The Blessing

I was baked in a social/cultural/geographic ecosystem where the word “blessing” and all its precious variants were super common.

“Bless your heart” (a Southern delicacy)

“Blessings upon this church” (Catholics love a blessing)

“We all get to be together this year, what a blessing” (this one exploded in the time since COVID)

“Will someone say a blessing before we eat?” (double points for reciting one from a Catholic prayer book, but this will also do)

Each of these phrases is so layered, so nuanced, and so contextual that they could have a different meaning depending on who says it, how it is said, or by whom, or even to whom.

For example, in my experience “Bless your heart” has two general connotations:

Talking to an actual baby, kindly: Awww, you smiled at auntie. Bless your heart!

Talking to a frenemy and pretending to be kind: You’re still selling Tupperware? Bless your heart…

I can decode a blessing in no time, but that’s not why I’m writing this.

I’m writing this because I’m profoundly bothered by the notion that a blessing is something we get for being good. A certain kind of good – the hard-working kind of good, or the pious and obedient kind of good.

Something we must earn or otherwise deserve.

I sometimes fret over whether I am “good”… another relic of my upbringing, specifically the Catholic part. As a child, I learned that there was only one way to be good. If it does not fit within the norm of whatever container(s) you find yourself in, then it's not good. Inherently. And if you’re not good, you get cut off from blessings, or they get taken away.

It’s such an insidious idea because life is full of good AND bad. Joy and pain. Wise choices and shitty choices. And society is full of oppressive containers. But we don’t know that as children. We only know what we are taught, or what’s modeled to us.

If we’re taught that pain is a result of you being bad and making shitty choices, that’s what we’ll believe.

So what does it mean if we are good, if we do make wise choices - and we still experience pain?

I’ll tell you what it means: it means that this constrained notion that I’ve inherited becomes completely useless.

I propose we simplify the blessing.

Strip it of its connotations.

Know it when we see it.

What if we think about a blessing as an acknowledgment of the sacredness of something that could easily be mistaken for mundane or unremarkable… except for the impact it has on you?

Have you ever let yourself just be stunned by the present moment? I have fallen in love with the shades of green on the leaf of a tree. I regularly marvel at the fact that my body can breathe, think, digest, move, and feel things at the same time. I remember the exact moment that I had the first sip of my first-ever oat milk matcha latte with lavender - it made my fingertips warm. Watching a group of dancers move together, separately, is like watching time expand.

This life can be so basic and or otherwise extraordinarily painful, but we get to find magic in the little things. Without reverence, they may go unnoticed. And what a missed opportunity that would be.

I’m choosing to see blessings simply as an acknowledgment of the beautiful, the stunning, the peaceful, the mundane, the precious, and the fleeting. An acknowledgment of the present moment. Just knowing that it’s there, existing in the same time and space as the joy and pain, the good and bad.

The blessing is what brings balance to the daily hard work of being human and alive in this world.