I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.
I love the simple ritual of grace before meals. Preceded and followed by a slow, long, intentional breath that releases the day’s distractions and allows us to relax into the simple pleasures of gathering and eating, it seems a little like lighting a candle whose light changes the whole room. Many families continue to say grace before meals even when other faith practices have dwindled to holiday rituals. Where that is the case, that one quiet moment of turning toward God as the source of life and health and blessing assumes particular significance, even if it is brief and rote. I still occasionally think of the first mealtime grace I learned about the time I began to speak: “God is great and God is good, and we thank him for our food.” These days, I’m more inclined to acknowledge the many layers of human labor, some of it undercompensated, that are the costs of our abundant fare, and to ask for food to be produced more justly and wisely, but God’s greatness and goodness still seem something to be acknowledged before eating, and I’m grateful for the little prayer that opened my imagination to awareness of blessing—that it keeps coming, that what lies before us here, now, is blessing.
Wendell Berry’s “Prayer after Eating,” written in 1971 and widely shared since then, reminds us of a custom less widely retained: of giving thanks after as well as before a meal, framing the whole event in a way that sets it apart as sacred time, as space separate from the other enterprises of the day, to be entered into and left with reverence. But it does much more than that. This deceptively brief prayer invites us to a level of reflection that is easy to avoid: it reminds us of the deep biological processes in which we are intricately involved, how light becomes food, and food becomes flesh. It reminds us that food fuels not only the flesh, but also the brain that apprehends and the affective life that enables us to be grateful. It reminds us of our mortality: that life is a “brief blaze.” That stark but wonderful image of what burns in the night—a comet, a fire in the hearth, a twinkling star—invites us to imagine our short lives here as something shockingly beautiful, “charged,” as Hopkins put it, “with the grandeur of God” for one brief, shining moment.
But the prayer doesn’t end on that dramatic note; instead, it concludes with a simple petition: “May I be worthy of my meat.” Blessing is freely and abundantly given, whether we acknowledge it or not, but when we do, it behooves us to recognize what we commonly call a “debt of gratitude.” It leaves us with something to rise to. Most of us, I imagine, received some form of early training intended to move us beyond the self-centeredness necessary to mere survival into the realm of grace and generosity. Most of us were told that a right response to our privilege and ease was to share it. And most of us who grew up in Christian homes heard versions of the Sermon on the Mount periodically that reminded us of the cup of water, the bread, the fish, the cloak we owed the poor. And most of us, I imagine, still need those prompts to maintain the measure of humility it takes to recognize, as the centurion did, that we are, of ourselves, unworthy. That only God can make us worthy.
To be made worthy of my meat would be, perhaps, to go out into the world with deepened concern for those who harvested or packaged or loaded and transported food from farms to our table (concern Berry has expressed with the unusual depth of understanding he brings to each of those populations as a farmer, man of faith, social critic, and environmentalist). It would be to assume responsibility, not in a spirit of guilt but in a spirit of gladness, for giving back where I have received, not only in caring for other human beings, but for the soil, the water, the air, taking an active interest in the health of ecosystems and the species that sustain them. All that takes time and care and conversation. Being made worthy, as the verb suggests, isn’t something we can do alone, but only with God’s help and each other’s. God’s help has already been given; grace abounds. What remains for us to do is to educate and encourage one another toward humble, intelligent stewardship and responsible consumption that begins and ends in gratitude.