Introduction to the theme on the gentle art of blessing – Thesis statement on blessing
The practice of blessing is a way to make peace.
To bless is to speak well of another person. To use words that foster shalom, reconciliation, mutual understanding, words that that heal, strengthen, encourage, mediate conflict and aggression. Blessing can be other than words. You can bless with thoughts, imagination, prayer, actions. To bless another is to desire their best, their health, prosperity and favor. To bless is to pray and to imagine good things coming their way. To bless is to do acts of kindness for others. To speak well, to desire their best, to imagine their health, and to do kindness – this is what it means to bless. This practice of blessing makes peace one person at a time. Blessing can extend to one house, animals, ships, buildings, water, herbs, whole mountains, special vocations. The blessing makes these sacred, set apart for God use, and infuses these with sacred powers.
The practice of blessing releases God’s creative, healing, transformative power
God is the source of all blessing, and when we bless, we become channels of divine power, there is an infusion of God’s joy, love and light. To bless is to invoke God’s fortunate power, God’s spirit, God’s Word to fill the person we bless. To bless is to believe, to have faith that the Spirit of God, the Word of God, the love of God, the peace of God becomes real and active thru our actions. Blessing opens the door to the creative energy of the Holy Spirit, blessing releases sacred power, blessing heals and transforms us and our world, blessing creates God’s peace.
- ‘I say to you who will listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you...do to others as you would have them do to you.’ Luke 6:28.
- Peter writes about blessing: “Live in harmony, be sympathetic, love as brothers and sisters, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called-that you might inherit a blessing. [I Pet 3:9]
To bless is to desire and wish a person wellness, prosperity, Shalom, while to curse a person is to desire and wish a person harm and adversity, to abuse, to condemn, desecrate, or incite aggression. While blessing evokes God’s favor, cursing evokes God’s condemnati0n and those who are cursed are thought of as inferior, expendable, the object of Holy War, bound for hell fire.
In blessing, spiritual, invisible, immaterial power become visible and incarnate in our world. Blessing opens a channel of grace and salvation, reconciliation and liberation. Blessing acts to counteract the powers of hatred and fear and acts to set us free from the powers of sin and oppression.
To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O’Donohue
John O’Donohue, in his book, ‘To bless the space between us,’ believes that each of us can practice blessing and urges us to rediscover our own power to bless others. When we bless others, we are blessed in return. He writes, ‘whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you.” [xv] And when we are blessed by another, we are encouraged and refreshed. He quotes the poet Yeats, ‘feeling I was blessed and that I now too could bless.” [p207]
O’Donohue thinks of blessing as prayer or invocation. He writes, ‘blessing is a gracious invocation, where the human heart pleads with the divine heart.” [xiv] Again, “Blessing in the infusion of sacred power, the art of harvesting the wisdom of the invisible world.’ [188]
Blessing is invocation, but when you write or give a blessing, he does not think it is always necessary to use the word “God.” He writes, ‘the temptation in writing blessings is to employ the word GOD at every juncture. I have chosen not to do this.” He thinks it would be repetitive and is unnecessary. Rather, he suggests that the word MAY, ‘may you be in good health’, “May your travel go well” this word MAY is the ‘spring through which the Holy Spirit is invoked to surge into the presence and effect. The Holy Spirit is the subtle presence and secret energy behind every blessing ….” [xvi] In his perspective, each person from different religious traditions has a unique intimacy with God. That when he offers blessing, he is doing it in the name and spirit of Jesus, while another may offer a blessing in the name and spirit of their ultimate concern.
In O’Donahue’s Celtic tradition, the act of blessing was part of daily life. Bake bread and you might mark the loaf with the sign of the cross. When you eat the bread, you might give a blessing, ‘The luck God put upon the five loaves and the two fishes may he put upon this food.” [Esther De Wall, Every earthly blessing, 4] When you finish eating, you might bless the time,
‘Who gave us this food and the sense to eat it.
Give mercy and glory to our souls
And life without sin to ourselves and to the poor.’
In the spring of the year, folks might wash their face with the morning dew for healing and refreshment. Each winter, on Candlemas, candles are brought to church to be blessed. Then, when trouble comes to you and your folk, you light a candle. Inanimate objects, rocks, bowls, water, oil, can become infused with divine power for protection and healing.
He cites the Austrian Poet Rilke, who recommended “ when life became turbulent and troublesome, it is wise to stay close to one simple thing in nature.” O’Donahue speaks of his friend who had great trouble with her mind, that when she felt her mind going, she would bring a stone into her apartment and concentrate on the stone, saying, ‘There is a fierce sanity in stone.” The stone, infused with divine grace, acts as a channel of healing and sanity.
Rituals of blessing may help us to be attentive to God in daily life, remind us to pray for another or that we are being prayed for. In Celtic spirituality there is no division between nature and spirit. Johannus Scottus Eriguena [800ad], a professor and monk, cited as ‘the greatest thinker of the Celtic Church, asserted that God was in all things. This is not pantheism but theophany, where one does not aim to worship nature but the creator thru the grace of nature. In the Celtic tradition, like Native American and some African religious practice, there is no fissure between spirit and nature, rather we find God’s presence within nature and oneself. So the Celtic spirit will write, ‘There is no plant in the ground but is full of God’s virtue.”
While wee folk do sin, wee folk are not defined in terms of our sin, as a plant is not defined in terms of its blight. O’Donahue writes, “At the core of being is not a wet, dark cellar that holds our wounds and destructive choices, but the soul that is fitted for eternal life. ‘Regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage.” [206] This is our ‘sacred heart’, and when we are blessed, this innate wholeness is awakened and called forth from within us. This sacred life of the spirit within us is kind and gracious to it’s core. When we are beset with fear, or when we need assistance, or wisdom, we call upon this invisible kindness and divine grace, what I would call ‘the abiding presence of Jesus’, or the ‘Sweet guest of the Holy Spirit.’ Blessing and being blessed are practices that help us to be attentive to the abiding love and word of Jesus.
For O’Donahue, “Blessing is the art of harvesting the wisdom of the invisible world.’ [188] ‘A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen.” Blessing awakens future wholeness, an awareness of our eternal life in Jesus. Blessing works to soften resentment and bitterness, to inspire forgiveness and peace, to increase our faith that what has been lost will be returned, what is damaged will be made whole. Sins of omission, regrets we carry, our participation in cruel acts that have harmed others, unresolved anguish and the negative powers that bind us can be reframed by blessing.
We all have the power to offer blessing. Blessing is not just for ministers, priests and rabbis. We all have the power and authority to offer blessing, to our spouse, children, parents, friends, colleagues. O’Donohue writes, ‘the key to who you are is in your soul…you bless from your soul, core of who we are is good, regardless of how bad we think of ourselves, “whenever one person takes another into the care of their heart, they have the power to bless.’ Pg 207
Blessing can be with words, but it may be in silence or in actions, a polite nod of the hear, folded hands, to bow, to smile, nod your head, all appropriate ways to bless another. Begin with silence, simple actions, with experience, work up to words, “May you be blessed with health, with strength, with courage, may you be blessed with wisdom.” Where the blessing is seen as a way to make peace and as a way to release God’s healing, creative, transformative power.
Two Applications of the teaching of Jesus, ‘I say to you who will listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you...do to others as you would have them do to you.’ Luke 6:28.
- A call for civility
There is a continuing turbulence in public discourse. Listening to the news is like riding on a plane experiencing turbulence, flashing warning, fashion seatbelts. Republicans are crazy, nuts, while democrats are socialist, radicals. We are not called to hate or curse those with whom we disagree, we are called to bless them.
Jim Wallish quotes Michael Sandel, Harvard professor and author of the book Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? “I think the reason for the breakdown of civil discourse is not that we have too much moral argument in politics, but that we have too little. What we really have are ideological food fights. Assertions hurled back and forth on cable news …. But what we don't have is a serious engagement with the competing moral and spiritual convictions that citizens bring to public life."
We don't need to give up our values, water them down, or throw out our convictions to have civil discourse. It is exactly these beliefs that allow us to engage in real dialogue. In that dialogue, we are called not to curse, demean, talk down, make fun, belittle, smear, rather we are called to come in the spirit of Jesus as peacemakers. We should all be able to say, in the words of Jon Stewart, "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler." - A call to bless our children and family, not to curse or yell or call them bad names.
I realize I fail to live up to my best intentions, that I am imperfect, that I do not always control my tongue, that there are times when I yell, curse, but I do not wish this to be my habit, pattern or practice, that I do not want to normalize cursing, but minimize it, and to turn more and more toward blessing, with the help of God. Aware of my own weakness, I ask you to be willing to refrain from calling children or adults bad names, from cursing others, to refrain from using words that injure, taunt, tease or belittle others. We are to be models of peaceful speech and blessing.
Regarding children, teasing, taunting, and cursing do not make for family peace. Negative speech, ‘you will never amount to anything, you are a bad boy, idiot, jack ass, stupid, mean, lazy, good for nothing” works to harm children. We can reframe negative speech to be more beneficial, where “what is wrong with you becomes ‘what you did was wrong.’ Rather than call them ‘selfish’ we might say we want them to be more generous, rather than call them rude, we can ask them to be polite, rather than careless, we ask them to be more careful, rather than lazy, we ask them to share. Repeating negative words over and over is like to curse, while repeating beneficial words over and over act to bless our children, and perhaps the act of reframing helps to calm down and channel our anger in a more constructive pattern.
Robert Fulghum writes, "Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones but words will break our hearts.” Cursing children injures their spirit while blessing them strengthens their spirit. Blessing children is a form of invocation, a way we pray for them. Maya Angelo tells story how her mother said she used to sing spirituals rather than respond to the taunts and the offensive behaviour of kids who were teasing her. - A call to hear our blessing in Jesus
In Jesus God’s word to us is blessing. In Jesus we are given God’s blessing. Paul writes in Ephesians 1, “We have been blessing in Jesus with every spiritual blessing, we have been chosen to be blameless before him in love. We have been adopted as children of God. God has blessed us in his beloved. Blessed us with forgiveness of our trespasses, blessed us with grace, blessed us with wisdom, blessed us with eternal inheritance, blessed us with the Holy Spirit, and blessed us with redemption.’