Lunch Prayer
May 4, 2010 at 1:44 pm
The back-to-the-land family sings a prayer before eating cassoulet on a Sunday afternoon. The guy with the shaved head is Johann, the son who had just fallen from the rafters. This is near Carcassonne, France.
by Mike
Before every meal they would sing these prayers – two in French with a Latin prayer in between. One of the prayers is the Lord’s prayer and I believe another is for Mary. They prayed after the meal as well. When we left the farm and started eating without prayer the moment felt a little emptier, a little more mindless. The same was true after we left the meditation retreat in Chiang Mai – we had chanted a prayer before eating there as well. It’s just another instance in which the practices overlap.
The family prayed before and after eating, when waking up and before going to sleep at night. In addition to these five routine prayers, there were also moments throughout the day when they would, essentially, check in with God. They saw it as giving thanks to God; I recognized it as an act of staying present. Similarly, Didier described how at the beginning of each day he would dedicate his physical pain to God – he knew there would be pain. God (as Jesus) went through so much pain for him that it was the least he could do to give some back. In this I recognized Buddhism’s distinction between pain and suffering.
