Blessings

      When you hear the word blessings, what comes to mind?
      In the past, I often associated the word with being happy. If I’m more honest, I sometimes worried the word encouraged people to appear happy regardless of how they actually felt.
      More recently, as I’ve developed workshops on the topic of loss and grief, I’ve embraced blessings in a new way. I have the authors of some of my favorite collections of blessings to thank for a new understanding of and appreciation for blessings.
      Following the unexpected death of her husband, author and artist Jan Richardson began to write blessings. She explains the power she believes blessings can have: “Within the struggle, joy, pain, and delight that attend our life, there is an invisible circle of grace that enfolds and encompasses us in every moment. Blessings help us to perceive this circle of grace, to find our place of belonging within it, and to receive the strength the circle holds for us.”
      Richardson adds: “It came home to me that the most profound blessings we will ever know are those that meet us in the place of our deepest loss and inspire us to choose to live again.”

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      In his final book, which was published just before his untimely death, the Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue celebrated “the gift that a blessing can be, the doors it can open, the healing and transfiguration it can bring.”
      “Regardless of how we configure the eternal,” he contended, “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. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.
      “It is not the invention of what is not there, nor the glazed-eye belief that the innocent energy of goodwill can alter what is destructive. Blessing is a more robust and grounded presence . . . its vision and force can transform what is deadlocked, numbed, and inevitable.”
      Divinity school professor Kate Bowler discovered the possibility of blessings during her journey after a diagnosis of stage IV cancer at age 35. For her, blessings recognize the lives people actually have and give people permission to feel human.
      Bowler has collected the blessings she’s written in a book and on her website. In her words, they are “blessings for garbage days, lovely days, grief-stricken days, and even (especially) completely ordinary days. These heartfelt words of prayer and hope are a chance to exhale when we feel everything from careworn to restless, devastated to bored.” They are “a reminder that we don’t need to wait for perfect lives when we can bless our actual ones.”
      The author of blessings who has most recently entered my life is perhaps the most important. I learned about the powerful writings of Maxine Shonk during a class I took in February.
      The blessings by this Dominican Sister of Peace have made their way into the world of ABCORI. They have been offered during workshops I’ve led, during ABCORI staff meetings, and at the close of worship services Executive Minister Courtny Davis Olds and I have led.
      Six of Maxine’s blessings inspired Elder Care Ministries’ most recent coffee chat series. Her blessings invited us to consider new images of God and the blessings we might discover as a result. Maxine was scheduled to join us via Zoom for the final coffee chat before our summer break, but she died in mid-June.
     In processing the loss I feel because of Maxine’s death, I have turned to her words. In the note to readers in her book Blessing Upon Blessing, she wrote:
      “I cannot pinpoint exactly when I began to write these blessings. It is as if they wrote themselves along the way. What I know is that as I have walked the path of Spirit through my own all too human story, I have at times been aware of the need to bless that story and to claim its gifts in grateful praise. At other times I’ve known a need that is closer to desperation to find the ways in which my story has blessed me especially in its pain and struggle. Wherever the journey takes me, my faith in the Resurrection promises that all will end in the blessing of new life. . . .
      “These blessings come from a place in me that might match a place in each of you that needs to both bless and be blessed in and by this double-edged journey to the Holy. Because there is no limit to where the Holy can be found in our lives, there is no limit to the blessings held out to us by a God who is so lavish. I share these blessings with you now with the hope that they may awaken the place of blessing in you and in everyone you bless in turn. I invite you to locate the Holy in your life, wherever it may be found, to tend it and to know its blessing . . . then bless each other with the awareness.
      “Surely as we bless each other, one person at a time, peace will come to a world that so
yearns for it.”
      My prayer is that the power of blessing will help us live our actual lives, find circles of grace, experience transformation, and bring peace to our world.
                                                                                                                               KP