The Blessing

In the morning when you rise
I bless the sun, I bless the skies
I bless your lips, I bless your eyes
My blessing goes with you

In the nighttime when you sleep
Oh I bless you while a watch I keep
As you lie in slumber deep
My blessing goes with you

This is my prayer for you
There for you, ever true
Each, every day for you
In everything you do

And when you come to me
And hold me close to you
I bless you
And you bless me, too

When your weary heart is tired
If the world would leave you uninspired
When nothing more of love’s desired
My blessing goes with you

When the storms of life are strong
When you’re wounded, when you don’t belong
When you no longer hear my song
My blessing goes with you

This is my prayer for you
There for you, ever true
Each, every day for you
In everything you do

And when you come to me
And hold me close to you
I bless you
And you bless me, too

I bless you
And you bless me, too

The Blessing, Celtic Woman
Songwriters: Brendan Graham & David Downes

what is a blessing?

Listening to this beautiful song and reading its lyrics, we feel deep in our souls the meaning of being blessed—receiving a blessing, feeling blessed, and offering blessings to others. The very idea of a blessing can bring tears to our eyes, stirring something profound within us. The singer’s clear, sweet voice and the gentle melody magically express a timeless message about blessings.

We know about blessings because being blessed by someone who has the love and power to bless us is an archetypal event–something common to all people in all ages. Whether it conjures up images of priests and censers, or the trembling hand of a grandmother laid on her newborn great-grandchild’s head, or that of a tribal elder passing his hands over the youth and blowing smoke around the young man’s head, we know what a blessing is.

Many of us have received blessings from our parents or grandparents, and many of us have not. Many of us spent our childhoods and young adulthoods waiting for that blessing, but it never came. Some of us have sat at the bedside of a dying parent and received nothing, no gracious word, no hopeful epithet to suit us. Some of us were blessed and given charges by the people we loved most, and went out into life under this banner. Whatever our individual experiences with blessings, we know what they are.

the roots of blessing

Etymology is the study of how words originated and changed over time. For me, delving into the origins of words feels like venturing into hidden caves. I’m a linguistic spelunker, crawling into the dark recesses of language, my headlamp casting light on forgotten meanings and buried roots. It’s magical.

The word “blessing” comes from the Proto-Indo-European word bhel, from which blood, boulder, phallus, and blind derive. A blessing has life in it, like the blood. Also like blood, it carries a unique code–like DNA–specific to the one being blessed. A blessing has the mass, weight, and substance of a boulder; people who have been rightly blessed carry the weight of that blessing with them their entire lives and have something of substance to pass on to others. 

Like a phallus, a blessing is generative and powerfully procreative. It has the masculine strength of the warrior with his spear, and like the warrior, a blessing is protective as well as defensive. Its phallic energy causes many scenes of blessing to be symbolically rendered through male figures, even though every person, male or female, carries this energy.

Finally, a blessing comes from a place as dark as blindness, for it arises from the unconscious, from what we know without knowing how we know it. A blessing is prophetic, having deep spiritual and mystical origins arising from some ancient tap root with fructifying power.

A blessing is an invoking of God’s favor, an expression of approval and good wishes, and an act of praise verbalized over another human being. We do not write our own blessings; we wait sometimes our entire lives to be blessed by someone else. And because we externalize the need to be blessed and are always looking for the priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, or fairy godmother who will lay hands on us and bless us, we forget that, deep down inside, our own priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, and fairy godmother has a ready blessing.

namaste

नमस्ते

Of all the traditions of other cultures I wish we’d adopt in the Western world, my favorite is the practice of bowing to another person in greeting. I love the Hindu and Buddhist greeting, namaste, which means “the divinity within me honors the divinity within you.” I can think of few other ways in which a greeting invokes a more powerful blessing than this one. So, today, namaste. The divinity within me honors the divinity within you.

Today, I invite you to bow to yourself. I invite you to meditate on the blessings that have been spoken to you, those spoken over you, and the ones you longed for but never received.

I invite you to meditate until images of your own blessings rise from deep within your soul and take shape as logos—the living word. Breathe those words in, let them settle within you, then speak them aloud–offering them to yourself as a gift. Bow to yourself in gratitude. Then, from that fullness, bow to someone you love, and bless them.