SAUCIER — Grace before meals

It is an Advent story, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

At first, I thought it was just about a man who had every reason to wonder what God was thinking.

He was a Black man, born and raised in the South, a target of racism and a prisoner of poverty.

He moved north, taking a lot of baggage with him. He found jobs, places to live, even a family, but he couldn’t find himself.

The bottle began as an entertaining distraction from the shadows of his past and the clouds of his future. But it soon became another of his demons, and the only way he knew to purge it was to try to drown it.

That didn’t work and neither did the drugs he sought to replace it.

Moving worked so well before, he thought he would try it again.

He didn’t know if it was the fear, the shame, or just simple selfishness, but he left his young daughter and her mother behind.

He spiraled down until there was no more room to fall. Finally, he felt something, or someone, pull him towards the light.

He joined an AA group and took hesitant, tentative strides along the Twelve Steps.

He found a small church whose members didn’t see him as an abject failure or didn’t care. He was good with either.

He was healing, inside and out. Then he had a stroke that rendered his spirit and his right side partially paralyzed.

It took time and the support of others, but he learned to accept his disability, and then to ignore it.

He began a slow path of reconciliation with the daughter he had abandoned, and finally went to visit her.

Shortly after returning from that trip, he went to the doctor. He had lung cancer that had metastasized in the brain. He was a dead man walking.

Some of the women in the church organized to cook meals for him. But for them, this wasn’t just cooking, it was a loving faith, mixed and measured. He said he ate their dishes slowly because he could taste their prayers.

Instead of a month or two, he lived three years, long enough to have a family again and long enough to be mourned.

Nobody said it was because of those meals, but nobody said that it wasn’t.

The Advent message?

Never underestimate the power of hope and change, especially when it’s conjured by cooks in their kitchen cathedrals.