We prioritize family dinner. With kids in sports, play, student council, and so forth, this means we might eat at 4:30pm one day and 7:00pm the next. Though we make sacrifices to eat together, being at table tends to provide some of the craziest times in our house.
The early Christians connected an actual dinner to the celebration of the Eucharist. This meal expressed their deep communion. It was called the agape supper (agape is Greek for “love,” or “self-giving love”). Now, communion literally means “with oneness,” and it implies a deep sense of union amongst persons who are coming together or who are being drawn together in love (agape). With the seven kids, it often feels like dinner is the opposite of an agape supper — there’s a lot of self-taking (whether it’s taking seconds or vying for attention) And “with oneness” is out the window. Instead, it’s more like “with nine-ness.”
Small people are standing on chairs, walking across the table, getting up to dance, singing the same one line an annoying song over-and-over, spitting out food in the trash can, falling off chairs, laying on the floor, exclaiming that certain things are “gross!” (setting the dominos in motion with all the little kids who now also think it’s gross), spilling drinks, rubbing chicken on their cheeks, stealing food, depositing “gross” food on the plates of others, feeding baby dolls, and so on. One kid even hums the whole time she eats.
Peaceful moments evaporate like trying to hold water in your hands.
I have said the most ridiculous things to human beings at the dinner table — things you’d think you’d never say to another human. For example: “Don’t rub your tortilla in your hair.” “Why are you trying to stab his face?” “Smarties don’t go in water. Why do you have Smarties anyway?” “We don’t wipe lunch meat on our cheeks.” “We’re not going to drink the soy sauce right now…errrr…ever.”
I suspect these types of things only happen at my house, so I’m not sure why I’m wasting my time and yours to offer guidance on how to deal with it. But, I’ll offer some unsolicited advice anyway.
A few years ago, we tuned into the Happy Place Homestead on YouTube. Some family members and friends recommended it. Happy Place portrays the life of Chris and Linda Padgett and their nine kids. Chris is a national Catholic speaker and he’s absolutely ridiculous. Turns out Linda is too. So, it’s pretty entertaining and wholesome.
In one of the episodes, you get a glimpse of dinner in the Padgett house. In a lot of ways, it’s not worlds apart from what I experience on a daily basis. But, there was one moment during the meal that caught my attention. Chris muttered something like, “Alright, Happy, Sad.” (That’s not even a complete sentence, by the way.) Suddenly, everyone’s focused and one-by-one each member of the family reported one awesome thing about their day, and one not-so-awesome bit. Kids listened to each other, asked each other clarifying questions, and were delighted to have the spotlight for a few minutes during the meal.
We thought it was a good idea, so we put Happy Sads into play for our own meals. We’re not totally consistent in doing it, but several times each week we have some Happy Sads and it’s always good. In fact, we’ve been doing it now for about three years. Here’s what we’ve noticed:
The kids love providing a report.
We all like gaining some meaningful insight about each other.
We’re establishing a culture of openness.
Things actually calm down significantly during that time, which seems to spill over a bit into the rest of the meal.
People are genuinely in a better mood during and after the meal.
In all seriousness, this is one of those little practices that establishes communion around the table and allows us to love on each other a bit as we grow as Christians in our own agape meal.
Happy Sads remind me why we prioritize family dinner.
In fact, those moments of being drawn together remind me of something else, too. Joseph Ratzinger (who would become Pope Benedict XVI), once commented that a meal is something like a “creation sacrament.” By this, he meant that something more than biological was happening, something mundane acquired a new dimension and became a fissure “through which the eternal look[ed] into the uniformity of the human routine.” “Human eating is something different from the food intake of an animal,” Ratzinger said. “Eating attains its human dimension by becoming a meal.”
Having a meal…means experiencing the delightfulness of those things whereby men are supplied with the gift of the earth’s fertility, and having a meal means to experience also, in such a reception of the choice things of the earth, the company of other[s]...a meal creates community…In a meal man discovers that he is not the founder of his own being but lives his existence in receptivity.
In other words, being together at table and bonding over food reminds us that all of life is a gift to be received — and that we are given to each other — in all the happy and sad moments of family life. This fact is worth every second of family dinner.