Christ the King member and artist Michelle Abernathy created a lovely kitchen blessing for her home and is now sharing it as a free printable for personal use with the Homely Hours. Her to-do list contains the goal of making “prayerful beauty in small spaces.” Perhaps her Kitchen Blessing art may also add prayerful beauty to the small spaces in your home. The blessing is taken from Edward Hays’ Prayers for the Domestic Church: A Handbook for Worship in the Home. You can follow Michelle and see more of her art on facebook and instagram. 

“Blessed be this shrine of the kitchen.

“Blessed be the herbs and spices, and the pots and pans used to prepare our meals.May the ill-seasonings of anger and bitterness never poison the meals prepared here.”

May all our meals be sacraments* of the presence of God.”

Click image above to print the Kitchen Blessing Printable from Michelle Abernathy Art.

*We take the idea of “sacrament” here to refer to a vision of reality that sees all creation as an epiphany of the presence of God– a “sacramental ontology,” as in Hans Boersma’s book Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. Our priest, Fr. Wayne McNamara, notes:  “I highly recommend careful use of the word ‘sacrament’. The Church historic has very specific denotations for this word that reserve a special status for certain actions (2+5) called ‘sacraments’. It is fine, I think, to identify that something has a sacramental quality, but to call eating meals at home a ‘sacrament’ is to use the word in a non-traditional way which, without an adequate explanation, might blur these distinctions for the unaware.”