I was once at a food court with my plate of food before me and
before heartily tucking in, made a reverent sign of the cross and thanked God
for the gift of appetite and food, and proceeded to eat thereafter. I happened to share the table with a
stranger, as is rather common whenever one eats alone at such places. He must have noticed what I did, causing him
to ask me pointedly if my prayers before eating made the food any tastier, and
whether it made any difference at all.
Obviously, this stranger wasn’t a believer in God or in ritual, but I
wasn’t quite ready at that point in my life to engage with him in any form of
spiritual discourse. I was only barely
twenty at that time, long before I became a priest.
Why do we pray before eating?
Why do we pray upon waking in the morning? Why do we pray at all? Routine in life can often end up making us
unthinking automatons but it really should not, especially where our faith life is concerned. Knowing why we do what we do makes us aware
of our existence and of life’s purpose, which for us believers has to be about
glorifying God and becoming his images in which we are made. Most of the time, however, we find ourselves
wrapped up within our own little world, and find ourselves having hearts that
are too small and loving in ways that are narrow and limited.
One of the very common things that many Catholics seem to struggle
with is the love of God. Whenever people
tell me (oftentimes in the confessional) that they have not said their prayers, or have missed Mass, my response is to ask them why they pray at all. Hardly have I ever received the answer that
they pray because they love God. If we
only pray in order to get God’s attention, or to get him to answer our requests
and needs, or only in response to having had received what we had asked for,
perhaps we have yet to realise that prayer should first and foremost be
predicated on our love for God.
Let me state that it is not wrong to ask God for our needs to be met
in prayer. But if that is the
predominant reason we seek God and want to communicate with him, our
relationship with him may be far from mature and life giving.
Jesuit writer Paul Coutinho wrote with much insight on one paradigm
of prayer, which sees one making the movement from talking to silence. He says that there are four stages here. The first sees us talking to God and
believing that he listens to us. At this
stage, we are confident that we can bring all our needs to God, and that it is
he alone who can provide for us what our loved ones are unable to. At this stage, we talk and God listens.
The second stage is when we listen to God, and behave like young
Samuel as we say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” At this stage, we are keen to carry out what
is willed for us by God, and where we can change and become stronger in faith
and overcome our weaknesses. At this
stage, God talks and we listen.
Then comes the third stage where because we are in a relationship,
both God and we are doing the listening.
There is little use of words that feature in prayer, and neither is
there much requests made. Heart begins
to speak to heart in presence. One can
compare this to how lovers find words superfluous and in the silence of each
other’s presence, one tries to anticipate what the other is saying without
words.
The final stage in this paradigm of prayer is where no one talks and
no one listens. Here, both perceive a
silence that does not have any agenda at all, neither in listening nor
asking. One just is in the other’s
presence and one is in a direct union with the Divine. Obstacles are non-existent, and one is
enveloped by God. It is rare that we
experience this in our prayer life, and I believe this is a mystical experience. Scriptural representations of these are
like Mary being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in her life, and Moses being
drawn and enveloped by the cloud and transformed, emerging from it with a
brilliance emitting from within him.
When our prayer life is not predicated on our love of God, we will
easily find ourselves loathe to pray. It
is only natural to avoid what we find a chore and a duty. But if we see that our rationale for praying
really has to come from our loving God, we will attach to it less and less any idea
of obligation or a task. If lovers
find loving a chore, in no time will they stop being lovers.
I began this blog, recalling that incident at the food court. I still do pray before my meals, and I can
say that it does stem from my love of God.
I am put in a state of awareness that it is the love of God for me that
he makes all things possible, and this includes nourishment for my body and
spirit. As to whether my food becomes
any tastier, it really doesn’t. I
remember that in my convalescence while undergoing chemotherapy, nothing I ate
was delicious and I went on for prolonged periods when my appetite was hardly
there. I still prayed before meals. It never made my meals enticing, but it definitely made me more grateful for everything before me in life.