Your gifts we are about to receive

A few weeks ago, I was on a long drive to my friend's mom's funeral, praying for my friend and her family, myself and what might lie ahead throughout the next few days when I felt the desire to pray one of the common table prayers. It's a prayer I have said before I eat at least two to three times a day every day for the entirety of my life.

I balked for a minute; I wasn't getting ready to eat. Why would I pray this prayer now? Surely out of context like this, the words would make no sense. I offered that thought to God and felt God suggest it might be fun to try it, anyway.

So, skeptical and curious, I prayed: "Bless us, O Lord, and these, your gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty, through Christ, our Lord, amen."

I paused. It was, in a way, as if I was hearing the words for the first time. The phrase, "Your gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty" specifically struck me. I was driving to a funeral, toward joy of an earthly life well-fulfilled, yes, but also toward deep sadness and grief at the wonderment of loss that never seems to make sense to our human hearts, no matter how many times we encounter it. It didn't feel like I was driving toward gifts from a bountiful storehouse. And yet, I felt God asking me to pray this prayer very specifically.

Could it be I had been thinking too narrowly? That God brings gift out of everything, no matter if we perceive whatever is to come as "good" or "bad?" There are gifts, coming.

Praying this prayer out of context helped me see it in a new context: what we are praying for is to be prepared for blessing. Everything is God's; we are asking to be opened for the riches to come. We ask audaciously and humbly for blessing, that what is to come might be made into blessing, having the boldness to acknowledge each thing as gift from God. We remind ourselves we can rest in the comfort that God has us, no matter what.

"Isn't rest a death?" my friend Merci Green wrote in a poem. Sleep, too, Thomas Merton writes, is a surrender. I am learning it is not so much up to me to figure out the words to pray to transform myself as it is for me to ask for grace and mercy and say yes to it, over and over and over again. This common table prayer is a death to what I perceive as gift or not, a rest from the way I try to control outcomes, a closing of my eyes to my sweet mind that tries to discern between what might bless me and what might not, so naively closing me off to things that could bless if I would allow God's grace to open my heart to receive.

This common table prayer is a prayer of surrender and expectation for all times, not only a prayer before I eat.