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BLESSING AT THE TABLE

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 3, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 9.

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BLESSING AT THE TABLE.

By Theodore Goodrich

THE custom of asking a blessing upon food before eating is a most beautiful one. What can be more appropriate at a grand banquet in the presence of the guests, who with bowed heads wait the rising of the minister who with the dignity of a Christian gentleman, invites the divine presence and blessing.
Fitting as this is, it becomes still more significant and touching when a single family, surrounding a table, perhaps scantily supplied with the good things of life, return thanks for what they have and then with perfect appetites and perfect humor eat without a criticism. The phrase, "I thank you," is a mark of refinement, and kindliness of heart. But the words are often used as an empty phrase without meaning. Often this is true in families where grace is said at the table.
They ask a blessing upon the food, but if it disappoints the taste, they utter criticisms that amount to maledictions. Every item on the well-filled table is subjected to the same test, and the grumbling continues to the end of the meal. The children have heard the heavenly Father thanked for "these evidences of his care," "these tokens of his goodness and mercy;" have heard him asked to "bless them to our use;" have seen the covers lifted, and in tones just as audible, heard the same "tokens" discussed, heard the deprecatory verdict of critical eye and palate. What must be the children's thoughts? Do they conclude the Father has heard the invocation and the thanksgiving and nothing more? The holy sacrament has been parodied in drinking saloons, but with all the ingenuity employed there to provoke levity, scarcely could a greater farce be enacted than some I have known that have occurred at the tables of church people. It would be a startling breach of etiquette for a guest to find fault with the food provided by the hostess, and yet those are exactly the circumstances I am narrating. So disturbed have I been, that the propriety of dispensing with the custom altogether has suggested itself, rather than dishonor it by association with what too frequently follows. It would be a wise alternative to do away with the blessing or the grumbling.—Theodore Goodrich, in Advance.