Seriously Steve 2: She Was a Woman, So She Probably F*cked Up Somewhere

[MamaJunebug]

55 minutes ago, Nothing if not critical said:

Had to smile at this, because it's pretty much an exact translation of my family's very Catholic South German pre-meal grace. 
Agree that it has the advantage of being short and to the point :).

Well, there we go!  My ancestors came from Saxony, so I guess good words got around

 

27 minutes ago, Bajovane said:

My aunt used to say that prayer so fast it was practically one word!

My Catholic, always-hungry, cousin once tried to pre-empt that prayer, shouting, "Good bread, good meat, good G-d, let's eat!"  We all laughed ... well, we cousins did.

 

[Alisamer]

13 minutes ago, MamaJunebug said:

Well, there we go!  My ancestors came from Saxony, so I guess good words got around

 

My Catholic, always-hungry, cousin once tried to pre-empt that prayer, shouting, "Good bread, good meat, good G-d, let's eat!"  We all laughed ... well, we cousins did.

 

I know a lady whose go-to pre-meal prayer is "God's neat, let's eat!"

This discussion reminded me of girl scouts when we would usually sing a song before meals. There was one we were told was "an indian blessing", but upon googling it seems to actually be a rather explicit Maori song of some sort!

[griffin]

My favorite is  "Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub! YEAH GOD!"

[Black Aliss]

Just to remove any lingering doubt that I am a terrible person, I taught my kids a secular humanist prayer:

We are great and we are good,
And we work hard for our food.
By our hands our mouths are fed,
And we live until we're dead. 
Aaaah-men.

[Hane]

@MamaJunebug, Ex-Mr.-Hane-#2 was an engineer, too. He’d get all taciturn and tense, I’d ask him what was wrong, and he’d invariably say, “Nothing”—then two hours later he’d blow up over some totally inconsequential thing. (Strangely enough, we were usually able to reason through and reach compromises on the normal disagreements of married life.) To use a gross analogy, it was like he had a festering boil he just *had* to burst.

[JordynDarby5]

6 hours ago, MamaJunebug said:

Late to the party. As an old-style Lutheran family, our pre-meal grace was:

Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,

And let this food, to us, be blessed.

Ahhhh-men!

Devotional, respectful, bouncy, brief and sincere! The first time I visited my ex's Southern Baptist family and the grace rambled allllllll over the place with lots of "justs" and "oh, Lords" I thought I'd die of embarrassment at the way i couldn't stop rolling my eyes.

BTW, we also had a closing prayer before we got up from the table.

O Give thanks unto the Lord

For He is good, and His mercy endureth forever.

Aaayyy men!

I know Catholics who have a "for the gifts we are about to receive...." grace and that's fine too. Imagine Chris really getting on a roll and saying "grace" for 35, 40 seconds .... poor Maxgrands. LOL

Maybe Steve felt the family were being too corrupted by the non-Maxwells at a nursing home.  Surprise? baby party? Was it Steve-sanctioned? I can imagine the exit was swift thereafter.

 

5 hours ago, Nothing if not critical said:

Had to smile at this, because it's pretty much an exact translation of my family's very Catholic South German pre-meal grace. 
Agree that it has the advantage of being short and to the point :).

That's the prayer my brother and I used to say as kids as our pre-meal grace. I'm not sure where we learned it from. Our dad was raised Luthern and our mom was raised Presbyterian but we were raised neither. Just considered ourselves Protestant. No specific Protestant group.

Edited January 28, 2021 by JordynDarby5

[PennySycamore]

@MamaJunebug,  my little Lutheran cousin used to say that Lutheran grace except the last two words came out Ble Blessed.  I think he was three at the time.  I imagine that he doesn't say it that way anymore as he's in his late 50s now.

[fundiefan]

My aunt was Catholic when she was married & we spent a lot of time at her house growing up. 

Bless us oh, lord

and these thy gifts which we are about to receive

from thy bounty, through christ our lord

Amen!

*pounds fists on the table* (and it was loud when there were six of us at the table)

"Let's Eat"

[courtlylove]

7 minutes ago, fundiefan said:

Bless us oh, lord

and these thy gifts which we are about to receive

from thy bounty, through christ our lord

Amen!

As a Catholic (growing up, not now) this was our grace before meals.

We also had a grace after meals - We give Thee thanks, Almighty God, for all thy benefits, Who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

One of the nicest pre-meal prayers I've heard is 

Bless us O Lord, bless this food, bless those who have prepared it, and give food to the hungry. Amen.

I'd still use this (if required) except for the 'Bless us O Lord' part. 

[Jana814]

I’m Jewish & I went to a Jewish sleep-away camp. We said a prayer before every meal. I can still remember it & I haven’t had to say it 3 times a day in 26 years. A few years back I was visiting a friend & her grandmother (a very Catholic woman was their) she asked me to pray & I managed to say the whole thing. I was so proud of myself. When I was done her grandmother thanked me for saying it. 

Edited January 29, 2021 by Jana814

[anniebgood]

We said Come Lord Jesus as our pre dinner prayer for years. My dad's family came from the Pommerz so I don't know if it came from them or not. My mom's family was Methodist and Southern Baptist and they had long winded prayers. 
We used to have one lady at church, when we allowed people to write their own prayers of the people instead of the lectionary, and she would go on and on and on. The self-written prayers ended with a new pastor. Many sighed in relief. 

[ophelia]

14 hours ago, MamaJunebug said:

Late to the party. As an old-style Lutheran family, our pre-meal grace was:

Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,

And let this food, to us, be blessed.

Ahhhh-men!

We had the same pre-meal grace. In German it is:

Komme, Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast,

und segne, was Du uns bescheret hast.

Amen.

So it's basically a word for word translation.

[TeddyBonkers]

@MamaJunebug a number of years ago at Grandma's house, we had to start combining the "Come Lord Jesus" pre-supper prayer and the after-supper "Oh Give Thanks" prayer. Said them one right after the other, because with 4 generations around 4 tables, none of us finished eating at the same time! ?

[smittykins]

My babysitter, who was raised Southern Baptist, taught me 

“Past the lips and past the gums

Look out stomach, here it comes!”

(Incidentally, my first Episcopal priest was also raised Southern Baptist, and according to him, his family’s mealtime prayers took forEVER.)

[MamaJunebug]

5 hours ago, TeddyBonkers said:

@MamaJunebug a number of years ago at Grandma's house, we had to start combining the "Come Lord Jesus" pre-supper prayer and the after-supper "Oh Give Thanks" prayer. Said them one right after the other, because with 4 generations around 4 tables, none of us finished eating at the same time! ?

Love love love that!!!!!

12 hours ago, ophelia said:

We had the same pre-meal grace. In German it is:

Komme, Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast,

und segne, was Du uns bescheret hast.

Amen.

So it's basically a word for word translation.

Thank you so much for that! I actually found really pretty piece of wall art with that at a Goodwill tor line $3.  Had it for years, gave it away JUST before a German-speaker Joined the family! Oh well, at least I told him about it.

12 hours ago, ophelia said:

We had the same pre-meal grace. In German it is:

Komme, Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast,

und segne, was Du uns bescheret hast.

Amen.

So it's basically a word for word translation.

Thank you so much for that! I actually found really pretty piece of wall art with that at a Goodwill tor line $3.  Had it for years, gave it away JUST before a German-speaker Joined the family! Oh well, at least I told him about it.

[PennySycamore]

This isn't about the before dinner grace, but about lengthy prayers.  At the most prominent Presbyterian church in my home town, the pastor was well-known for his very long closing prayers.  The women hated it because those stupid prayers made it impossible to plan Sunday dinner.  Every wife in that church deserved an InstantPot.  

[Bethy]

On 1/29/2021 at 8:58 PM, PennySycamore said:

This isn't about the before dinner grace, but about lengthy prayers.  At the most prominent Presbyterian church in my home town, the pastor was well-known for his very long closing prayers.  The women hated it because those stupid prayers made it impossible to plan Sunday dinner.  Every wife in that church deserved an InstantPot.  

I really, really can't stand preachers who think their time is worth more than everybody else's. I used to attend a church with a pastor who routinely preached way overtime and when criticized, he claimed that "I have to say what the Spirit leads me to say" so if you were criticizing his lack of consideration for everyone else's time, you were actually criticizing the Trinity. He once preached a sermon that went overtime on a Sunday when he was doing a baptism of an adult who was joining the church later in life...he allowed her to give a lengthy (like 40-minute) testimony of her entire life and then proceeded to insist on singing all the verses of the closing hymn. I was sitting there like, "Did this actually happen or is this some terrible dream I had?"

[Coconut Flan]

People forget you can just leave.  

A church I attended for a couple of years had to get a new pastor.   The search committee went for someone "who would increase numbers" in their opinion.  The church was affiliated with a retirement community and many of the residents would walk across the street to the church or take the resident bus.  This new guy was no respecter of time and blathered on and on either repeating himself or going off on tangents.  I'd been brought up with the polite you never leave church until it's done.  I learned from the retirees, just get up and go.  They would be late for lunch if they sat through to the end of his blathering plus they had no patience for a sermon that wasn't cohesive.  I followed their fine example out the back door the second or third Sunday and never went back.  I think the church kept him a year or so, but they lost almost all of the original congregation in the process.  The retirement community even broke ties and hired their own pastor.  

The important lesson is you don't have to have false respect for someone who doesn't respect you. 

[Bethy]

57 minutes ago, Coconut Flan said:

People forget you can just leave.  

You can't when you're the pianist. Also I can't remember what year this took place, but I do know my husband was in the picture (don't know whether we were married or dating) and he was my ride and wouldn't have been on board with a walkout. So I could've made a "statement" by walking out, but I couldn't have gone further than the church basement.

57 minutes ago, Coconut Flan said:

The important lesson is you don't have to have false respect for someone who doesn't respect you. 

^^Wish I had learned this a great deal sooner than I did. That pastor definitely fell into this category.

[Coconut Flan]

5 minutes ago, Bethy said:

You can't when you're the pianist.

One of the few people where it's tougher to just leave, but you can quit.  

[Hane]

I look back fondly to the summertime Masses of my youth. The church wasn’t air conditioned, and the priest used to skip the sermon on hot days so little old ladies wouldn’t pass out in the pews. Thirty minutes and out!

[smittykins]

@Hane, was that when you were required to fast for three hours before receiving Communion?(I’ve read that at an earlier point, you couldn’t eat/drink at all, not even water.)

[Hane]

1 hour ago, smittykins said:

@Hane, was that when you were required to fast for three hours before receiving Communion?(I’ve read that at an earlier point, you couldn’t eat/drink at all, not even water.)

No—this was right at the beginning of the time when the pre-Communion fast was shortened to an hour. (I’ll never forget my First Communion day, in 1960, when they still had the three-hour fast: My mom got me up in the dark at something like 5:30 AM to feed me breakfast. The parish gave us kids a pancake breakfast at the restaurant across the street from the church.)

When my mom was a kid, the pre-Communion fast started at midnight!

[FiveAcres]

My parents-in-law were devout Catholics and my partner is the oldest of twelve. When I started celebrating Christmas with his family, the routine was:

I think J, my FIL, went to Mass early on Christmas Eve.  The little kids would all be put to bed at their normal times. My MIL, M, went to midnight mass with the older kids. J would stay home and start prepping a huge breakfast. M and older kids would get home from Mass after midnight. Little kids would be woken up: "Santa came!" We would open presents and then sit down to the huge breakfast that J had prepared. After breakfast and cleanup, the older kids would sit around playing games much of the night and the little kids would play until they curled up little kid piles and went to sleep. (I assume they would then be carried to bed.)  My partner and I generally arrived about 11:30 pm and stayed through the breakfast. 

Christmas mornings were very, very quiet in that household. Generally J would be one of the first up so he could get a start on Christmas Day dinner. By the time I knew the family, my FIL did most of the cooking, something that he passed on to his five sons.  One became a professional cook and traveled around Europe for a while using his skills. 

 

[PennySycamore]

I think some of the Trad Catholics have gone back to fasting from midnight before they can receive Communion.