To Retrieve the Lost Art of Blessing
STRUCTURES OF KINDNESS
There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves. Here in Conamara, the mountains are terse and dark; left to themselves they would make for a brooding atmosphere. However, everywhere around and in between there are lakes. The surface of these lakes takes on the variations of the surrounding light to create subtle diffusions of color. Thus their presence qualifies the whole landscape with a sense of warmth and imagination. If we did not feel that some ultimate kindness holds sway, we would feel like outsiders confronted on every side by a world toward which we could make no real bridges.
The word kindness has a gentle sound that seems to echo the presence of compassionate goodness. When someone is kind to you, you feel understood and seen. There is no judgment or harsh perception directed toward you. Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive; it wants nothing back for itself. Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference.
Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Hier zu sein ist so viel—to be here is immense. Nowhere does the silence of the infinite lean so intensely as around the form of a newly born infant. Once we arrive, we enter into the inheritance of everything that has preceded us; we become heirs to the world. To be born is to be chosen. To be created and come to birth is to be blessed. Some primal kindness chose us and brought us through the forest of dreaming until we could emerge into the clearance of individuality, with a path of life opening before us through the world.
The beginning often holds the clue to everything that follows. Given the nature of our beginning, it is no wonder that our hearts are imbued with longing for beauty, meaning, order, creativity, compassion, and love. We approach the world with this roster of longings and expect that in some way the world will respond and confirm our desire. Our longing knows it cannot force the fulfillment of its desire; yet it does instinctively expect that primal benevolence to respond to it. This is the threshold where blessing comes alive.
WE LIVE ON THE SHORELINE OF THE INVISIBLE
The beauty of the world is the first witness to blessing. In a land without blessing, no beauty could dwell.
The eye adores the visible world. Once it opens, it is already the guest at an unending feast of vision: so much difference clothed in such diverse colors, the sheer range of presence suggested in different intensities of surface, the fecund nearness and the enigmatic distance. For the exploring eye there could be no dream greater than the world that is. The human eye falls in love with the enthralling plenitude of the visible. This fascination is addictive; then almost immediately our amnesia in relation to the invisible sets in. We live in this world as if it had always been our reality and will continue to be. However, when we think about it, we recognize that invisible light does accompany a new infant into the world. We also notice, at the other end, how the shadows of old age are lit more and more from the invisible world. Yet in our day-to-day lives, we continually fail to recognize the invisible light that renders the whole visible world luminous. This light casts no shadow; or perhaps we could invert the usual priority we give to the visible and say that the actual fabric and substance of the visible world is in fact the shadow that this invisible light casts.
Fixated on the visible, we forget that the decisive presences in our lives—soul, mind, thought, love, meaning, time, and life itself—are all invisible. No surgeon has ever opened a brain to discover crevices full of thoughts. And yet our thought determines who we think we are, who we think others are, and how we consider the world to be. We are not the masters of our own reality; granted, we do choose the lenses through which we see the world, yet the shape and color of these lenses are offered to us from the primal benevolence of the unseen world. Everything that is here has had its origin there. The invisible is the parent of the visible.
Before time began the invisible world rested in the eternal. With the creation of our world, time and space began. Every stone, bush, raindrop, star, mountain, and flower has its origin in the invisible world. That is where the first sighting of each of us occurred. We emerged from the folds of time, each an intense mixture of visible and invisible. Our eyes cannot see this world. Our hearts are usually too encumbered to navigate it, our minds too darkened to decipher it. As the Bible says: “Now we see through a glass darkly.” Yet it is exactly on this threshold between visible and invisible that our most creative conflicts and challenges come alive. Each new beginning, each new difficulty always finds us on that frontier. And this is exactly why we reach for blessing. In our confusion, fear, and uncertainty we call upon the invisible structures of original kindness to come to our assistance and open pathways of possibility by refreshing and activating in us our invisible potential. When we bless, we work from a place of inner vision, clearer than our hearts, brighter than our minds. Blessing is the art of harvesting the wisdom of the invisible world. From day to day it offers us new gifts.
THE WONDER AND STRANGENESS OF A DAY
Each new day is a path of wonder, a different invitation. Days are where our lives gradually become visible.
Often it seems that we have to undertake the longest journey to arrive at what has been nearest all along. Mornings rarely find us so astounded at the new day that we are unable to decide between adventures. We take on days with the same conditioned reflex with which we wash and put on our clothes each morning. If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we might learn how precious each day is. There are people who will never forget today.
A man awakes this morning beset by an old emptiness that has gnawed for years. By now he is adept at managing it. He accommodates himself to another day; instinctively, he sets the compass of his mind. Later in the morning, at work, he receives a call from a woman he once knew. He had never forgotten her. He always sensed that she might have had the measure of his emptiness. Now, out of the blue, she is wondering if they might meet for dinner. As he puts down the phone, he imagines he can hear a door opening—and senses that things may never be the same again.
Somewhere else a woman awakes beside her husband; she already feels weary at the prospect of the morning’s work and the rest of the day minding young children. But she stops herself, coaxes her heart to realize that things are actually great. The relationship has deepened in the last while, the awkwardness with their eldest son has calmed, and the money situation has improved significantly. She gets up, goes to take her shower. At this stage she is even singing quietly to herself. She does her routine breast check and finds the lump. An abyss opens. She will never forget this day.
Meanwhile, we dodder through our days as if they were our surest belongings. No day belongs to us. Each day is a gift. Tragically, it is often only when we are about to lose a thing that the scales fall from our eyes, but it is usually too late. On its way toward us, destiny travels silently, until it arrives. Then something we had never expected becomes loud around us. Time is where eternity unfolds. The contemplative tradition has always recognized the morning as the time to recognize the new day with a sense of creative expectation and openheartedness.
TO RECEIVE EACH DAY AS AN INVITATION
One night recently I visited our family farm. A calf had just been born. It had just slumped to earth in a wet, steaming mass. At midnight I went out to look at the cow again; by this time she had licked her new calf dry and he had sucked his first milk. Everything was mild and gentle, illuminated by the moon’s mint light. What a beautiful night it was to arrive on earth. Even if this newborn were a genius, it could never possibly imagine the surprise of the world that was waiting when the dawn would break in a miracle of color illuminating the personality of mountains, river, and sky.
The liturgy of dawn signals the wonder of the arriving day. The magic of darkness breaking through into color and light is such a promise of invitation and possibility. No wonder we always associate the hope and urgency of new beginning with the dawn. Each day is the field of brightness where the invitation of our life unfolds. A new day is an intricate and subtle matrix; written into its mystery are the happenings sent to awaken and challenge us.
No day is ever the same, and no day stands still; each one moves through a different territory, awakening new beginnings. A day moves forward in moments, and once a moment has flickered into life, it vanishes and is replaced by the next. It is fascinating that this is where we live, within an emerging lacework that continuously unravels. Often a fleeting moment can hold a whole sequence of the future in distilled form: that unprepared second when you looked in a parent’s eye and saw death already beginning to loom. Or the second you noticed a softening in someone’s voice and you knew that a friendship was beginning. Or catching your partner’s gaze upon you and knowing the love that surrounded you. Each day is seeded with recognitions.
The writing life is a wonderful metaphor for this. The writer goes to his desk each morning to meet the empty white page. As he settles himself, he is preparing for visitation and voyage. His memory, longing, and craft set the frame for what might emerge. He has no idea what will come. Yet despite his limitations, his creative work will find its own direction to form. Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.
TO CROSS THE THRESHOLDS WORTHILY: WHEN A GREAT MOMENT KNOCKS ON THE DOOR OF YOUR HEART
It remains the dream of every life to realize itself, to reach out and lift oneself up to greater heights. A life that continues to remain on the safe side of its own habits and repetitions, that never engages with the risk of its own possibility, remains an unlived life. There is within each heart a hidden voice that calls out for freedom and creativity. We often linger for years in spaces that are too small and shabby for the grandeur of our spirit. Yet experience always remains faithful to us. If lived truthfully and generously, it will always guide us toward the real pastures.
Looking back along a life’s journey, you come to see how each of the central phases of your life began at a decisive threshold where you left one way of being and entered another. A threshold is not simply an accidental line that happens to separate one region from another. It is an intense frontier that divides a world of feeling from another. Often a threshold becomes clearly visible only once you have crossed it. Crossing can often mean the total loss of all you enjoyed while on the other side; it becomes a dividing line between the past and the future. More often than not, the reason you cannot return to where you were is that you have changed; you are no longer the one who crossed over. It is interesting that when Jesus cured the blind man, he instructed him not to go back into the village. Having crossed the threshold into vision, his life was no longer to be lived in the constricted mode of blindness; new vision meant new pastures.
Today many people describe themselves as “being in transition.” In a culture governed by speed, this is to be expected, for the exterior rate of change is relentless. This “transition” can refer to relationships, work, and location; or more significantly, to the inner life and way of viewing the world. Yet the word transition seems to be pale, functional, almost inadequate and impersonal, and does not have the same intensity or psychic weight as perhaps the word threshold evokes. The word threshold was related to the word thresh, which was the separation of the grain from the husk or straw when oats were flailed. It also includes the notions of entrance, crossing, border, and beginning. To cross a threshold is to leave behind the husk and arrive at the grain.
THE LOSS OF RITUAL LEAVES US NAKED IN OUR RITES OF PASSAGE
A threshold is a significant frontier where experience banks up; there is intense concrescence. It is a place of great transformation. Some of the most powerful thresholds divide worlds from each other: life in the womb from birth, childhood from adolescence, adulthood from middle age, old age from death. And on each side there is a different geography of feeling, thinking, and being. The crossing of a threshold is in effect a rite of passage.
Our culture has little to offer us for our crossings. Never was there such talk of communication or such technology to facilitate it. Yet at the heart of our newfound wealth and progress there is a gaping emptiness, and we are haunted by loneliness. While we seem to have progressed to become experts in so many things—multiplying and acquiring stuff we neither need nor truly want—we have unlearned the grace of presence and belonging. With the demise of religion, many people are left stranded in a chasm of emptiness and doubt; without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of people’s lives, the key crossings pass by, undistinguished from the mundane, everyday rituals of life. This is where we need to retrieve and reawaken our capacity for blessing. If we approach our decisive thresholds with reverence and attention, the crossing will bring us more than we could ever have hoped for. This is where blessing invokes and awakens every gift the crossing has to offer. In our present ritual poverty, the Celtic tradition has much to offer us.
THE CELTIC SENSE OF TIME AS CREATIVE OCCASION
Always, when my father left home to go to work in the fields or to go to town, the last thing he did as he walked out the door was to turn back toward us in the kitchen and inhale a full explicit breath. I had never really thought about this image from childhood until I started writing this book. And it seems that what he was doing as he left was inhaling the spirit of his loved ones to nourish and protect his journey, coming back to take for himself a blessing-breath.
We know that there will be a time when a certain farewell will be the last. In French, au revoir and in German Auf wiedersehen both explicitly state the wish that we might be seen again. In Irish, we say slan leat or go dte tu slan: “safety be with you,” or “may you go safely.” Our forms of greeting express joy and delight that the person is still there. In German, the surprise is almost palpable: Da bist Du…“there you are.” Or Gruss Dich “greetings to you.”
In Irish we say, Dia Dhuit, “God to you,” and the response is, Dia ‘s Muire Dhuit, “God and Mary to you.” Beyond the courtesy of convention, this manner of words suggests that your being there still is an act of divine kindness. Blessing always shores up the heart against the ravages of time; this is wonderfully expressed in Conamara when one puts on a new garment: Go maire tu agus go gcaithe tu e agus go gcaithe tu seacht gcinn nios fearr na e: “May you live and may you wear it and may you wear seven more even better than it.” Blessing is intended to strengthen human presence, and it often harnesses the energy of nature to affect this.
In the Celtic world there is a great tradition of blessing. Because it was primarily an oral tradition, the blessings were learned by heart and handed on from one generation to the next. There are blessings for every possible occasion. The Celtic mind had a refined sense of occasion.
The human mind cannot encompass the full weight of time. We break time up into divisions we can manage. But the word occasion suggests a period of special time when something of significance unfolds. In Western culture, occasion is now mere social occasion. Yet for the person who lives time consciously, there is a continuous undertow of possibility always at work. Accordingly, it is received and appreciated as continuous occasions of invitation. To live like this is to experience time as a constant invitation to growth—to become more than you have been, to transform loss into presence, and to allow what is false to fall away. At the gates of time, blessing waits to usher toward us the grace we need.
TO BLESS WITH HOLY WATER
While blessing is an act of the senses expressed in word and gesture, the source and the destination of blessing remain invisible. Perhaps this is why water has always been used as a vehicle of blessing. In elemental terms, water stands midway between the physicality of earth and fire and the unseen air. Water is colorless, odorless, and transparent; it has a huge affinity with the unseen and yet achieves a tentative and sometimes forceful visibility. The origin of water retains its secrecy; the source is always out of human view. Crucially water is the mother and vehicle of life. The human body is over eighty percent water, and the fertility of the earth is directly dependent on it. Given this metaphoric range, water is the ideal liturgical vehicle to confer blessing.
In the Christian tradition, water is always blessed before use; this is understood to infuse the water with the energy of the Holy Spirit, the carrier of the Trinity. Holy water is used in the sacraments to bless and confer transformation. Before the coffin is lowered, the grave is blessed. Holy water is often sprinkled at night for the souls in purgatory, and also for exiles and to protect those traveling. It is also often carried in cars to protect from accident and danger. Furthermore, it is held to be powerful in protecting us from evil; no such spirit would enter a circle of holy water.
Traditionally in Ireland, the act of blessing was not separate from daily life. When baking bread, a woman would put the sign of the cross on the dough with a knife. Each year on St. Bridget’s Eve, my uncle always made a little timber cross and nailed it to the ceiling to protect our home for the next year. On this night it is also customary to leave a piece of cloth out overnight, then take it in the next morning dripping with dew. This was the Brath Bride; it brings luck and blessing for the year. On May morning—Beltane—people often wash their faces in the morning dew for healing and health. On St. John’s night, some of the fire is put out along the fields of the farm to protect it. On February 3, the feast day of Saint Blaise, people have their throats blessed. February 2 is the feast of Candlemas. On this day wax candles are brought to the church to be blessed. It is very important to have these blessed candles in the house. Anytime during the year when there is trouble the blessed candle is lit. Furthermore, inanimate objects when blessed can become vehicles of grace and protection; this includes medals, scapulars, rosaries, and crucifixes.
In all these modes of blessing the objects are seen to take on the infusion of sacred power, and long after the occasion of blessing has passed the blessed object still retains its protective power. There is certain poignancy in this belief that blessing can enter the silence and privacy of the object and continue to dwell there. It changes the nature of the object; it is no longer simply itself. Now it is a live sanctuary from which the divine light and protection proceed. Be it water, metal, fire, or candle: each can be penetrated and benevolently permeated by the breath of blessing. These practices also recognize how precarious the work of day-to-day living can be: there can be danger or darkness anywhere. Habitual time can turn in a second, and suddenly some unforeseen suffering is taking up tenancy in one’s life. These blessing objects are meant to become active at these frontier apertures where one could be damaged.
A BLESSING IS A PROTECTIVE CIRCLE OF LIGHT
What is a blessing? A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen. Life is a constant flow of emergence. The beauty of blessing is its belief that it can affect what unfolds.
To be in the world is to be distant from the homeland of wholeness. We are confined by limitation and difficulty. When we bless, we are enabled somehow to go beyond our present frontiers and reach into the source. A blessing awakens future wholeness. We use the word foreshadow for the imperfect representation of something that is yet to come. We could say that a blessing “forebrightens” the way. When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.
The word blessing comes from the Old English: Blêtsian, blêdsian, blœˆdsian. As intimated in the sound of blêdsian it means “to sanctify or consecrate with blood.” It is interesting that though the word blessing sounds abstract, a thing of the word and the air, in its original meaning it was vitally connected to the life force. In ancient traditions blood was life; it connected the earthly, the human, and the divine. To bless also means to invoke divine favor upon.
We never see the script of our lives; nor do we know what is coming toward us, or why our life takes on this particular shape or sequence. A blessing is different from a greeting, a hug, a salute, or an affirmation; it opens a different door in human encounter. One enters into the forecourt of the soul, the source of intimacy and the compass of destiny.
Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of a life’s journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.
BLESSING IS FOR THE PILGRIM MIND
There is an implicit wholeness in the human heart; it is a huge treasure house that we draw on every day. Ultimately it is what anchors and guides us. A simple metaphor for this is a physical wound. When you have a wound in your hand, it always heals from the edges; the center is the last place to heal. Clearly it is not the wound that has finally relented and decided to heal itself. Rather it is the surrounding health and wholesomeness of your body that invades the stricken place with healing. The mind of blessing is wise, and it knows that whatever torments or diminishes a person cannot be healed simply from within that diminishment; consequently it addresses the wholeness and draws that light and healing into the diminished area. When someone blesses you, the fruits of healing may surprise you and seem to come from afar. In fact, they are your own natural serenity and sureness awakening and arriving around you.
In my family, our parents always insisted before and after meals, at the rosary, and at the Angelus time that we bless ourselves and say the appropriate prayers. Lately that simple ritual has come back to me with new echoes: Bless yourself. If each of us has the ability to shape and form our lives through our thinking, do we not also have a huge ability to bless our lives?
BLESSING CAN MAKE DISTANCE KIND AND FORGIVING
While we live in the world, we always live in distance. Often the greatest distance is not physical but mental. Maya Angelou has said, “And lovers think quite different thoughts while lying side by side.” Often the nature of one’s mind is what separates us most from another. There is also the emotional distance when some hurt or wound constructs a wall between friends. In the west of Ireland, we share the interesting phrase: “I have fallen out with someone.” Once the bond of kinship and togetherness is broken, you fall out of it; i.e., you fall into distance again. Though distance can have many forms of separation, it need never be spiritual. One can still continue to remain close in spirit to the distanced one.
The beauty of blessing is that it recognizes no barriers—and no distances. All the given frontiers of blockage that separate us can be penetrated by the loving subtlety of blessing. This can often be the key to awakening and creating forgiveness. We often linger in the crippling states of anger and resentment. Hurt is always unfair and unexpected; it can leave a bitter residue that poisons the space between us. Eventually the only way forward is forgiveness. We tend to see forgiveness as the willingness to see beyond what has been done to us; and it is. But the gift of forgiveness is also a gift to us. When we forgive, we free ourselves. No longer do we hang, sore and torn from the injury done to us. Even though it goes against the grain at first, when we practice sending blessing to those who have injured us, forgiveness begins to become possible. It is always amazing to meet someone who has been hurt, and find that they have broken out of the trap of victimhood and managed to bring compassion and forgiveness to the one who wronged them. They have gone beyond the emotional geometry of the situation, beyond reaction, beyond the psychology of it. They have transcended the natural structure of expectation and managed to tap into some deeper flow of destiny that can integrate and overcome the injustice of hurt. They have entered a vision larger than the wounded view from the present situation. In situations you would expect to be wired with hard lines of justified resentment and bitterness, it is always surprising to discover beneath the surface fluent veins of compassion and forgiveness.
“WHILE HE WAS STILL A LONG WAY OFF…”
There is no distance in spiritual space. This is what blessing does: it converts distance into spiritual space. It is as though the very idea of blessing was designed for the traveler who is still far from home. Some of the tranquillity and completion of the destination itself sets out to approach and embrace the one who is still a long way off. The approach of blessing is reminiscent of the father who is at the door looking out, awaiting the return of the prodigal son; the lovely phrase is: “While he was still a long way off.” On the journey, the pilgrim will have to traverse thresholds that will test every conviction and instinct. It is especially at such thresholds that the plenitude of blessing is needed.
On our farm in the winter, we put the cattle out on the mountains into the winterage. There the grass has been preserved all year. Even in the worst of weather, in frost and snow, the cattle still have fresh fodder. Because the landscape is bleak, there is little shelter. Every so often out there, one notices semicircular walls. The cattle know them well. These are the “sheltering walls” when winds and storms blow up. Similarly, when you invoke a blessing, you are creating a “sheltering wall” of rest and peace around a person. Ultimately, nothing need be deemed negative if embraced rightly. So much depends not on how awkward destiny is, but rather on how openly it is embraced. This is what the “sheltering wall” of blessing can enable.
BLESSING OUR ZONES OF OMISSION
When we look back on our lives, things become clear in a way they never were while they were happening. We see again a situation where someone was being badly treated or bullied, but we remained silent. Perhaps there was a time when something unworthy was beginning, and a simple action from us would have prevented the damage, but we did nothing. At another time perhaps we were part of something that was developing negatively, perhaps in a relationship or at work, and we never had the courage to say how we felt; we simply went along with it. In this way we damaged our integrity and our dignity. It is chastening to look back and see how frequently our silence allowed damage to occur and perhaps shored up something that was cruel, negative. It is easy to feel regretful that we did not stand up clearly and courageously then. But we know that at that time it was hard, maybe impossible, to speak out, and we live with a sense of something unresolved.
Gradually over the years, a parallel life of undone things builds up. The unresolved has a lingering force and it follows us. Because this happens in the unconscious and unknown regions of our hearts, we rarely notice its effect. The undone continues to live near us; sometimes it is more powerful than what we have actually completed. What is finished lets us go free; it becomes truly part of us and is integrated and woven into memory. What remains unfinished continues to dwell in that still hungry and unformed part of the heart that could not realize itself and grow free; these gaps in our integrity stay open and hungry. This is one of the neglected areas that can be reframed by blessing.
WHO CAN BLESS? EVERYONE?
When I was a young priest I had occasion to visit a contemplative community of sisters. An old sister opened the door. Knowing that I was a new priest, she asked for my first blessing. I stood over this contemplative and drew on every resource I knew to invoke the most intimate blessing. As I was completing the blessing, it struck me how ironical this situation was: here was a contemplative who had spent over sixty years of her life navigating the searing silence and darkness of God, yet she was asking a twenty-five-year-old for his blessing. When she stood up I decided to kneel down and ask her for her blessing. She seemed utterly taken aback; she mumbled something and practically ran out of the room. She must never have had such a request for her blessing before. This was a woman who practiced a totally contemplative life, and yet the system made her feel that she could not bless, and, conversely, it made me think I could. This experience led me to question who had the authority and power to bless.
Who has the power to bless? This question is not to be answered simply by the description of one’s institutional status or membership. But perhaps there are deeper questions hidden here: What do you bless with? Or where do you bless from? When you bless another, you first gather yourself; you reach below your surface mind and personality, down to the deeper source within you—namely, the soul. Blessing is from soul to soul. And the key to who you are is your soul.
THE SOUL OF BLESSING
How we think determines so much of what happens to us. Sometimes we are unaware of the most powerful truths about ourselves, for instance, that each of us has a soul. We go on with our everyday lives as if we are completely dependent on our own ability, though aware of how frail and limited that can be. The world of spirit is strange; it is subtle and concealed; it will wait for our calling. If you never think of your soul but confine it to some vague region of spiritual fantasy, you squander an infinite energy at the heart of your life. Once you awaken to your soul, you know that you are no longer alone; nor are you at the mercy of your own frailty and limitation. Awakening to your soul, you begin to learn another way of being in the world. The old barriers no longer confine you, the old wounds no longer name you, and the old fears no longer claim you. Not that all of this simply disappears in some new, born-again conversion. A blessing does not erase the difficult nor abolish it; but it does reach deeper to draw out the hidden fruit of the negative. The old patterns do not evaporate, but become transformed under the persuasion of the soul’s new affection.
The core of the human is not some psychological cellar that holds the crippled shapes of our woundedness and destructive choices, but the soul, the core self that dovetails into the infinite. Meister Eckhart said: The soul has two faces; one is directed toward your life, the other toward God. Our literal lifeline is this continuity with the infinite. To realize and believe this increases confidence; it can light up every thought, word, and action. Ultimately, thought is the infinite, breathing inside the word. Our grounding in the soul means that regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage. The intention of friendship, love, and prayer is to allow your heart to enter this inner sanctuary where it can regain its confidence, renew its energy, and quicken with critical and creative vision. The soul is the home of vision.
This is the secret heart of the whole adventure of blessing. It is not the invention of what is not there, nor the glazed-eyed belief that the innocent energy of goodwill can alter what is destructive. Blessing is a more robust and grounded presence; it issues from the confident depth of the hidden self, and its vision and force can transform what is deadlocked, numbed, and inevitable. When you bless someone, you literally call the force of their infinite self into action.
PREPARING THE SPACE FOR BLESSING
When a blessing is being invoked, time deepens until it becomes a source from which refreshment and encouragement are released. As Yeats says: Feeling I was blessed and that I now too could bless.
Wherever one person takes another into the care of their heart, they have the power to bless. There are things we never do, simply because it never occurs to us that we can do them. To bless someone is to offer a beautiful gift. When we love someone, we turn toward them with our souls. And the soul itself is the source of blessing.
A blessing is a form of grace; it is invisible. Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness. There are no limits to it; it has no compartments, corners, or breakage in its flow. For the one who believes in it, a blessing can signal the start of a journey of transformation. It belongs to the same realm as the inner life—its effect becomes only indirectly visible in the changed quality of one’s experience. Where before gravity and deadness had prevailed, there is now a new sense of animation and lightness. Where there was grief, a new sense of presence comes alive. In the wall of blindness a window of vision opens.
WHEN BLESSINGS FLOW THROUGH THE HANDS…
The Bible is full of blessings. They are seen as a communication of life from God. Once the blessing is spoken, it cannot be annulled or recalled. It is often recommended that we should ask for blessing. “Ask advice of every wise person and blessing of every holy one.” There is also the tradition in the Bible that a blessing is imparted by laying one’s hands on the head of the one being blessed. When one is in sorrow or pain, touch can become the silent language that says everything; it travels deeper than words can. The head is where consciousness is centered; therefore blessing is always a blessing of consciousness. In the sacrament of ordination, the whole force and power of the sacrament is conveyed and actualized through the laying on of hands, essentially through blessing. The force of a blessing can penetrate through and alter the inner configuration of identity. When the gift or need of the individual coincides with the incoming force of the blessing, great change can begin.
Some years ago I had a series of car accidents, one after another. I began to feel a darkness tightening around me. I realized that I needed to have that shell broken. I knew an old priest who was totally unconventional and deeply holy. I knelt down and he laid his frail hands on my head and blessed me in Latin. Then he put his hands under my arms and raised me up and said, “Ni tharloidh tada dhuit, anois a mhac”—“Nothing will happen to you now, son.” Immediately I felt that whatever negativity had had me in its sights had been dissuaded.
KINDNESS IS A MODE OF BLESSING
Perhaps we bless one another all the time, without even realizing it. When we show compassion or kindness to another, we are setting blessing in train. There is a way in which an act of kindness becomes an independent luminous thing, a kind of jewel box of light that might conceal itself for days or years, until one day when you are in desperate straits, you notice something on the floor at your feet, you reach for it, and you discover exactly the courage and vision for which you desperately hunger.
Perhaps this is also true of places. When you are in a certain place, great love or kindness happens; it imprints itself on the ether of the place. When we pass there, hungry and needy in spirit, that loving imprint shines on us like an icon. In folk culture one always knew where to go when sorrow darkened the heart. These places can also act like a poultice to take the poison out of the heart’s wounds. Rilke recommended that when life became turbulent and troublesome, it was wise to stay close to one simple thing in nature. A friend of mine who had great trouble with her mind told me once that she had brought a stone into her apartment, and when she felt her mind going, she would concentrate on the stone. She said, “There is a fierce sanity in stone.”
THE INNER FRIENDS OF THE HEART
It is such a privilege to have people who continue each day to bless us with their love and prayer. These inner friends of the heart confer on us inestimable gifts. In these times of greed and externality, there is such unusual beauty in having friends who practice profound faithfulness to us, praying for us each day without our ever knowing or remembering it. There are often lonesome frontiers we could never endure or cross without the inner sheltering of these friends. It is hard to live a true life that endeavors to be faithful to its own calling and not become haunted by the ghosts of negativity; therefore, it is not a luxury to have such friends; it is necessary.
I have always loved the shy beauty of country people who have quietly made their lives sacred. Their presence has the feel of unaffected authenticity. Theirs is a spirituality that draws no attention to itself; it is more beautiful than most institutional religious decorum or studied spirituality. These people have often lived through great difficulty, but their quiet and subtle lives never saw any need for brash declarations of spirit; rather they exhibited the shyness that is natural to the soul itself.
Much modern spirituality and psychology is full of loneliness. Much of it is the fruit of emptiness; it has not grown naturally from minds conversant with the eros of the earth. It lacks the rhythm and belonging of a true ecology of the heart; it has a hunger at its core that inevitably breeds narcissism and the mechanics of relentless self-observation, whereas the spirituality of country people seems always to issue from a sense of belonging to a deeper, more ultimate order. They see life as an act of creative service and the world as call to full participation. Theirs is a lifestyle infused with blessing. There are blessings for putting down the fire in the morning, blessings before and after meals, blessings for the start of work, blessings for the person who met you, blessings for the gifts a day brought, blessings of acceptance for the untoward elements that arrived, blessings for health, journeys, animals, and the dead. This weave of blessings is a constant activity of what is now called “mindfulness,” a recognition of the miracle of being here, on the constant shoreline of pure arrival. These blessings are also an acceptance of the transitory and terminal nature of all gifts that have arrived; they need not have come. It is also recognition that the spaces of home and landscape are the apertures through which divinity emerges to enfold us. The spirituality of the rural mind does not see time as routine or treadmill; time is a far more precious space where crevices open into the infinite, and where the rhythm of the eternal is felt to preside.
PERHAPS OUR FRIENDS AMONG THE DEAD ARE BLESSING US
I imagine that one of the great storehouses of blessing is the invisible neighborhood where the dead dwell. Our friends among the dead now live where time and space are transfigured. They behold us now in ways they never could have when they lived beside us on earth. Because they live near the source of destiny, their blessings for us are accurate and penetrating, offering a divine illumination not available according to the calculations of the given visible world. Perhaps one of the surprises of death will be a retrospective view of the lives we lived here and to see how our friends among the dead clothed us in weave after weave of blessing.
In folk culture, there is a huge power attributed to the curse. When invoked, a curse could kill someone. If dark intent can travel the negative path to hit its target, should the bright intention not be as capable of traveling the creative path to heal the loved one? It is impossible to underestimate the power of the human mind and the forces it can unleash. It seems that when a person finds himself in extremis and gathers his mind and calls out, something comes awake in the highest regions of destiny. Time behaves differently when blessing is invoked.
FOUND BLESSINGS
It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward. Most of the time we are unaware of how blessed our lives are. Poets often refer to an occasional poem as a “found poem.” In contrast to the usual travails, frustrations, and endless versions through which most poems come to life, this is a poem that practically wrote itself. Perhaps in terms of blessing, we could say the same: there are around our lives “found blessings.” Friendship, for instance, is one. Yeats once said, friendship is the only house we have to offer. Without the blessing of friendship, we would never have become who we are. In the climate of love and understanding that friendship provides, we take root and blossom into full human beings. Our friends are the mirrors where we recognize ourselves, and quite often it is their generosity of spirit that has enabled us to grow and flourish. There is also the blessing of health: the ability to see, to hear, to understand, and to celebrate life. The found blessings also include the gifts that we find coming alive in our lives, abilities that sleep in our hearts that we never suspected. There are also the blessings of our discoveries and modest accomplishments. All of these have been given to us; on our own we could never have merited or earned them. The more we recognize our found blessings, the more they increase around us.
THE SECRET SUSTENANCE OF OUR UNCHOSEN LIVES
On certain birthdays the shape of our unfolding life comes into clearer view. Because we are netted into the webbing of each day’s chores and duties, we seldom see the shape our lives have taken. When we look back, we can identify the key thresholds where the vital happenings of our lives occurred. These were usually the times when we were confronted with decisions about the paths we wanted to travel. Perhaps there were seven of these decisive thresholds in your life up to now. When you look at each threshold, you see that you had several choices at each point. You could always choose only one path. In this way the person you are today is the result of the path you chose. Out of these choices you have inherited and shaped your chosen life. This is the life you live now. This is the person you have become. When you visit these thresholds, you will see how you chose your life.
The interesting question is, What happened to the lives you once had as options but did not choose? Where do they dwell? Perhaps your unlived lives run parallel to your current life and in some subtle way continue to influence the choices you make. All this might be happening beside you and in you, yet unknown to you. Maybe these unlived yet still unfolding lives are the sustenance from which your chosen life draws. Maybe this is one of the secrets of death: that you die only when your invisible, unchosen lives have also fulfilled themselves, so that you bring into the eternal world not only your one known life but also the unknown, unchosen lives as well. Maybe your visible life is but the outer edge of a whole enterprise of creativity and realization in which you are unknowingly involved. This unseen ground of your unfolding in the world is a place that needs blessing and holds the key to the invisible. Blessing strengthens the network of presence you carry through the world.
BLESSING OUR WORLD NOW
Sometimes when we look out, the world seems so dark. War, violence, hunger, and misery seem to abound. This makes us anxious and helpless. What can I do in my private little corner of life that could have any effect on the march of world events? The usual answer is: nothing. We then decide to do what we can for our own, and leave the great events to their domain. Thus, we opt out, and join the largest majority in the world: those who acquiesce. Believing ourselves to be helpless, we hand over all our power to forces and systems outside us that then act in our names; they go on to put their beliefs into action; and ironically these actions are often sinister and destructive. We live in times when the call to full and critically aware citizenship could not be more urgent. We need to rediscover the careless courage, yet devastating simplicity, of the little boy who, in the middle of the numbed multitude, in naive Socratic fashion, blurts out: “But the emperor has no clothes.” When spoken, the word of truth can bring down citadels of falsity.
Real presence is the ideal of all true individuation. When we yield to helplessness, we strengthen the hand of those who would destroy. When we choose indifference, we betray our world. Yet the world is not decided by action alone. It is decided more by consciousness and spirit; they are the secret sources of all action and behavior. The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.
THE INESTIMABLE POWER OF INTENTION
There is incredible power in the mind when it directs its light toward an object. I heard recently of an ongoing experiment in an American university. There is a sealed-off room; in that room there is a coin-flipping machine. All day and all night it flips coins. The results are usually fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails. Nearby there is another room into which people are invited. Each person is asked to make an intention. Which would they prefer? Heads or tails? Having made their choice, they then write it down on a page that is put in a sealed envelope and addressed to the team who conducts the research. The results are astounding. If a person wishes for heads, the machine ends up flipping up to a seventy-five percent majority of heads and vice versa. They found the distance that the power of the intention to affect the outcome held for up to a hundred-and-fifty-mile radius around the experimentation room. Now, if human intention can substantially affect the outcome of something as cold and neutral as the working of a coin-flipping machine, how much more must our human intentions achieve as they relate to one another?
I have also heard of an experiment in meditation. For a certain number of days, some years ago, a group of people made a circle around the city of Washington and meditated continually. Gathered unknown to itself within this circle of loving kindness, Washington changed. The statistics for that period in the city showed a remarkable and unprecedented decrease in violence and crime. The power of intention to bless is not some utopian fantasy; it can be shown factually to effect concrete and transformative action.
We have no idea the effect we actually have on one another. This is where blessing can achieve so much. Blessing as powerful and positive intention can transform situations and people. The force of blessing must be even more powerful when we consider how the intention of blessing corresponds with the deepest desire of reality for creativity, healing, and wholesomeness. Blessing has pure agency because it animates on the deepest threshold between being and becoming; it mines the territories of memory to awaken and draw forth possibilities we cannot even begin to imagine!
THE EYES OF JESUS
I imagine the eyes of Jesus
Were harvest brown,
The light of their gazing
Suffused with the seasons:
The shadow of winter,
The mind of spring,
The blues of summer,
And amber of harvest.
A gaze that is perfect sister
To the kindness that dwells
In his beautiful hands.
The eyes of Jesus gaze on us,
Stirring in the heart’s clay
The confidence of seasons
That never lose their way to harvest.
This gaze knows the signature
Of our heartbeat, the first glimmer
From the dawn that dreamed our minds,
The crevices where thoughts grow
Long before the longing in the bone
Sends them toward the mind’s eye,
The artistry of the emptiness
That knows to slow the hunger
Of outside things until they weave
Into the twilight side of the heart,
A gaze full of all that is still future
Looking out for us to glimpse
The jeweled light in winter stone,
Quickening the eyes that look at us
To see through to where words
Are blind to say what we would love,
Forever falling softly on our faces,
His gaze plies the soul with light,
Laying down a luminous layer
Beneath our brief and brittle days
Until the appointed dawn comes
Assured and harvest deft
To unravel the last black knot
And we are back home in the house
That we have never left.