From quilts to backpacks: how ritual blessings create care and connection

By Walter Hesford | FāVS News Columnist

When our pastor visited our new residence in a retirement community, she left us with “A New Home Blessing” that includes this verse: “May this house be a place of discovery, Where the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your soul can emerge – To deepen and refine your vision – For all that is yet to come to birth.”

How wonderful to be encouraged to think that where we have come in our old age may be a place of discovery, vision and rebirth. 

This blessing, this encouragement comes from John O’Donohue’s “To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings.”

The nature of blessings

Our pastor was kind enough to also leave us O’Donohue’s book, so I have been able to peruse it and contemplate the nature of blessings.

Drawing on his Celtic and Catholic heritage and the rituals that he says can be found in the Irish countryside, O’Donohue endeavors to retrieve for his readers “the lost art of blessing” in an essay toward the end of his book. 

Our modern secular culture often leaves us lonely for connections, for meaning, claims O’Donohue. Retrieving the art and the ritual of blessings can restore meaning to our life. They are particularly needed, he writes, when we are crossing thresholds like moving into a new home or onto a new stage in life. He writes, “Blessing always shores up the heart against the ravages of time…”

I don’t have O’Donohoe’s complete faith in the efficacy of blessings, in their power to affect the lives of those who are blessed. Also, the ritual of blessing strikes me as often feudal or patriarchal or arcane. As O’Donohoe mentions, the word blessing comes from an Old English word meaning to consecrate with blood — the word “bless’ is etymologically linked with “blood.”

Even if the event is not bloody, one thinks of a serf knelling down before his liege lord to receive a blessing. Or, going back even further in time, one thinks of the poignant scene in which Esau kneels before his father Isaac who had already blessed his deceitful brother Jacob. “Have you only one blessing, father? Bless me also, father!” begs Esau in vain (Genesis 27:38 NRSV).

Are those without a blessing lost? Are those with a blessing saved? The skeptic in me puts some blessings in the same category as the prayers critiqued by Janet Marrugg’s July 29 FāVS News column “Please don’t pray for me — do something.” Neither “thoughts and prayers” nor “blessings” should substitute for helpful action.

Blessings have a place

Although I have these reservations about blessings, I do think they can help give comfort and create a climate, a community, of care and respect, of contemplation and appreciation. Along with blessings for threshold moments, O’Donohue offers ones for those in various callings such as farming and nursing, for desires and states of heart and for phenomena such as the Earth, fire and light.

When I visited a friend who was recovering from eye surgery, who had to keep his eyes and head cast down, I read to him O’Donohue’s poem “For Light,” which begins: “Light cannot see inside things. That is what the dark is for: Minding the interior, nurturing the draw of growth through places where death in its own way turns into life.”

My friend and I shared this time of “minding the interior” and the hope, voiced in a later verse, “That our thoughts may be true light, finding their way into words which have the weight of shadow to hold the layers of truth.” 

At church I especially like those Sundays when we bless the beautiful quilts made by a committed group of skillful women. The quilts are draped over the pews so that we can place our hands on them and send them into the world blessed to provide warmth and shelter for those in need.

And as the school year nears, there’s a blessing of backpacks, both those of the kids in our congregation and those stuffed with school supplies, which, like the quilts, are sent abroad.

May all your backpacks be blessed as you cross your thresholds.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.