of us mutters under our breath as we individually sit down. Our dining room buffet is covered in laptops, cameras, notebooks, and schoolbooks so it isn’t useful anymore for placing dishes of food on it to collectively serve the meal. That’s why we all sit down randomly and individually. Once we hear that dinner is ready, we all rush to the kitchen like ravenous wolves to get our fair share of the food. It’s very much like surviving a stampede.

Sometimes my boys have eaten an entire plate of food before I even manage to sit down. They’re waiting there at the other end of the table with both hands on their plates, a hungry look in their eyes, ready to bolt from the table and pile on a second serving.

I’ve often thought about imposing some order and using the meal prayer booklets from Clear Creek Abbey. They’re a little out of our league talent-wise with all the collective singing and figuring out what page to be on, but I think it would be nice to have a more formal set of prayers for the family to practice and pray together. If not every single night, then maybe at least a few nights per week. It would slow us down and impose some dignity on the opening ceremonies.

But the desire is more than that. Meal prayers aren’t only a way to formalize a meal. They’re a way to make the food itself sacred by offering it to God along with our gratitude. The Scriptures begin and end with meals; the first words of God to Adam and Eve are an invitation to dine, and the vision of St. John of Heaven is basically a giant wedding banquet (in other words, a family meal). In the meantime, the final act of Our Lord before his death is to share a meal with his disciples, and the way Catholics make sacred the Lord’s Day is to participate in that meal at Holy Mass. During his ministry, Our Lord often joined in with meals. He ate with his disciples, his friends, seekers, pharisees, and, yes, sinners. Meals are all-encompassing. No one is left out, not even the wrong sort of people.

If meals are sacred, what are we to make of the fact that the wrong sort of people are still invited? I look around at my dinner table. I wonder if we are the wrong sort of people. We get on each other’s nerves. I impatiently chastise the kids to chew with closed mouths. I admonish them to take their elbows off the table and sit up straight. Sometimes our conversation is interesting. Other times it’s boring. Sometimes we laugh. Occasionally we gripe at each other. There are times when we rush through to get to some other event. We aren’t perfect, not by a long shot. We are, in this sense, very much the wrong sort of people. It takes some grace to sit here, together.

We practice our little rituals. Our hurried prayers. I put on a Puccini record. The five-year old dims the electric chandelier and lights two candles. She does this every night to make dinner fancy. She has the right idea. We imperfect people are gathered round the table learning to live together, meal after meal. We love each other and want to share time together. Good time or bad time. Boring or enchanting.

I don’t think we really need the knives with prayers engraved on them. All we need is to pray together, sincerely, and thank God that we are welcome at the table, that he cares for us and has given us each other. The important point is to pray together and eat together. Yes, we can improve our meal blessing, but it can be simple. Anyone can do it.

It makes sense that we would strive to bless the meal. It’s so the food might nourish souls as well as bodies. In acknowledging the ritual, we are opening ourselves up to the deeper spiritual aspect of the meal. It’s a heavenly banquet, a sign of familial unity. In our family, there will always be a place at this table for these children. Hopefully someday, their future children will join us. The blessing is for the whole family, past, present, and future. The blessing is for the food but ultimately it is for us, that Christ himself would fix a plate and take a seat.