THE BLESSINGS THAT ENFOLD US

Rain falls here in New Iberia early this morning, and I am thankful for the patter of it on the roof. I check the weather forecasts for Sewanee and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the former where I live part of the year, and the latter having been damaged by forest fires in the Great Smokies. I’m relieved to see reports of rain in Gatlinburg where so many acres of the town and forests have been destroyed.

For four weeks now, I’ve been plagued by bronchitis from the ash in the air because of burning in the sugar cane fields, many times thinking we should travel to our second home at Sewanee where the air would be less polluted. However, a friend who has just returned from Sewanee says that the air there is also polluted with smoke drifting over from the fires in the Smokies. 

Rain is a blessing right now in many parts of the country and I turn to a book of blessings To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O’Donohue for his thoughts about living in a world infused with blessings of both home and landscape. About clean air, he writes: 

Let us bless the invigoration
Of clean, fresh air.
The gentleness of air
That holds and slows the rain,
Lets it fall down…In the name of the air,
The breeze,
And the wind,
May our souls
Stay in rhythm
With eternal
Breath.

I was fascinated about a story O’Donohue told regarding the power of intention and of blessing people, habitats, happenings… An ongoing experiment took place in an American university in which there is a sealed-off room containing a coin-flipping machine. Day and night the machine flips coins. The results usually show fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails. Near this room there is another one that invites people in. Each person is requested to make an intention — heads or tails? After they make their choice, they are asked to write it down on a page that is placed in a sealed envelope and addressed to the research team. The results showed that if a person wished for heads, the machine ended up flipping up to 75 percent majority of heads and vice versa. The team found that the distance that the power of the intention to influence the outcome held for up to a hundred and fifty mile radius surrounding the room in which the experiment took place. O’Donohue poses the question that if human intention can substantially influence the outcome of a cold, neutral coin-flipping machine, how much more can our human intentions achieve as we relate to one another? He writes: "Goethe says that once the commitment is made, destiny conspires with us to support and realize it."

And as the rain falls, I read the succinct lines of the poet who created this book of gracious invocations: 

Let us bless the humility of water,
always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it…Blessed be water,
Our first mother. 

And I add: Blessed be the flow of renewal in the rain and air as they become transformative agents in our anxious world.

Painting by my deceased brother Paul who loved the waters of the Pacific Ocean and the fresh air of northern California.

IONA, BLESSINGS, AND MIRACLES

There are numerous monasteries, convents, retreat houses, and churches that combine prayer and daily Bible reading with action for justice and peace, and one of the names that is on the bucket list of Anglicans searching for a place to join with others in carrying out this work is the Isle of Iona. Iona lies off the west coast of the Isle of Mull where St. Columba, an Irish monk, settled and influenced the establishment of Christianity in England, Scotland, and the European mainland. Iona, the site of a restored Benedictine abbey, attracts followers devoted to rebuilding “community,” and is populated by people from all walks of life -- followers who flock there to work in the kitchen and laundry and to light candles, lead morning services, or conduct sessions of Aramaic prayer for as many as ten weeks of volunteer service.

Sister Lucy, former head sister of St. Mary’s Sewanee, Tennessee, led many pilgrims to Iona and is reputed to have called forth miracles in this “thin place” off the coast of Scotland.  I’ve often told the story of a miracle about The Rev. Elmer Boykin, a good friend of mine (now deceased) who made one of Sr. Lucy’s pilgrimages to Iona years ago. It was a small miracle but nonetheless, one that reflects a kind of luminous clarity that occurred in a priest who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. During most of his life as a priest, Fr. Boykin had a booming voice that lifted the rafters when he preached and celebrated at the altar, but when he became ill, he not only lost his ability to celebrate, he could no longer read the Gospel at a service. When Sister Lucy was asked to conduct a service in the Abbey chapel at Iona, she walked up to The Rev. Boykin and in her characteristic no-nonsense way told him: “You read the Gospel.” Anne, the priest’s wife, hid her face in her hands in embarrassment, knowing that he hadn’t been able to proclaim the Gospel for several years. However, when the time came for the proclamation of the Gospel, The Rev. Boykin stood at the lectern and read it, every line reverberating in the old abbey chapel, and at that point in time, he reclaimed his voice. His wife Anne says that there was never a repeat performance, but in a restored abbey on an island off the coast of Scotland, he found his voice long enough to proclaim his faith.

The church in Iona was an early Celtic church, and the Celts, a strong part of the Anglican tradition, are impressive for their focus on blessing everything, from thresholds of homes and cooking pots to states of the heart. A blessing is an act that changes the atmosphere of a place or the heart of a person in a cogent way. In this new year, Fr. Matt Woollett, priest at the Episcopal Church of Epiphany in New Iberia, Louisiana (where I reside part of the year) has issued a call to parishioners to have their homes blessed, as is customary during the season of Epiphany. I had my home here blessed many years ago when the priest used the “long form,” blessing every corner and room, even the patio outside. The year that it was blessed, Hurricane Andrew roared through, flattening trees, destroying roofs, and flooding low areas in south Louisiana. However, although the wind squeezed my house back and forth like an accordion, it survived without harm, perhaps because “the defender of the household” had been invoked months before the storm.

For those who wish to read more about blessings that have Celtic roots, John O’Donohue has written a wonderful book of lyrical blessings entitled To Bless the Space Between Us that emphasizes seven rhythms of the human journey: beginnings, desires, thresholds, homecomings, states of the heart, callings, and beyond endings. He writes that “in the evocations of our blessings, the word ‘may’ is the spring through which the Holy Spirit is invoked to surge into presence and effect. The Holy Spirit is the subtle presence and secret energy behind every blessing…”

May you enjoy a blessed New Year.   

THE LANGUAGE OF BLESSING

“May you have a blessed Christmas” is the phrase of the season, a kind of benediction that is pronounced on those whom we want to touch and embrace, perhaps even to heal, by wishing them well. Christmas is the time to bless one another, to change the atmosphere of doom and gloom that surround us on every side in this postmodern world.

A few Christmases ago, a friend gave me a copy of a book of blessings, To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donahue, a writer who lived in Ireland and who frequently traveled to the U.S. to give lectures and trainings. O’Donohue used Celtic spiritual traditions to construct his poetic blessings, explaining that the word “blessing” evokes in us a sense of warmth and protection, that in a blessing the “human heart pleads with the Divine heart.” He believed that regardless of our differences in religion, politics, and language, there is no heart without this divine reference.

When I was a child, my mother gave me the blessings of good books, objects that comforted and transfigured my life, inspired me to become a writer. In the preface to my book about Louisiana women, Their Adventurous Will, I speak of her gift of books to me:

“…My mother loved words and books. When I was three years old, she would seat me, cross-legged in the middle of a small kitchen and open for me giant editions of Mother Goose, A Child’s Garden of Verse, and Marigold Garden, laughing at friends who often dropped in to proclaim that I was backward because I did not talk and only sat quietly, absorbing the book characters she knew I would remember for a lifetime. She read aloud the entire series of Uncle Wiggly in the Cabbage Patch, The Little Colonel, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Greek Legends, Black Beauty and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even after all of the children in our family had learned to read.

“Every month for years, my mother would take one of the three children in our family to Claitor’s Bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to choose two books for our nightly reading session. She was the first family member to open the books, touching the pictures with credulous delight. My mother began to fly in the heavens long before Mary Poppins opened her umbrella to make her wonderful flights…”

I remembered those wonderful children’s books as I re-read John O’Donohue’s book this morning, thinking how meet his words are that describe blessing as a “direct address, driven by immediacy and care” – the qualities that drove my mother to share books she knew would always be my good friends. When I opened To Bless the Space Between Us, I blessed my mother as I pondered how we can dissuade negativity by simple blessings, by acknowledging that we have been blessed with inestimable gifts – children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends, warmth and shelter, good food, love, discoveries, small accomplishments, the ability to animate our ideas, and, of course, books that remind us how words can illuminate and transform our lives.

May you have a blessed Christmas!