Prayery Milk Chocolate

'Quiet times' (regularly spending maybe an hour praying) can become pretty boring.

When this happens, they tend to become less frequent too.

A couple of years ago I began to combat my lack of motivation to spend time with God by buying a chocolate bar and a drink to take along with me. Like I usually do when going to the cinema.

In time, I felt that some of my prayers were lacking integrity, since said chocolate bars were not Fair Trade. Asking God for stuff while supporting a system that was making life worse for others, well that just didn't seem consistent to me. So I switched to pastries. This didn't last too long though, thanks to Dairy Milk going FT, followed by thin Kit-Kats. (still looking forward to the Kit-Kat Chunkies catching up)

Today is Easter Saturday, so this evening I attended the local church's annual multimedia meditation service. This is when the church replaces most of the chairs with cushions, soft music, low-lights and umpteen clever interactive stands for one to pray silently at. A whiteboard that you can write stuff on and then wipe clean, that sort of thing.

I found myself an extra chair and positioned it by the outside corner of one of the church's pillars. This enabled me to sit back from everyone else and just absorb the general atmosphere, without disturbing anyone.


Here I got out my Dairy Milk bar and cookie dough flavour Frijj drink. I did this surreptitiously, just in case any sad church official spotted something unexpected taking place in their world and decided to spontaneously make up a rule stopping it. This is not really a church attitude, but a human one, as arguably was my paranoia about it. Anyway, I got away with it.

So as I sat there, praying to God while eating one of my favourite chocolate bars and drinking my favourite drink, I realised that for me this had become communion.