I am a creature of habit, especially for eating my lunch almost every day. This is especially true when I find a tuna sandwich I really like. I believe I have been doing this regularly for over 70 years.
There is a sandwich shop in walking distance from our Georgia home, called Which Wich, which has the best hot tuna on whole wheat. It may be the best sandwich I have ever eaten. Run and owned by an Indian family, they are a very friendly people, who work hard at their small business. I must eat there five to six times a week.
Lunch has always been my favorite meal because it helps me clarify the important issues of my day. Their iced tea sometimes provides a dose of serenity where all things seem to fall into place.
Something really special happened to me at lunch recently. Like most of my favorite places, I usually have a special table or booth. On this particular day, it was very crowded and Yogi, the owner, was not able to keep my L-shaped table open. I love this table because it provides ample space for me to spread out my four newspapers, sunglasses and baseball cap.
Before I knew it virtually everyone was gone, except for a little blonde girl and a woman, presumably her grandmother, seated at the bottom of the L. Her name was Nora and she was just adorable, as many young ladies are at this age. I have often written that I see the Face of God and pure innocence in such children.
It is little ones, such as Nora who have increased my awareness that these little people are in the gunsights of a culture, which despises innocence because it reflects God in them. Like Herrod they have to kill the innocent God-child.
As Nora prepared to eat her children’s size sandwich, she folded her hands, said something and then blessed herself. Good grief! I cannot ever remember witnessing a child of this size saying grace in public. I must have said or at least thought there is still hope for this country and religion.
Since neither the New York Times, nor the Wall Street Journal had anything much of interest, I glanced back at them a few times. She was actually listening to her grandmother and having a real conversation. I just had to say something to them.
When it looked like they were getting ready to clean up and leave, I told the woman how wonderful an experience it had been for me watching this child say her grace before meals. I think I asked if they were Christian or Catholic.
The grandmother, whose name was Patty, told me they were Catholic, so I complemented her on teaching our faith to little Nora, whom I guessed was 4-5 years old. When Patty asked her to tell me her age, she proudly told me she was not six but six and a half. Nora, which seems more like an adult name, seemed very mature for her age.
I had to tell Patty about my writing for this publication. She seemed really interested and immediately found it on her phone. When she came to the section with the latest essays, one of mine was on top because Rose-Colored Glasses had been published early that morning. Then Lady Inspiration bit me again. I told her I was going to write an essay if I could get at least 1000 words out of meeting her and Nora.
Nora put to shame my own history of saying grace before meals. I have had periods when it was the last thing on my mind and then at other times, I enthusiastically embraced the short prayer. I think it has to do with whom I was with at the time.
I have also had some very embarrassing moments with my grace before meals. Many years ago, I was having lunch with St. Louis Deacon, the late Ed Macauley. To the St. Louis public, he was better known as Easy Ed Macauley, the St. Louis University All-American basketball player as well as an NBA Hall of Famer with the St. Louis Hawks.
Ed was 6’8 and at the time suffering dearly after two knee replacements that had not been totally successful. When my tuna sandwich arrived, I immediately started stuffing it in my mouth. Meanwhile Ed and the other men at our table had bowed their heads and started praying. Gulp!
A similar incident happened while I was eating lunch with my oldest child Mark, then at about 25. The same mouthful of tuna happened again. My motto has always been See food! Eat food! I was very proud of him for making a habit of grace before meals. I wish I could have said, Like father, like son. But that hasn’t been the case.
While growing up I think grace before meals only came during Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter dinners. I cannot remember having had the tradition instilled in me. As a very old adult I do try to say grace before my lunches and dinners but breakfast has seldom been part of my morning ritual.
Like most of our religious traditions and activities, grace before meals has an interesting history. Though a grace of thanks has no real required words, most people settle for the traditional one:
Bless us oh Lord for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord Amen.
When Mark married his wife, Patti, she was not Catholic but had been raised with a strong Christian background. She was well-schooled in saying grace from the heart, which were absolutely beautiful. I had to kid her that when she converted to Catholicism her graces were not quite as spontaneous. From that point on, I tried her spontaneous grace prayers and did produce some of my better prayers, though I always ended with the perfunctory Bless us oh Lord…
Having a common prayer does facilitate other people joining the prayer to make it more communal. According to Simply Catholic what most Catholics call saying grace is actually a prayer of blessing. The term, saying grace, comes from the Ecclesiastical Latin phrase, gratiarum actio, literally act of thanks. The word Grace* comes from the Latin gratia, meaning thanks or gratitude for the blessing received.
The origins of the before meal prayer are obscure. While it is listed in the Roman Ritual, it has no attribution. Theologically, the term can be found in the Bible many times, where Jesus and St. Paul prayed before meals, especially in Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. The practice reflects the belief that humans should thank God who is the ultimate origin of everything.
Though it was before my time, the story about my late father-in-law was a legend in the O’Rourke family from Charleston, Missouri, where I met my first wife. Daddy Al as all of his intimates called him, was a shy and reticent man. While a graduate of Notre Dame, his grace prayers needed work. Before one memorable dinner, he began: Now I lay me down to sleep…
Grace before meals has been a staple of American culture since the Pilgrims. Norman Rockwell captured this tradition best in his famous painting, Freedom from Want, which appeared on the cover of the March 6, 1943, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It quickly became iconic because it depicted a family of his friends in Arlington, Vermont in prayerful thanksgiving for their blessings of liberty during World War II.
Thanksgiving for meals have appeared in a number of memorable films. The funniest had to be Ben Stiller and Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents, produced in 2000. Meeting his prospective in-laws for the first time, Stiller’s character, who is male nurse Greg Foster, is asked to give the blessing. Being Jewish just adds to the awkwardness of his situation. DeNiro’s character, who secretly works for the CIA, was a strict and hardened man with a strong devotion to his mother, whose ashes rested on the dining room mantel.
Stiller’s completely spontaneous grace begins with Ours is…a kind and gentle and accommodating God…we thank you for the smorgasbord… Oh Dear Lord, …we pray to love thee more dearly, to see you more clearly, to follow you more nearly…day by day…by day… His word salad grace pales by comparison when he opens the bottle of champagne and the cork knocks Jack’s mother’s urn off the mantle, shattering it and scattering her ashes all over the room.
For a completely different approach to grace, I remember the 1965 movie Shenandoah, which took place on a Virginia farm during the Civil War. The stern family patriarch, Jimmy Stewart, made a promise on his wife’s death bed that he would raise their children as good Christians. His character, Charlie Anderson, has also tried to keep his family neutral during the war. Not a true believer, like Stiller he does the best he can with his unique grace at the family table.
As quoted in Dr. Sonny Holmes 2016 essay in his blog, Life in the Church the thankless father prays: Lord we cleared the land. We plowed it, sowed it and harvested it. We cooked the harvest. It wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be eatin’ it if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you just the same anyway Lord for the food we are about to eat. Amen
As religion and prayer continued to be squeezed out of the public marketplace, I refer back to young people like Nora who have been schooled in some of the basic rituals and rites of the Catholic Church at an early age. I cannot help of think of a borrowed quote from Joseph Sobran on his understanding of freedom and sovereignty among ordinary people. He quoted Christian apologist C. S. Lewis who wrote the modern world insists that religion be a purely private affair and then shrinks the area of privacy to the vanishing point. When the state moves in, separation means forcing the Church to move out.
This quote echoes the fact that government tyranny has been in a long war to completely remove public displays of religious faith. This might subconsciously account for my reluctance to say my rosary in a food store, grace in a restaurant or an airport while waiting for my wife or our plane to board. I used to think it stemmed from my not wanting to sound my own horn. I believe there is a little bit of the Pharisee in all of us. But in reflection, perhaps government pressure and public disdain might have something to do with it.
In retrospect, I am truly amazed at how meeting Nora and Patty inspired me to write this essay. There are no random acts in our lives. Everything we do, even as seemingly mundane as eating a hot tuna fish sandwich, can result in extraordinary meaning for us. If a six and a half-year-old child can pray in public without fear of disdain, then I guess I can do that as well.
*The female name Grace runs in my wife Anna’s family and is the name of her youngest child, whom she name Mary Grace, though everybody calls her Grace.