The Natural History of a Prayer

Traditions are hard to see from the inside. Only in adolescence, with its first stirrings of separation and evaluation, did I notice that our grace before meals was different from other families’. We had the standard default Catholic grace – short, sweet, and unchanging – recited in unison:

Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.

Sometimes we would vary it: if there was something extra to be thankful for or if it was someone’s birthday, my dad would add an extra Glory Be or Hail Mary. When we were little and looking extra rowdy, he would announce that we were doing Pentecostal Amen tonight. Pentecostal Amen meant that at the conclusion of the prayer, everyone would scream “A…MEN” at the top of their lungs, bang their hands on the table, and generally carry on like wild hogs. (A belated apology to all Pentecostal brethren).

Rob Barnes, Harvest Field, Linocut, 2022. Used by permission.

But there was one way in which, even on ordinary nights, our grace was different. At the conclusion, the point at which most families picked up their forks, we launched into another prayer:

Oh God, who wills not the death of the sinner,
But rather he be converted and live,
Grant we beseech thee
Through the intercession of the Blessed Mary, ever virgin,
All the angels and saints,
An increase of laborers for thy church,
Fellow laborers with Christ,
To spend and consume themselves for souls,
Through the same Jesus Christ, thy Son,
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
One God forever and ever,
Amen.

Then we could eat.

You will notice, if you try to say this prayer out loud, that it is difficult for the average set of pipes to get through all in one breath. This led to some quirks of communal prayer: a sudden silence, like a microphone shorting out, where we had all misjudged and overextended our breath, and gulped in air over a line or two. Then there was the pacing issue. On cold nights when the smell of buttered mashed potatoes wafted up from the trivets, we would noticeably quicken until the words ran together in a mumbo-jumbo, elision-prone, glutton’s Latin: livesnreignswithyinthunityoftholyspiritoneGodforeveneveramen – at least until one of my parents’ voices would rise above the crowd, inexorably grinding out a more appropriate tempo.

Eventually I learned that this prayer has a name: it is the Serra Prayer for Vocations (or at least a variation on it), promulgated by Serra USA. According to the organization’s website:

Serra USA was formed in 1935. It happened when a small group of lay people in Seattle decided to form an organization to promote and foster vocations to the priesthood and consecrated religious life. As a result, they chose Father Junipero Serra, the great missionary, as their patron and named the organization Serra Club of Seattle.

My father grew up saying the prayer before meals, which means, I assume, that my grandparents encountered it when they were enrolled in the Serra Club (as they were constantly being enrolled in one society or other). And we’ve had it ever since.

It should be noted that the prayer works, at least on a micro-scale. My father’s family said it every night before dinner, and my uncle became a priest. We said it every night before dinner, and now my brother is in the seminary. That’s the Serra guarantee: applied nightly, produces one priest (or at least one seminarian) per family, per generation, or your money back.

Of course, not everyone aspires to have a priest in the family. And many Christians may not be interested in calling upon saints, angels, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. But I would encourage them to try the prayer, nevertheless. The offending lines can be substituted with something about the merits of our Lord and Savior, making the subtext text, as it were. More laborers for the church is something any Christian of any denomination can and should pray for, at any point in time. We have been asked to pray for this by the person in whose name we pray, which is about as unsubtle as a gentle nudge gets. The harvest is great, but the laborers are few. Ask the harvest master to send more laborers.

As for myself, I have only become more attached to the Serra Prayer over the years, only more determined to keep praying it, in all its breathy unwieldiness, at my own table. Why? Partially because it’s the prayer we’ve been praying, and each renewed instance makes the discrete oration a desire coursing through time, gathering strength and numbers through each generation; it makes me a living version of one of those Buddhist prayer wheels turned perpetually by water. But mostly because the words of the Serra Prayer formed me in ways I was totally oblivious of, taking it for granted as I did, night after night over the table. Most of all, that first line: “Oh God, who wills not the death of a sinner, but rather he be converted and live.” It’s a missionary line from a missionary prayer by a missionary society named after a missionary – but the first frontier of conversion is one’s own heart. Night after night, I absorbed the idea that this is who God is – God, who wills not the death of the sinner, but rather he be converted and live – this, after all is said and done, and whatever else may be true, is who God is to you. Whenever I wandered, as I grew up, and however badly I erred, this belief was the invisible string tethering me and bringing me back, the long line upon which the Fisher of Men who makes fishers of men slowly, steadily, reeled me back in.