Modern Prophet: Ancient Wisdom—John O’Donohue 8-24-14

God, bless us this day with a sense of wonder in our minds and in our hearts.  Show us the power of your blessing of us and our blessings of others.  Show us how to love.  Amen

                Here’s what I learned from reading Fr. John O’Donohue:  We don’t know anything about the power of blessing others or the radical nature of God’s blessing upon us.  Nevertheless, if I were to sneeze, I would instantly gather 40 or 50 blessings because saying “Bless you” is just something we do and we do it without thinking.  If we really understood the power to bless and if we really meant it when we said “Gesundheit”, why, we’d be sneezing all over the place just so we could gather blessings along the way.   

You’ve heard me quote from Fr. John O’Donohue before.  He died unexpectedly at age 52 and wrote several books about Celtic spirituality and did wonderful work on the nature and necessity of blessing.  He says:  “What is a blessing?  A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen.  Life is a constant flow of emergence.  The beauty of blessing is its belief that it can affect what unfolds.”   If you think about it at all it will give you pause—imagine believing that we can affect what unfolds in this constant flow of life.  He  then continues:  “Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless.  Regardless of how we configure (or think about) the eternal, 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, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of a life’s journey will enjoy a homecoming, to invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.”                         

In his work, O’Donohue reminds us that Old Testament Jews believed that all blessings were owned by God and, therefore, dispensed by God.  The patriarchs such as, Adam, Noah, and Moses were all blessed by God.  For his part, Moses passed on a parting blessing to the Twelve Tribes of Israel in Deuteronomy.  In the Old Testament, the idea of "blessing" was also closely related to the question of inheritance, passing blessing from parent to child. Jacob blessed Joseph in Gen. 48:15, and Joseph's two sons. We must also remember that Old Testament Jews had a very sophisticated understanding of the sacred.  God was so sacred that you dare not speak the name aloud.  Places became sacred when God was encountered there.  Names were given to commemorate God’s visitation.  You may remember that Jacob names the place where he encounters the sacred “Bethel”.  This naming, the blessing of sacred space is consistent with our need to speak the blessing. 
                Earlier this week, I got to thinking about the story of Nicodemus from the perspective of blessing—seeing Jesus’ response to Nicodemus as the ultimate blessing.  Nicodemus had come to Jesus at night.  For the longest time, Nicodemus has gotten a bad rap for doing that.  Many think that he did it because he was afraid of getting caught.  He was, after all, a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin, the high Jewish Court.  But, if he suspected or even believed that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah, it is also possible that he went at night so as not to draw extra attention to Jesus which would have put him in immediate danger.  Whatever the case, we see Nicodemus deep in conversation with Jesus.  He has asked Jesus how one gains eternal life.  Jesus tells him, cryptically, that a person must be “born again”.  Nicodemus jumps to the wrong conclusion about what Jesus is saying.  You can almost see him, after having been engrossed in the conversation, sitting back and saying.  “What are you talking about?  How can anyone who is already grown up go back into their mother’s womb to be born again?  This talk makes no sense.  What’s this ‘born-from-above’ talk?”

Jesus, with his usual compassion says, “You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.”  As the dawn begins to break, we see the light beginning to shine in Nicodemus’ heart as well.

Is this—this availability of God’s Spirit—not the ultimate blessing given to us by God and explained so beautifully by Jesus?  Most of us need a little more explanation than this, however.  I found one of O’Donohue’s poems, simply called “The Blessing”, that I think gives us a way to understand what happens to us inside when we allow God’s Spirit to form us into a living spirit.  O’Donohue would suggest that we are brought to the point of wanting and longing for something more and this leads us to welcome God’s Spirit.  His poem, his blessing upon us is this:

Blessed be the longing that brought you here and that quickens

your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to befriend your eternal longing.

May you enjoy the critical and creative companionship of the

                question “who am I?” and may it brighten your longing.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and shelter your

feeling.

May your mind inhabit your life with the same sureness with

                which your body belongs to the world.

May the sense of something absent enlarge your life.

May you succumb to the danger of growth.

May you live in the neighborhood of wonder.

May you belong to love with the wildness of Dance.

May you know that you are ever embraced in the kind circle of

                God.

Furthermore, O’Donohue states this about blessings:  “The Bible is full of blessings.  They are seen as a communication of life from God.  Once the blessing is spoken, it cannot be annulled or recalled.” 

              Can we think of the impact on our lives if we begin to view God’s blessings as a “communication of life from God?”  If every time we meet and share the good news of God’s radical love and acceptance of us, we bless each other and ourselves, we begin to open up a floodgate of God’s gracious gifts that we best be ready to accept and pass on.  If every time we meet, we remember to bless the God who created and first blessed us, we begin to live into a place of constant communication of life from God and to God.  As we mature into a fuller understanding of the role of being blessed, accepting and living into God’s richest blessings, and desiring to reach out into the lives of others to bless them similarly, we will experience the grace of God to a depth, height, and breadth formerly unknown to us. 

                We also need to bless each other because when you bless another you make real O’Donohue’s belief that no life is alone or beyond the reach of all others.  When you offer a blessing, you make a potentially life-altering connection with that person—a connection that permeates all the fences we erect to keep others at a distance.  To offer that blessing and to have it received, is to connect with another at the deepest level.  

O’Donohue writes, ―a blessing is different from a greeting, a hug, a salute, or an affirmation . . . blessing is from soul to soul.”  I think we hunger for soul-to-soul connections.  And we hunger for them in everyday life—not just in church or in some special retreat or conference.  And so, we go about our daily lives.  How often do we stop ourselves to think about the innate sacredness of another person—that same person as the one who just bagged our groceries or cut our hair?

Think what might happened if we deliberately set out to infuse our lives and theirs with more and more blessings.  O’Donohue believed that “blessing” is a way of life and a means of transforming a broken world—a “huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.”

I know that some of you have noticed that at some point in the last year, I added “Namaste” to the “amen and amen” at the end of my sermons. “Amen” feels like God’s blessing on us, but Namaste feels like our blessing upon each other.  Some churches now use “Namaste” when passing “The Peace” or greeting each other in the service.  The Namaste, is performed by slightly bowing and pressing hands together, palms touching and fingers pointed upwards in front of the chest.   Commonly performed in India, “Namaste” is a respectful greeting and means “The spirit in me respects the spirit in you,” or “the divinity in me bows to the divinity in you.” The gesture first appeared 4000 years ago on clay seals of the Indus Valley Civilization. The Namaste is a reverential salutation that could stand a bit of use in and out of church in our own country.  I’m not suggesting that Open Circle take up the Namaste as an official greeting, but I would never be offended if you offered it to me and I to you. 

And, so, in whatever form you use, I invite all of us to exercise our blessing ability just a bit more.  As O’Donohue says, “May we all receive blessing upon blessing. And may we realize our power to bless, heal, and renew one another.”  Amen and amen.  Namaste.