ACHOO!! The sudden sneeze startled everyone, perhaps none more than the one who sneezed. “Bless you!” “Gesundheit!” “God bless you!” several of those within hearing distance responded. Did they think about what that predictable phrase meant? I doubt it. Blessing someone who sneezes originated in folk belief. Some people believed that a sneeze caused the soul to escape the body through the nose. Saying “bless you” would stop the devil from claiming the person’s disembodied soul. Others believed the opposite: that evil spirits could use the sneeze as an opportunity to enter a person’s body.

I seriously doubt if any of us reading this believe anything of that sort. But what is going on with blessing? Reverend Seth frequently ends our services with “Go and be blessed and be a blessing.” A hasty scan through our UU Worship Web reveal that contributors to that site have written blessings for risk-takers and failures, those divorced or separated, meals, houses, new church buildings, justice builders, the sky, new drivers, playgrounds, teachers’ hands, all living things, “life and the end of life,” bicycles, bodies, the world, and backpacks, among others.

Most of humankind’s religious and spiritual traditions engage in some form of blessing. The daily cycle of blessings that Orthodox Jewish men say is among the most detailed and extensive. [Women are exempt from most of these out of concern that doing so would be a burden when added to their child-care responsibilities.] Among the ritual blessings incumbent upon Jewish men are those upon awakening in the morning and going to bed at night, a cycle of blessings that accompanies donning the tzitzit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (leather boxes that attach to arm and head and contain scrolls) for daily prayer, blessings before, during and after meal with specific ones for certain foods, an entire cycle of holiday blessings, again among others. The rationale for the ritual is clear when we note that each blessing begins with begins “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe…”

Many traditions, including our own, encourage pausing for a moment to bless a meal before we eat it, including the myriad of people who helped get the food to us and the bounty of the natural world that provides it. The Muslim fast of Ramadan blesses the act of eating. Jesus’ Beatitudes, a scripture beloved by many Christians, lifts up the holiness inherent in the lives and actions of people.

Buddhist social activist and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, whom I consider among my mentors, encourages the use of gathas, short verses which remind us to pay attention, to be awake in the present moment, to really be “in” whatever we are doing. One of my favorites, said when washing dishes:

Washing the dishes

Is like bathing a baby Buddha.

The profane is the sacred.

Everyday mind is Buddha’s mind.

 

I don’t always recite a formal gatha, but it’s an important practice for me to pause amidst my daily mundane tasks and remind myself to be present to the warmth of towels fresh out of the clothes dryer, the luxurious feel of warm water on my hands and the privilege of having clean, safe water at the turn of the tap, or the warmth, color, fragrance and taste of a cup of tea.

So where does this leave us, or me at least? What’s this “blessing” thing about? “Blessing” doesn’t confer holiness or sacredness. Although blessing does not make something holy, it is more than just remembering; it is an intentional acknowledgement that the holy is lurking within the most mundane of daily activities and events.

I will refrain from commenting on whether our offering a blessing invokes the holy and/or its presence. Or on whether there is in fact a presence to be invoked. Doing so, it seems to me, does invoke OUR being present, our openness to whatever might be there. We bless something with our awareness (Soul Matters). Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was described in his 1961 New York Times obituary as an “adventurer in the mind.” He was as well one of the sons of an evangelical Lutheran pastor, and much of his adventuring around the mind happened at the intersection of religion and psychology. Over the door of Jung’s Kuessnacht home on the shore of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland is carved the Latin the inscription:  Vocatus atqua non vocatus deus aderit (Called or not called, God is present). Whatever/whomever it is that is “out there”—be it a deity, a force, an unknown, or in the delightful words of one of our youth at our Coming of Age ceremony recently, an all-knowing chipmunk—does not appear because we have spoken a blessing. But we are changed by doing so.

When we light a chalice at the beginning of worship or at an “ordinary” committee meeting to do the nitty-gritty work of the church, we recognize the presence of the holy and summon our own being present to that dimension.  A chaplain at Ball hospital is one among many hospital chaplains who annually offer a “blessing of hands” to the nursing staff. Doing so recognizes that the work of healing that they do is indeed holy work. As a chaplain, I have blessed ill people, hospital staffers, the bodies of people following death, including on more than one occasion, babies who died before or during birth. It was always an intensely meaningful experience, as much for me as for the person or family. When we offer a blessing for a child, a marriage, a death, we acknowledge the holiness of the cycle of life and of relationships.

Whatever it is that we experience as holy lurks within the everyday. Blessing asks us to be aware of that presence and to acknowledge it.

May your life be blessed!

Rev. Julia