The Slow Way: Reclaiming Blessing and Provoking Hope
Blessing as a gift by which we honor one another. It is taking something ordinary and pronouncing it remarkable, sacred.
Reclaiming Blessing and Provoking Hope
I’ve been working for a couple of years on a manuscript about how raising my son Ace has brought me more fully into Jesus’s pronouncement of blessings in The Beatitudes. Its a story of how blessing one another opens us up to a world that includes, dignifies, and celebrates the ones our world has taught us to ignore.
The long version of Jesus’ pronouncement of blessing is found in Matthew 5. A shorter, more simplified version is in Luke 6. In these passages, Jesus gathers his followers, and probably a few Jesus-Curious types, on the side of a hill (in Matthew) or a plain (just to keep things exciting in Luke) and gives them a sermon like nothing they’ve ever heard before. The story he tells the crowd that sits before him is about what the world should be, God’s Dream for the world, who deserves dignity, and what gives humans value.
And the answers he gives have nothing to do with power, authority, wealth, or status. He’s presenting a value system utterly different than the systems in which we humans instinctively operate. The weakest, the impoverished, the mistreated, the misunderstood — these are the ones Jesus holds up as deserving of blessing.
My pastor, Michael Rudzena, preached last weekend on the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son in Luke 15, and how in each story the lost thing is given dignity and value. He invited us to “take on this generous imagination that is always looking for the person that is left out, the person who’s hurting, the person who has been put out.” He said that the Church at its best is a “provocateur of hope.”
What a beautiful invitation to be someone who provokes hope in others, to be part of a community of people who provoke hope in their neighborhoods and towns and cities. There is some significant connection between practicing Jesus’ generous imagination and the calling to be a provocateur of hope. How do we become people who live in the generous imagination of Jesus, whose lives and work and presence in the world leads to more hope?
What if the way into the generosity of Jesus is found in becoming a person who blesses? What if we learn to pronounce blessing on one another?
Blessing is a wild idea. In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor makes the case that we should all be blessing each other, that we should cling to a kind of Godly audacity that enables us to hold our hands over one another and call each other good, “whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not.”
But what does it even mean to bless? Over and over scripture tells us to bless, to recognize and act on the value and dignity of one another. Bless and do not curse, it says. But we are a cursing sort of people, aren’t we? Pronouncing the failures of others first. Keeping blessing all for ourselves because it is easier to do so. Our natural stance is to turn our gaze inward, stare at our own longings. It is harder to search for the glory of God in the people, creatures, and things already around us.
But blessed has become the hashtag of the happy ones. The word we use to sound like we don’t believe in luck, we believe in a higher power orchestrating our lives. Sometimes that’s good. Except for when it’s pretense. Except for when we’re saying that our blessings are somehow proof of God’s choice to make our life easier than someone else’s. My journey of raising Ace and losing my dad this past year to brain cancer, has taught me over and over that easy is rarely the same thing as good. And blessing is rarely the same thing as easy. I’m not blessed because I find a parking spot. I’m not blessed because my house is bigger than someone else’s. If another woman’s 7-year-old is verbal and growing at a typical pace, she is certainly not more blessed than I am because my son has more challenges. Blessing is more beautiful and complex than our simplistic categories of good and bad.
So I’ve been reclaiming blessing, not as something we get if we’re lucky or pious enough. But blessing as a gift by which we honor one another. It is taking something ordinary and pronouncing it remarkable, sacred. Barbara Brown Taylor says the act of blessing is not so much the work of conferring holiness as it is the hope-filled task of recognizing and acknowledging the holiness already there.
What if we release that other notion of blessing, the one that can make us feel small or unseen by God? What if instead we look for ways to “share in God’s audacity,” to boldly call the world around us good?
What if we become liberal and excessive with our holy pronouncing? Blessing the garden, blessing the houses of our neighbors, silently blessing the lady who breathes too loud in barre class and the kid who makes your kid feel rejected? What if we begin to live like the stories Jesus tells in his parables of lost things, where we recognize all around us that there is dignity and value to the people and things we pass by in our lives. What if we begin to live like priests? Because we are, friends. We are priests of a God who does not exclude, a God whose love is ridiculously loud and outrageous. I want to live in that inclusive, outrageous love. And I want to be the blesser.
We are invited to model the extravagance of a God who gives love freely: believing that there is always enough blessing to go around. So let’s be Provocateurs of Hope. Let’s learn to see the glory around us, cultivate a life of holy things: Let’s hold our hands over foreheads and shoestrings, babies and strangers, casseroles and glasses of wine—and call them holy. Let’s learn to bless so we forget how to curse.
A Slow Practice
This week’s practice is not something you can accomplish in the next five minutes. It’s a practice of our days, something I would love for you to come back to over and over this week. I want us to practice blessing.
I think the simplest blessings are found in the particular, so you don’t have to have something profound to say. As Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, we can simply notice the stick on the ground and wonder what it has been through to be there before us. Where did it grow, what creatures sat on it, how long did it live connected to a tree? She says, the more you become aware, the more blessings you will find.
So here’s what I want us to do. I want us to find our own simple blessing to carry with us into our days. To whisper to our cat when she curls into our laps. To speak into our toddler’s ear when we’re helping put on shoes before school, to think silently as we approach the postal worker behind the counter or the grocery check out clerk, or to say out loud when someone cuts us off in traffic. Here are some ideas:
I bless you. You are a dream of God coming true.
I bless you with the overflowing love of God.
I bless you with peace that comes from the nearness of God.
I bless you with purpose, because you have value and dignity.
There are so many ways to pray a blessing. And there are no magic words. The invitation to bless one another is found first in noticing who is deserving of our blessings — which is to say, everyone. Then we go from there.
Let’s take a minute to practice. Take a breath with me.
As you breathe in, use your generous imagination to consider the face or name of someone or something you want to honor. As you breathe out simply say “bless them” or “bless it.”
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Let’s spend some time in silence practicing becoming people who bless.
A List of Things
Have you been watching Rings of Power? I was never a Lord of the Rings nerd. My brothers read the books when we were kids but fantasy was never my jam. When I met Chris he told me his favorite Tolkien book was The Silmarillion, which I’ve learned is the ultimate proof of one’s Tolkien-nerdism. Chris has been looking forward to this series for at least nine months, and he’s going deep into every article, tweet thread, and podcast he can read about it. I won’t pass those onto you. But I will say that it’s a delight to watch a show like this with my big boys and not worry that someone is going to be torn limb from limb or our favorite female character is going to be brutally sexually assaulted. I have missed TV like this—fun, unique, adventurous (without traumatic violence)—and I’m so happy it exists. D.L. Mayfield wrote about it in this thread on Twitter, and I was particularly fascinated to think about how Tolkien’s work was a way of working through questions of power and corruption following WWII.
This week on Poetry Thursday I read a Tania Runyan poem from her most recent poetry collection, What Will Soon Take Place. Tania’s poetry is gorgeous and I’ve admired her for a long time. She is wrestling with a lot of the same spiritual and religious ideas I am. And this book in particular is a deep dive in the book of Revelation. If you’re poetry-curious and scripture feels like a sibling you love deeply but also are constantly frustrated with, I highly recommend.
This weekend I’m with one of my The Lucky Few cohosts, Heather Avis, at the Down Syndrome Diagnosis Network’s conference for moms. The DSDN is an amazing resource for any woman who gets a DS prenatal diagnosis. (Note to all supportive friends: Googling “Down syndrome” can hurt more than it helps.) Besides connecting expectant moms who have received a prenatal diagnosis, they also connect moms of kids in the same age range, and offer educational support to medical professionals, who historically, have done a pretty terrible job encouraging or helping expecting and new moms make sense of the diagnosis.
I said last week that I have never been an anglophile, but the royals do still fascinate me. I read this article in The New York Times this week about the role Princess Anne has played in the family and how she will be one of King Charles’ most trusted advisors, and I was impressed. In a family of wild scandals she seems like a quiet, steady, wise one. Those are the people (as you know!) who I’m most interested in.
I found you here on Substack yesterday and this morning I'm reading your beautiful work and crying as I drink my coffee and my toddlers wrestle beside me in the laundry basket. Why am I crying? I don't really know. Except that I feel I've found a kindred spirit.
I love this line, "...easy is rarely the same thing as good. And blessing is rarely the same thing as easy." God's been teaching me this very thing. And you put it into a neat little word package that now I can hold onto.
Thank you. I'll be recommending you to my own readers - I know they'll love you too.
When I was in my 20s, I lived in Israel for 3 months. One weekend, I visited a "modern orthodox" Jewish community. All I remember is meeting a young woman who made an impression on me. What I remember most is when I left, this young woman said to me, "I want to give you a blessing before you go." I was delighted, moved, thrilled. Such a simple gesture was so powerful. I don't at all remember what words she used, but I definitely remember the feeling. I felt cared for, seen, spiritual, alive, connected to her.
Thanks Micha, for the reminder of the power of giving our blessings to others.
Micha, I bless you with the energy for creative self-expression, because you have the spark of life and the gift of words flowing through you.