Grace Before Meals

Christ with the Peasants (c. 1888) by Fritz von Uhde

Does your family say a prayer before meals? I hope so. It’s a wonderful tradition to have, and if you don’t currently practice it, you might consider starting. However, I can’t say too much because I myself am sometimes bad about taking that extra moment to thank God for my food. You can see from my waistline that when a delicious meal is in front of me, I’m not usually waiting around too long before diving into it!

Grace before meals is important though for lots of reasons. For one thing, it can be a great way to train our young people in the traditions of our faith. When I visited my sister’s family for a few days early this past week, I practiced making the Sign of the Cross with my niece and older nephew and what the proper words were to say. Our family hopes that they incorporate those practices into their lives so that they become second nature as they grow up.

Another reason we pray before eating is to ask the Lord’s blessing. We ask God to keep us safe from illness and malnourishment in the food we are about to receive and that instead it will make us strong and capable for the work we have to do. The power to bless is found all throughout the Scriptures, and not just in priests, but also in parents, those in authority, and even in the poor. When we bless our food we invoke God’s power to bestow his favor upon it and, by extension, upon us as well. 

While these are good reasons for saying grace, thus far I haven’t mentioned the most important reason we do so: to give praise and thanks to God. In a sense, this is the fundamental purpose for everything that we do – to glorify the One who is the source of all that is and who thus has given us all that we have. When we pray before a meal, we remember that it’s not just the food in front of us that is God’s gift, but everything else as well. Even those things that we strive hard for, the bread that we earn by the sweat of our brow – even that is sheer gift, because our abilities and our opportunities come from him. As St. Therese of Lisieux once said, “Everything is grace.”

In the Gospel today, Jesus feeds the five thousand. He satisfies their physical hunger, but before he does so offers a blessing over the food that he will multiply. This miracle is, of course, a foreshadowing of the spiritual meal that we gather to celebrate every Sunday, where the Lord satisfies not our physical but our spiritual hunger. The Eucharist is very much a family meal, in a sense – it’s the banquet of the Lord’s family, the Church. It might be helpful to think of the Mass as the grace we say before partaking of this spiritual banquet. We offer prayers to God for some of the reasons we say grace in our homes as well: to instill within our children and ourselves a renewed appreciation for the practice of our faith, and to ask for God’s blessing upon us. 

But the most important reason for the Mass, the motive for why we come to pray each week, is the same reason we do everything: to offer praise and thanksgiving to God, the source of all good. More than any other prayer, more than anything else we can do in life, the Eucharist is the highest and most perfect form of giving thanks. The very word Eucharistia in Greek means “thanksgiving.” For Christians since the time of Jesus until now, it is in and through the Mass that we give perfect praise to God. We unite ourselves to the prayer of Jesus, our High Priest, who offered himself to the Father as perfect sacrifice for our sins. In the prayer of the Mass, we become sharers in time to the Lord’s offering of himself that extends beyond time; we glorify our Heavenly Father by giving thanks to him in the way that he loves most, the self-gift of his Son. And then because the Father finds his Son’s sacrifice eternally acceptable, he gives us in return that same gift of the Son: the Lord’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. The whole Mass is, in this way, an exchange of praise and thanksgiving – the Son, and us along with him, praising and glorifying the Father, and the Father then glorifying his Son by allowing us to share in the sacrificial meal of communion. 

Philippe de Champaigne, The Last Supper (c. 1648)

If you think that sounds like a lot of high theology, you’d be right. But that is what the Church believes about what we do at each Mass, and it is important for us to at least try to understand what it is we are doing when we gather around the altar. This participation in the prayer of Christ has great value for us, even when we may be prevented from actually partaking in the Eucharistic meal. At times, for various reasons, we may not be able to actually receive the Lord’s Real Presence in communion, but we can always share in the prayer of praise and thanksgiving that is the Mass as a whole.

Perhaps you and I might ask ourselves today: How well do I enter into the prayer of the Mass? Am I prepared spiritually before coming to church? Do I take time to recollect myself when I do arrive? How well do I listen, reflect, and respond to the prayers of the Mass, that is the prayer of the Body of Christ made to the Father? Do I have the tendency at times to think of the Mass as a show that I sit back and watch rather than an act of worship I am called to participate in? Do I remember to offer a prayer of thanksgiving, a Eucharistia, after communion to glorify the Lord for the gift I have received? Above all, do I make sure I never miss Mass through my own fault? 

Friends, if we are honest with ourselves, each of us can probably do better in one or another of those areas. I know I certainly can! Because while I hope you and your family do take the time to say grace in your home, the most important prayer before a meal is the prayer of the Mass, when we participate in Jesus’s prayer of praise and thanksgiving to his Father for our good and the good of all the world. On this Feast of Corpus Christi, let’s recommit ourselves to striving to pray this act of worship well – to prepare for it, to participate fully in body, mind, and soul while we are here, and to take a brief moment to give thanks afterward. As we prepare to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice, in this Mass and always, may we find in this sacred meal true satisfaction for all our hungers and encounter the Eucharistic Jesus with hearts full of praise and thanksgiving.