TR

By Tom Robotham

 

Recently I sat down to a lovely brunch with someone at 456 Fish, one of my favorite Norfolk restaurants. As I was savoring my first bite of Eggs Benedict, I noticed that my companion hadn’t yet lifted her fork. Instead, she was blessing her food.

I put down my fork and did the same.

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of saying grace before meals. When I was a child, my family did so regularly—if not at every meal, then at least over Sunday dinner and holiday feasts. Generally it was my father who led the prayer: Bless O Lord this food to our use, and us to thy loving service. And keep us ever mindful of the needs of others. In Christ’s name, amen.

I found it comforting. When I went off to college, however, I abandoned the practice. One reason was that I no longer regarded myself as a Christian in any conventional sense. I still had a deep sense of spirituality. But the act of saying grace was so strongly linked in my mind to my Christian upbringing that it now struck me as just another silly superstition.

Most people I know these days are either agnostics or atheists, and as such they share this attitude. Indeed, I suspect that if someone were to bless food in their presence, these friends and acquaintances would think it was weird at the very least—and might even feel a little uncomfortable. In their minds, only religious zealots say grace.

But I think they are missing the point.

The act of saying grace needn’t be grounded in any religious sentiment at all. At its core it is simply about mindfulness: an opening of space in the heart and mind to consider the people who grew and harvested the ingredients, transported them, prepared them and brought them to the table—not to mention the wonders of nature that made all of this possible: The sun, the spring rains, and the fertile soils.

Nowadays, of course, this is problematic, since corporate agriculture has polluted the food chain with both chemicals and cruelty. Many of my friends are vegetarians or vegans as a result. I’m not sure that all of them are more mindful than my meat-eating friends. It seems to me that in some cases people embrace veganism because it is the hip thing to do and is thus more about group identity than it is about individual philosophy.

That said, it’s not my intent in this essay to weigh in on the pros and cons of eating meat, factory-farmed or otherwise. Instead I want to return to this idea of mindfulness and the ways in which we might cultivate it—not only at mealtime but throughout the day.

We could all benefit from eating and living more mindfully as a way of slowing down and cultivating gratitude for all of the things that we often take for granted. The trouble is, we live in an age in which a thousand cultural forces discourage mindfulness. The common practices of eating while working, watching television or even driving down the Interstate exemplify this.

The antidote to this toxic cultural trend, I believe, is the cultivation of ritual. This may seem counterintuitive. To many people, after all, ritual implies the very opposite of mindfulness—a rote repetition of words and actions, without a thought to their meaning. But just because something has been cheapened in practice doesn’t mean that its inherent value has been diminished. If you’ve ever observed a Japanese tea ceremony, or the creation and destruction of a sand mandala by Tibetan monks, you know that ritual can be beautiful.

But rituals need not be as exotic as that. There are many ways of incorporating simple rituals into everyday life.

Take the practice of listening to music, for example. It used to be done ritualistically. Today, more often than not, it involves a click of a button on our iPhones. I’m guilty of succumbing to this convenience myself. But whenever possible, I try to return to the more ritualistic practice of pulling a vinyl record from its sleeve, cradling its edges so as not to leave fingerprints, powering up the turntable, removing the dust with a Discwasher, and placing the needle in the record’s first groove. By going through this process I am giving the music the respect it deserves, and preparing myself to experience it as fully as possible.

The same goes for practicing an instrument. In my less mindful states, I may grab my guitar off its stand and start strumming a song to take a break from something else. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself. But there’s a better way. Glenn Kurtz describes it perfectly in his wonderful memoir, Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music:

“I am sitting down to practice,” he writes. “I open the case and take out my instrument, a classical guitar made from the door of a Spanish church. I strike a tuning fork against my knee and hold it to my ear, then gently pluck an open string….I turn the tuning peg slightly, bracing it between my thumb and index finger, until the two sounds converge….From string to string, I repeat the process, resolving discord with minute twists of my wrist….Finally I play a chord…and the instrument shivers with delight. The feeling is unmistakable, intoxicating. When a guitar is perfectly in tune, its strings, its whole body, will resonate in sympathetic vibration, the true concord of well-tuned sounds. It is an ancient, hopeful metaphor, an instrument in tune, speaking of pleasure on earth and order in the cosmos, the fragility of beauty, and the quiver of our longing for love.”

All of that, and Kurtz hasn’t even begun to play. And yet, the whole process strikes me as a kind of song in itself, undertaken with such mindfulness that he pauses to think about the wood from which his guitar was constructed.

Virtually anything can be ritualized in this manner. Physical exercise certainly can. Many people these days seem to endure it with as many distractions as possible—watching TV while on the treadmill, or listening to music while running. In a martial arts studio where I trained for many years, the approach was very different. It began with the donning of the gi and the tying of the belt in a precisely specified manner; then a bow before stepping onto the mat, and so on throughout the whole regimen. To some outsiders it seemed silly. But for me, it slowed down my mind and heightened my awareness of my own body as well as the ancient tradition of which I was now a part.

All of this reminds me of one salient fact—we have become slaves to technology, the unnatural pace that it has set for us, and the countless distractions that it hurls in our path. There is no escaping this, perhaps, in the world of work or school. The standards have been set by others. But in our leisure time we have a choice, and for me the choice was summed up in that single moment in which my brunch companion bowed her head: We can dig in, with half awareness of what we’re doing; or we can pause for a minute to say grace in whatever way is meaningful to us. In so doing, we invite grace into our lives. And that is surely something we could all benefit from in greater abundance.