HOW TO BLESS THE TABLE?
Almost without realizing it and pushed by various factors, we’ve gone about dehumanizing little by little that gesture that’s so endearing and human of sitting down at table and eating together.
Food has become for many something purely functional that’s supposed to be organized quickly and precisely within the work schedule. That privileged moment of family encounter around the table is getting rarer and rarer each day. In many homes that table that was made to be sat around now isn’t used for the parents and children to be together, sharing their lives, conversing and resting together.
Others go about getting used to «feeding their organism» in those impersonal meals at restaurants or at the corner self-service drive-through. Many find themselves obliged to participate in formal or work dinners, where the friendly gesture of eating together is substituted for one of interest, pragmatism or for show.
Jesus’ gesture of inviting people to sit down to share together a simple meal, blessing God for the bread we receive, can be a call for us. As Xabier Basurko playfully expounds in his study «Share the Bread», eating is much more than «introducing a determined ration of calories into the organism».
The need to nourish ourselves is above all a sign of our radical abject poverty. Obscurely we human beings perceive that we aren’t founded in ourselves. In reality we live by receiving, feeding on a life that, by means of the earth, is gifted to each one day by day. That’s why it’s a profoundly human gesture to stop ourselves before eating to give thanks to God for those foods, fruit of the effort and work of man, but at the same time, a gift originally from God the Creator who sustains our life.
But in addition, to eat isn’t just an individualistic act of biological character. The human being is made to eat with others, sharing our table with family members and friends. To eat together is to fraternize, dialogue, grow in friendship, share the gift of life.
That’s why it’s so hard to give thanks to God when one has more food that we need while others suffer destitution and hunger. We feel ourselves accused by those words of Gandhi: «Everything that you eat without necessity, you are robbing from the stomach of the poor». Maybe in the countries of plenty we need to learn to bless the table another way: giving thanks to God but at the same time asking forgiveness for our lack of solidarity, and being conscious of our responsibility before the hungry of the Earth.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
