Published in Spirituality
Vol.23, September / October 2017; No. 134
Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy.
(Abraham Heschel)
The American film critic Gene Siskel once asked the queen of media communications, Oprah Winfrey ‘What do you know for sure?’ and, after being somewhat stymied by it herself, she fell in love with the question. Now she uses it regularly in her interviews with her guests. Siskel is deceased and Oprah’s not calling, so I’ve been asking myself this question, convinced that it stimulates constructive rumination and positive action.
One of my answers to Siskel’s question is ‘I know for sure the world is enriched whenever and wherever we enact blessing.’ Likewise, I know that the world is impoverished, as are we, whenever someone has not had the experience of being and feeling blessed, whenever people are indifferent to being blessed, or whenever people fail to bless.
THE BLESSING OF BLESSING
It is true that blessing connotes the acute awareness of, gratitude for, and response to the sheer gratuity of life and creation. It manifests itself as a fundamental consciousness and personal life orientation. But in this reflection, I am referring to more than feeling fortunate, counting one’s blessings, being grateful, or offering praise. I am also pointing to more than the knee-jerk, perfunctory ‘Bless you’ offered when someone sneezes or the rapid-fire sign of the cross before a penalty kick or when entering the batter’s box or a church sanctuary. Instead, I have in mind the actual act of giving and receiving a blessing. I’m talking about a deliberate word-act that involves a transmission of life in various forms— as the capacity to thrive, as care, benevolence, peace, protection, love, or divine presence.
Although special occasions call for and merit special blessings, and although blessings by priests, rabbis, or imams in religious services in religious buildings are good and edifying, I am talking about blessings offered in everyday life by everyday people. I especially have in mind self-designed, or friend, couple, and family-created ritual blessings of one another for specific though not necessarily special occasions.
I’m not in the advice business but if I were asked by young couples for ways to enhance their relationship or by couples wanting to deepen or reenergize their relationship after many years together, I would encourage them to cultivate a habit of blessing one another. I would urge them to create together simple blessing rituals and to establish the habit of blessing one another regularly, intentionally, slowly, and with one’s full presence.
Similarly, with young parents, I would encourage them to weave into their daily lives simple, thoughtful blessings of their children and in so doing develop a sustaining tradition of beatitude. Simply put, I would emphasize the blessing of blessing.
WHY GOD LOVES
To begin with, the act of blessing is inherently religious. Religious here meaning ‘to bind back’ or ‘re-connect to’ its source which is one etymological possibility. Whatever the context, means, or reasons for blessing, at its most basic, all blessing involves evoking, accessing, channeling, and sharing the life and beneficence that flows from its original, loving Source. Thus understood, blessing is inseparable from creation itself, from the sheer gratuity of life, and the original creative act of the Divine. The primordial, divinely-imagined and enacted benediction involved God choosing to share with the not-God that life which was originally indigenous to God alone.
When life is understood as a gift rather than a given it suggests a free, generous Giver. Echoing Rabbi Abraham Heschel, creation-centered theologian Matthew Fox emphasizes that the active, playful, and creative word or energy (dabhar) of the Creator that called the universe into being (as depicted in Genesis 1) is principally a gesture of divine blessing. He writes:
Blessing is . . . the desire behind the creation. For God, the Creator, like any artist, is not indifferent or neutral to his/her work of art. Like any parent, God loves her creation and that love which is an unconditional sending forth into existence is blessing.[i]
In this view blessing precedes creation and is the purpose of creation. Blessing, Fox explains, refers not only to the love of creation and creatures but also to the original desire that preceded and motivated creation in the first place. God does not just love what God creates.
GOD CREATES BECAUSE GOD LOVES
And God loves in order to bless. To be created by Love as a labour of love for the sake of love is our primordial and greatest blessing. For us to bless is to participate in and extend that free, generous, unconditional, and initial sending forth of Divine life into the world. Thus, whenever, wherever, and whomever we bless, we consciously share that original Divine love, presence, and goodness. To bless is to be a surrogate for God.
Fox submits that blessing is the theological word for goodness. So to bless, we might say, is to ‘good on another.’ It is to call upon, hope for, lean into, communicate to, and wish for the other the goodness or ’godness’ of God in whom we live and move and have our being.
Whether the blessing is a prayer of protection of someone or for a bountiful harvest or rain, whether it is a prayer for a loved one to thrive or be healed, whether it is the blessing of another to be courageous in being oneself or facing a difficult decision or resisting injustice, whether the blessing is for a newborn entering life or for a dying parent to pass peacefully from it, whether the blessing is for a daughter heading off to college or a friend going in for major surgery, whether the blessing is for the homeless man sleeping outside the laundromat or the desperate addict or a local or national leader entrusted with power and responsibility to serve the common good, the unifying principle of all blessings is that the one who blesses acts as a conduit through which the life, love, goodness, presence, and concern of God is made known and shared. To bless is to be a conscious and willing channel of life that is love. Whatever the circumstances that evoke the opportunity or desire for blessing, to bless always means entrusting the other into Divine love. It is to say, in essence, ‘God be with you’ or to humbly reassure, ‘God is with you.’
More so, in offering a blessing, something of the one bestowing the blessing is also shared. Biblical scholar Claus Westermann writes ‘The act of blessing, berekh, means imparting vital power to another person. The one who blesses gives the other person something of his [or her] own soul’ as well.[ii] Fox says something similar when he writes, ‘the gift-giver has truly put herself into the gift (for who gives a gift that is not representative of himself?). Thus, to know the gift is to know the giver behind the gift’ as ‘to know creation is to know the Creator.’[iii]
WHY HUMANS BLESS
Like God, we bless because we care, because we love, because we can and must. It’s a mandatum that comes with being human and with the incomprehensible blessing of being itself. Blessings can be given by anyone to anyone. And should be. To bless is an equal-opportunity venture. Blessings can be offered by elders, spouses, mothers, fathers, children, teenagers, friends, teachers, coaches, co-workers, neighbours, strangers.
Blessings can be offered for and to anything: the new day, a warm shower, eyesight, strawberries, bird song, a golden leafed Ginkgo tree, a dog companion, friendship, legs, the opportunity to learn, work, or play, as well as difficulties, disappointments, failures, suffering, loss, and the courage to face them. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote blessings in the form of odes. He penned them to broken things, a woman gardening, the smell of wood, the lemon, sadness, his socks, to name just some.
Blessings can be offered at any time. Jews are taught to offer 100 blessings a day which, daunting as it sounds, is accomplished by praying the daily prayers at each meal and during three prescribed times of the day beginning after sundown and rolling over to the morning and afternoon of the next day. Blessings are used to bid farewell to nature’s seasons and to greet the next one or to transition into the different seasons of one’s own life. There is no person, no moment, no situation, no life form too small or insignificant to bestow blessing on or from whom to receive a blessing.
There’s mystery and magic in a blessing, both receiving and giving one. Mystery, not as that which is yet-to-be-categorized or labeled, but as that ineffable dimension of all reality that holds a superfluousness of meaning; magic, not as superstition, but as the experience of aliveness and the quality of connection with something that is other than us. We bless because we are blessed. Persons who are awake to being blessed tend to become blessers themselves as William Butler Yeats alludes to in his poem ‘Vacillation.’ Of a numinous, blissful experience he had while sitting in a London shop with ‘an open book and empty cup,’ Yeats writes
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.[iv]
To move toward full human aliveness involves moving from the awareness of being blessed to the action of blessing. These are two essential steps in the dance of becoming. Becoming human and holy involves actualizing one’s capacity and vocation to be a blesser.
CREATING AND CELEBRATING EVERYDAY BLESSINGS
I encourage parents to design blessing rituals for and with your children. The earlier the better. Not just to cultivate a nurturing and nourishing tradition but to insure that our children know ‘where they come from’ and that they are cherished. A good place to begin is with a Cradle Song like the Welsh folksong All through the Night using Harold Boulton’s lyrics or when the children are older with a lullaby like James Taylor’s beautiful You Can Close Your Eyes.
Create rituals that are reverent, simple, and elegant or one’s that are simply fun. You can rely on blessings from sacred texts like the blessing from the Book of Numbers:
May the Holy One bless you and keep you;
May God’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
May God turn toward you, and face you, and give you peace.[v]
For a night time benediction with the littlest of children you can use playful blessings like this classic nursery rhyme from the 1700’s which can be spoken or sung as a lullaby:
I see the moon,
And the moon sees me;
God bless the moon,
And God bless me.[vi]
It is good to have a repertoire of reverent and delightful blessings, remembering that to bless is to enliven. Counsel like that from Zen master Yun-men with an accompanying touch of the head or cheek or a culminating kiss can be worked into a blessing that will bring a smile or giggle from Elementary school-aged children as you send them on their way:
In walking, just walk.
In sitting, just sit.
Above all, don’t wobble.
One of my favourite blessings that can be used with older children or adult family and friends at nighttime, or before a farewell, or on special occasions is a Irish blessing that the Wild Goose set to music within me only seconds after I read it for the first time in a card shop:
Wishing you always walls for the wind,
And a roof for the rain, and tea beside the fire;
Laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
And all that your heart might desire.
Blessings don’t need to be elaborate, just heartfelt. Use few but meaningful words. When beginning with young children, use the same words each time. Children especially love ritual that includes repetition and rhyme, some accompanying gesture, action, or touch as in all evocative ceremony and embodied prayer. For daily blessings, it is best to choose the same time. When first rising, before leaving the house for the day, before and/or after meals, or at bedtime are cross-culturally favoured times for ritual blessing.
When my children were in elementary school and junior high, before they were old enough to get themselves to school, we had a ritual. It was a morning, car ritual. A blessing to greet the day and to send them on their way. We usually waited to begin until we had a view of the foothills and the mountains behind our home. Then I would ask, ‘Who wants to lead?’
If I was lucky, that is, if the passengers were verifiably awake, not doing homework, and in an agreeable mood, one of them might have accepted my invitation and volunteered. Occasionally one would take the lead without my prompting. I admit, oftentimes my invitation was answered with silence or an indecipherable guttural grunt (German, Dutch, Neo-Aramaic?). Other times someone might say ‘You do it daddy’ in which case I would begin by saying with uncharacteristic enthusiasm for that hour,
‘Oh, what a day! It’s so beauti-
(and all passengers would respond) ful,
and grace-
ful,
and wonder-
ful,
and so we are
thankful.’
Then we would sing a short chant of thankfulness by the brothers from Weston Priory.
On my mornings to drive, whether the sunny day reflected our sunny dispositions or whether the early morning forecast was foul weather and foul moods, I tried to remember to invite us to bless the day that blessed us. Occasionally I forgot. I should say I remembered to forget, regretting that particular morning I had created this simple rite that sometimes interrupted my own irritability. Most mornings we entered in with willing hearts and joyful spirits. More than a few times over the years, a block or two shy of school where we would all part for the day, one of my children would suddenly realize ‘we haven’t done the blessing’ and take it upon him or herself to jump start our mini-morning liturgy and by doing so pull us out of our sleepiness or silence or blue funk by exclaiming ‘Oh, what a day!…’
I began this tradition when my now adult daughter was just a toddler. Her brothers were initiated into the mix when their drooling was not yet considered unbecoming. Besides being a morning reminder to myself, it was designed with the explicit purpose of creating a space, time, and context in which together we could cultivate blessing and the art of grateful living.
Life transitions are other obvious and significant times for blessing: first day of school or junior high or high school, a daughter’s first menstrual cycle, at a son’s designed rite of passage into manhood, when young adults leave home and live on their own for the first time, at wedding receptions, at retirement or what one author calls refirement,[vii] when sick, when dying, or at the time of death are just some of the points along the life cycle when blessings can be meaningfully bestowed. Establishing a pattern of blessing makes spontaneous blessings more likely and possible.
THE BLESSINGS THAT SAVE US
Sadly, it is because so much human breakage and suffering can be traced to a wound or series of diminishments whereby one’s sense of being the image of God was lost or damaged in early childhood or adolescence that it is best to begin bestowing blessings in a person’s life as early as possible. In one Catholic church I know, when an infant is baptized, the priest invites the oldest member in the assembly that Sunday to come forward, sign the forehead of the child with the sign of the cross, and bless the newest member of that community. This is not meant to be merely a sweet, quaint, token gesture. It is an evocative, instructive, and potentially transformative act of pastoral care, a brief but profound ritual moment in the ongoing and collective memory of the entire community of faith. More than an act of pastoral care it is a living reminder of our ‘holy communion,’ the communion of saints, and the sacred connection between all beings.
I remember another poignant example of the power of blessing and ritual. When I was 25 years old I did an internship in a ‘home’ for neglected or abused children in south Philadelphia. Each evening, Mr. Wilson, a grandfatherly houseparent who was the overnight staff person, would line up the children before they went to bed each evening and perform a simple but sacred ceremony.
It was remarkable how the children, normally rambunctious and unruly, quickly settled down, anxious and ready to receive the nightly unction they had been deprived of thus far in their lives. One by one, Mr. Wilson called the children forward by name. Sitting in a straight back chair and with the child standing close and face to face with him, Mr. Wilson poured baby oil into his hand. Then he tenderly, amply, lovingly rubbed it into each child’s head of hair, smearing the leftover oil affectionately on the child’s forehead and face. Oh, how even the angriest, bitter, foul-mouthed, damaged waif did glisten and shine!
This modest ritual said more and taught more about the sacraments, about who God is, and about who those children really were than any religious education class, catechism, or sermon ever could. It said something to those bruised and broken children about the nature of God’s love: that it is generous beyond measure, prodigal, personal, unearned, pure gift. It said something to each child regardless of race, creed, colour, gender, sexual orientation, DSM-classification, family circumstance, or the day’s misdemeanors and demerits, about their own dignity and sacred worth. And wherever they might be today, whether living on the streets or on the straight and narrow, in heaven or on earth, if anything saved those children, salvaged their fragile lives, it was not the daily dose of meds, counseling sessions, art therapy or group activities. It was the intimate elegance and indulgent superfluousness of Mr. Wilson’s nightly anointing with Johnson’s baby oil.[viii]
These are simple but profound examples of the power of blessing. Spiritual directors and pastoral counsellors, as well as pastoral staffs of local faith communities, hospitals, prisons, hospices, or homes for the elderly, would do well to recover or refashion ancient blessings for their work with people. But also grandparents, mothers, and fathers, married couples, siblings, friends, and compassionate pilgrims on the way would do well to bless one another. It is mutually enhancing when we call forth from those we bless and convey to those for whom we care the realization that they possess ineffable beauty, and are the beloved of God.
WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE
‘What do you know for sure? I know that every person is innately and infallibly precious, that each person, in Rabbi Heschel’s words, is ‘a synonym for an incarnation of uniqueness,’ and that ‘every human being has something to say, think, or do which is unprecedented.’[ix]
‘What do you know for sure?’ I know that each and every person is the bearer of divinity, is divinely treasured and blessed, and that it is our personal and collective responsibility to insure that each and every person knows this by heart. I know that it is a collective sin shared by all when (literally ‘God forbid’) someone leaves this earthly life without knowing and experiencing this truth about themselves in the core of their being. As Rabbi Heschel writes, ‘Some are guilty, all are responsible.’ To be blessed is to know and experience oneself as treasured. In this sense, any word, gesture, or deed that communicates to another, ‘I see you. You matter. You are good, appreciated, of inestimable worth, an unrepeatable miracle, beautiful, the beloved of God’ is to bless and to bring beatitude into the world. I know that to become human involves being a bearer of beatitude.
‘What do you know for sure?’ I know that wherever and whenever blessing happens sincerely and wholeheartedly—with what the rabbis called kavanah or inner participation — it brings life and gratefulness, infuses the moment and the participants with reverence, worth, and a sense of the sacredness of life. No one who is reverently blessed goes away afterwards feeling unseen or unimportant. To the contrary, they feel acknowledged, special (from the Latin root word meaning ‘to see’ or ‘look upon’), worthwhile, even celebrated, and part of some community, some mystery bigger than themselves.
BLESSING AS INTIMATE CONNECTION
As stated above, although there is no statute of limitations on initiating blessing, the most effective way to cultivate a natural affinity for offering your children (or grandchildren) personal blessings, is by starting to do so when they are infants, toddlers, or preschoolers. For many this is quite instinctive when their children are cuddly babies or little rug-rats. But my sense is that as the children grow up it becomes not only more important but more difficult, especially for fathers, to bless their children, especially their sons, if they have not done so when they were younger.
Months after hearing me tell the story of Mr. Wilson’s nightly anointing, a man who was a former professional baseball player in the Mexican league, now a high school principal and a self-described man’s man, told me he had begun a nightly ritual in which he took hand lotion and rubbed the feet of his four-year old son as he quietly talked to him, and then blessed him with a kiss before bed. The chances of that son feeling cherished by his father, and the odds of that father being able to embrace the intimacy necessary to bless his son as a young or grown man increased exponentially by his decision to design and enact this simple ritual when his son was young.
Ideally, for committed couples too, it is best to begin a regular practice of blessing early on when love is still new, juicy, developing, and before patterns of behaviour and relating become too safe and too deeply entrenched. Of course the ideal is seldom the particular deal with which we are dealing, so you begin where you are and if you are many years married you dare to begin there. You dare the love you professed so many years ago with so much sincerity and even more naivety.
To state the overlooked obvious, because it involves the sharing of oneself as well as life and love, blessing is essentially and necessarily relational. To bless someone we love is to form each time a more intimate connection. For many, intimacy is difficult and demanding and, as a result, can feel awkward, vulnerable, scary, and risky. Intimacy bears no resemblance to what some people pejoratively call ‘touchy-feely’ and use as a ruse to hide their discomfort and fear. Blessing should always give us a bit of a pause, never become passé or rote or pro forma, but rather always hold a certain sense of awe (the Hebrew word berekh usually translated ‘to bless’ has the connotation of kneeling). We should neither underestimate the intimacy and vulnerability asked of us in genuine blessing nor miscalculate the danger of any ritual becoming pro forma. It is up to the couple to insure this doesn’t happen. Although freshness and creativity are important, the real antidote to personal blessings between couples becoming lifeless and mechanical is not so much frequent changes but deeper presence and more complete surrender to the other.
I am certain that for most married couples, a face-to-face, reverent, non-rushed, prayerful blessing of their partner while being wholly present is far more intimate and vulnerable than sex. To exchange blessings that you have taken the time to create and share, not just once in a blue moon while on a Marriage Encounter weekend retreat or at a Valentine’s Mass for married couples but regularly or even intermittently regularly, is a daring and courageous gift, but it is a potentially profound and fecund one as well.
To take the time to sit or stand face-to-face and eye-to-eye with your mate, to behold the face of this mystery-laden, ineffable stranger who is the precious partner you have gone to bed with for 6, 12, 24, 48 years, to bless one another as you do so with carefully chosen words or with words you decided on together, words exchanged with an accompanying gesture — holding hands or holding the other’s face in your cupped hands, caressing one another’s cheeks, perhaps with spiced-oil prepared and used only for these intimate consecrations, maybe with a meaningful sign to bless him or her — is to call on and be the channel of the goodness or godness from which all blessings flow. It is consciously to offer that secret gift and benediction to one another with a bit more of your magnanimous self and a bit less of your parsimonious ego each time. It is to rejoice and delight in the blessing of the other, to hope for his or her thriving and well-being, and acts as a holy hint of what it really means to ‘make love.’
A FINAL BLESSING
What we know for sure is not so much what is empirically verifiable. It’s what enlivens and sustains us. It’s what gives us meaning, purpose, and peace. Like the North Star, it’s what orients our lives and guides us on our way. It’s what we know most intimately and deeply, usually through love and suffering, through agony and ecstasy, failure and discovery.
What I know for sure today is that ‘Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy,’ and that to participate in the divine benediction of life and creation means I am called to bless. What I know for sure, what I have discovered through my own stumbles and tumbles as well as my cartwheels of grace, is not merely that being blessed engenders the desire and capacity to bless. It does. What I have discovered is that to bless is to be blessed.
[i] Matthew Fox, Original Blessing, p. 44.
[ii] Claus Westermann, Blessing: In the Bible and the Life of the Church, p. 19.
[iii] Matthew Fox, Whee! We, Wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual, Prophetic Spirituality, p. 74.
[iv] Richard J. Finneran, The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Dreams, and Prose (Scribner, Revised Edition, 2002). 117-119
[v] Numbers 6:24-26.
[vi] Joseph Ritson, Gammer Gurton’s Garland, or the Nursery Parnassus (London: Forgotten Books, 2017), 29.
[vii] James Gamboni, Refirement: A Boomer’s Guide to Life After 50 (Minneapolis, MN: Kirk House Publishers, 2000).
[viii] I told this story slightly differently here: “An Elegant Sufficiency: Symbol and Gesture in Christian Initiation,” Catechumenate: A Journal of Christian Initiation, 24, no. 6 (November 2003), 2-13.
[ix] Heschel, Who Is Man?, 36-38.
© Daniel J. Miller, Ph. D. All rights reserved.