Pre-Blessed Food!

this video so totally matches up with a wicked cool story from today at supper. So my second youngest son stayed home from school today. He was supposed to go with someone for “Take your kid to work day” but he couldn’t go with Char to do catheters and pik lines and no other arrangements could'/were made so…

Char said, “Fine, you are going to stay home and find out what its like to be a house wife.” She lined up a bunch of chores for him to do around the house and i threw in a few as well. Bam he worked pretty much all day. I did take him to Dairy Queen for lunch (like I always did with Char every day when she was house bound as a house wife :))

Guess who made supper? – you guessed it! Now we are a family who still prays before we eat our meal. We tend to not use the memorized prayers but the content and format usually do not vary much. So tonight my youngest prays and as he says “…and bless the hand that have prepared this…” our grade nine ‘house wife’ throws up his hands like a football referee indicating a touchdown. He grins as I look over at him with a pretty blanked out look…

“That was me!” he says, “That was me!” He made the food – he got the credit and his hands got blessed in the process. What happened there in that moment is profound. Think of all the ways that scene comments on gender roles and the relegation of certain tasks into obscurity… Think of what that scene potentially says about for whom prayer is meaningful and how prayer operates either to create a certain kind of distance or to actually acknowledge engagement. Here is what I mean. There is a whole lot of work that has gone into getting the food we ate for supper onto the table. My sons work might actually be the least demanding. The table prayer is intended to reflect gratitude for this labour from which the rest of the family is benefitting. But is it possible that the prayer might actually be making the labour of getting the food onto the table disappear since it ultimately gives God credit for stuff that human beings spent a lot of effort producing. Don’t get me wrong – it not as if I don’t recognize that God ultimately is the source behind the food we get to eat. In a way (and i know this may not be popular to say) praying this prayer of blessing sort of allows to stop accounting for the guilt of not having worked very hard to make this food a reality. This video throws that door wide open. It seems to say look everything is already pre-packaged and pre-prepared but in order to allow yourself that unadulterated access to this food without having to even acknowledge the ‘ultimate’ divine source makes the alienation with the food complete. Now it is possible for food to exist without source – like it just appears on the Grocery Store shelves by magic – like manna appearing on the desert floor. The ludicrous nature of that idea should be apparent. I mean even the militant atheist would have to acknowledge that it takes a far weirder and outlandish faith to believe that stuff just appears on grocery store shelves than it does to believe that God is the source of all food.

In the end the disservice (the thing that does not get blessed) may lie in the fact that we are not really engaged in the production of our food.

So bless the farmer and the butcher and the meat wrapper and stock boy and the cart picker-upper dude in the parking lot. God bless the stove maker and the assembly line designer and the tortilla maker and the fertilizer distributer and the farmer who is wandering towards Christmas this year without so much as sniff of a profit line to show for all the rain and hope he has poured into the fields he tends. And God bless my son.

a special thank-you to the anonymous contributor who brought this video to my attention – storing up riches in…