Table Grace
by Nathan D. Mitchell
Assembly Vol 22:2, May 1996
Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.
[From "Invocation to Kali," Section 5, by May Sarton; in Collected Poems (1930-1993); NY: Norton, 1993, 326]
A meal is that pause in a day's course when creation's bounty and beauty are given a chance to reveal themselves afresh. Saying "table grace" is our acknowledgement that this is so -- that this is good. For since ancient times, human beings have seen -- in tables heaped with food and love -- an opening to that bliss The Buddha sought: "May every living thing -- young or old, weak or strong, living near or far, known or unknown, living or departed or yet unborn -- may every living thing be full of bliss." [M.J. Ryan, ed., A Grateful Heart; Berkeley: Conari Press, 1994, 6] Believers of every stripe (or none) have thus recognized that there is more to our meals than feeding the gut. For food, as Marc David has written, "is not merely something we eat. It is a ceaseless reminder that we are mortal, earthbound, hungry, and in need. We are bound by a biological imperative that forever keeps us returning to the soil, plants, animals, and running waters for replenishment. Eating is life. Each time we eat, the soul continues its earthly journey. With every morsel of food swallowed a voice says, 'I choose life. I choose to eat, for I yearn for something more.'" [A Grateful Heart, 84]
We humans thus resist the idea that meals are nothing more than efficient platforms for snarfing down calories. A bag of potato chips can, after all, deliver you craved-for fix of oil, salt and fat far more quickly and efficiently than "arugula salad with oven-fried apples and pears and walnut-Stilton croûtes." But we humans cling to the idea that a meal (even a simple one of salad, bread or soup) is an occasion, an opportunity, an opening--to bliss? to Oz? to the wedding feast of the Lamb? The subjunctive: that is the mood of our meals -- a language of dream, of delectation, of "what if ...?" So we pause before eating, briefly opening a space, a stillness where we can recognize that "there is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy ... [that] rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility." [Thomas Merton, quoted in A Grateful Heart, 216]
It is clear, then, that we come to table not merely to refresh our bodies but to renew our hearts. For many busy families, meals may be the only moments in the day when, together, members can remember the Divine. "Saying grace," writes Toinette Lippe, "establishes an immediate connection with that memory. In such a moment, when our minds are clear and the truth is reinforced by being sounded aloud, we can dedicate the meal and the strength we receive from it to the service of whoever or whatever is before us." [One Hundred Graces; selected by Marcia and Jack Kelly; NY: Bell Tower, 1992, 11]
To be occasion, opportunity, opening, a meal need not, then, always be festive. Often enough, we eat our bread in sorrow and mix our drink with tears. But it is precisely then when fear and grief and despair have overtaken us -- that we must affirm once more what poet Wendell Berry calls "the grace of the world:"
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
["The Peace of Wild Things", in Openings, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980, 30]
