Greetings, friends!

Do you like to cook? I do, and I find that as the weather grows colder my thoughts turn to certain kinds of food. I went all summer without making a pot roast, cooking an acorn squash, or baking bread; who wants the oven to be on all day when the kitchen is already roasting? But now, ’tis the season to make something hot—something sustaining—something with lots of gravy.

So I’m thinking today about Brother Lawrence, a French monk of the seventeenth century. He was a lay brother, a man of modest education, who served for most of his life in the monastery kitchen. His letters and writings have been published in many languages and editions since his death in 1691; in English, they are usually entitled The Practice of the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence said:

In the ways of God, thoughts amount to little whereas love counts for everything. And it is not necessary to have important things to do. I flip my little omelette in the frying pan for the love of God, and when it’s done, if I have nothing to do, I prostrate myself on the floor and adore my God who gave me the grace to do it, after which I get up happier than a king.

Preparing food is a wonderful opportunity for prayer—even if you are not planning to end your kitchen service with prostrate adoration. When you cook, you begin with ingredients that already carry many blessings. Suppose that your recipe calls for a cup of flour; that one ingredient concentrates the lives of many stalks of wheat. Through those lives, it concentrates many days of sunshine, many soft rains, and many fair breezes; and it concentrates the labors of the many people who grew and processed the wheat. In your kitchen, you combine it with other blessed ingredients, and you add your own special blessing. And what your hands make will carry all these blessings to the people you serve, bringing them health and wholeness, comfort and joy. When you cook, you embody some of the core virtues of the Christian (and pre-Christian Hebrew) traditions, where table hospitality and simple service are constant themes.

When you prepare and serve food, you are acting as an agent of God—a minister, in fact—connecting people to God’s blessings with your own hands. If you do it with a prayerful focus and feeling, the act of cooking and serving can be an act of prayer. Then, as my father used to say: Bless, O Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service, and make us ever mindful of the needs of others.

Amen.

Adam Webber
Pastor and Teacher