I have always prayed before meals.
This has been ingrained in me since my earliest childhood. When I was very small, a stern throat-clearing from my mother would pause both my father and I mid-reach for the rolls. He sheepishly removed his hat and I sheepishly bowed my head.
The habit has stuck with me, at all manner of meals. My husband and I pray before meals at home; we pray before meals at work; we pray before food, period, even if we are scarfing down a crappy airport sandwich in the middle of the terminal.
I have never thought anything of it, until recently.
This is because, at the church we have started attending of late, congregants (some) make the sign of the cross. This is common across liturgical traditions but, coming from evangelicalism, a rarity for me. So rare, in fact, that the one time I only ever witnessed it once in high school when my Catholic friend, Sarah, crossed herself either before or after prayer during a Bible study.
What I remember: the whole room paused. Nonplussed, Sarah went about her business. But the gesture became the topic of much conversation later amongst the evangelical students who remained, many of whom disparaged it in the context of Matthew 6:7. The consensus seemed to be in the group that making the sign of the cross was deliberately performative, somehow hypocritical, a prideful way to be seen and noticed as a believer and thus never to be emulated by any of us.
For my part, I thought it was sort of cool. But I knew well enough to keep that thought to myself.
And now here I sit in a church and a congregation where people cross themselves like breathing. The practice feels awkward to me—not because I don’t want to do it (I love it, if I’m honest), but as though I don’t have any right to do it. As though my evangelical past is nudging me not to be showy, not to be too performative, not to babble—or, I suppose, gesture—like the pagans for the purposes of being seen.
Except I’ve never once felt strange about bowing my head in public to pray. That’s a public gesture, too.
And when I was attending the sort-of-charismatic, wildly-non-denominational Bible study that dominated my college years, I quickly learned to shed my awkwardness over raising my hands in the air for praise or prayer. I was in a context, in both situations, where the gesture or the practice was not familiar to me—but I was able to embrace it in sincerity in spite of my natural reticence because it expressed a sincere feeling or moved me into a space for worship.
For believers, these areas of Christian freedom and practice should be ours to engage with as authentically as wish. And we should allow other believers the freedom to engage in the way they find appropriate, leaving to them and to God how they choose to engage with their faith publicly.
Certainly, there are times and places we might in good faith have a gentle, prayerful chat with another believer on rare occasions where the Spirit moves us to intercede. I am thinking here of my college friend P., who had a particular habit of dropping to his knees in the student union with literal loud groans and wails to intercede for random crowds of passersby. No one told him to stop, exactly. But our campus ministry pastor did ask P. to consider if his choice of prayer method and manner was focusing those around him on him, or on God, and if his way of going about it might be alienating to the very people he hoped to win for Christ.
Still, by and large, we have much freedom in Christ to behave and express our faith in a way that is both meaningful and unique to us.
For my charismatic friends, this meant raising hands. For my liturgical friends, crossing themselves. For the folks emerging from my milieu, bowing my head in prayer before a meal. When I was young, I thought nothing of walking around decked out with my WWJD bracelets and crosses and dc Talk shirts—and regardless of the choices I might make now, I meant those stylistic choices then. I wasn’t doing it to look like the Uber Christian. I was doing it for God, and for me, from a place of genuine sincerity and earnest affection, to show what and who I loved.
I suppose what I want to say is that we’re allowed to change and grow.
God knows us always and does not expect us to stay in stasis. He meets us, always, where we are. Though believers should not perform their faith out of a prideful urge or for the attention and praise of others, we are meant to confess Christ with our lips and to wear our faith with great enthusiasm. This is who we are; this is what we live for; this is what we’ve chosen to arrange our lives around. However we do that is up to us. And that’s a great part of the beauty of the Christian faith: the variety of cultures and contexts reflected in it, all focused on the centrality of Christ.
About six months ago, I had lunch with a Christian colleague. I bowed my head to pray; he, not realizing I intended to do so, caught himself mid-sentence with an “oop.” Having finished my prayer, I lifted my head and starting talking, only to interrupt him mid-sign-of-the-Cross and prayer. “Oop,” I said.
We both laughed. And isn’t this how it should be, all of us making room for each other, and learning, and adopting what works and releasing what doesn’t, all for the glory and acknowledgement of Christ?
Let’s bless all the ways we express our faith in public.
Samaritan's Song 