Some very brief thoughts on blessing.
I sit outside for the first hour of the day, while the weather is still warm enough. It seems I only have to sit down with a cup of tea for the action to begin. I have observed this to be a fact, and not just my imagination, as I always wait on the other side of the window to see if anything is going to happen before I go out there. It rarely does.
But within seconds of my sitting down about fifty swifts appear circling and dipping over the natural pool in front of the house. It is their drinking moment, to be repeated at around 6pm for as long as daylight allows. I think they sense the shortening days and that they must soon leave. They are making the most of this brief moment, of its blessing. The swifts are already lining up on the television aerials, flexing their wings and calling out to each other, to encourage the first-timers perhaps, urging them to keep up their exercise routines. I shall miss them, especially on that first day after they leave. They don’t take off singly, or even in pairs. The whole crowd is there one day and gone the next.
Most blessings are like that, I find. Here one moment and gone the next, often only recognised after they’ve gone.
It’s easy to miss our blessings in the times we’re living in, in the rather ‘potted’ state many of us who are still semi-isolated feel we inhabit. Longing for Covid to be a thing of the past constrains us even more in the realities of the present. How good it would be to take off with the birds. But if we were to take off, as many are desperate to do right now, there would be little room for the blessings of the present moment. We would be too busy anticipating what is about to happen, next week or tomorrow, instead of being fully present to what is happening right now, including the surprising blessings that crop up on the lowest of days.
I’m not saying ‘Always look on the bright side’, not that I’d want to reference the song and its (in my view) bafflingly ill chosen context in the Monty Python film. In any case, for many people right now there isn’t a bright side. To pretend that there is one is to deny the blessing, strange as that may sound. What we do have to do, then, is to keep a window open.
This reminds me of an apocryphal story told of Jesus who, between the hearings with Caiaphas and Pilate, was lowered into a pit (the equivalent of a police cell) for the intervening couple of hours. There would have been an opening at the top from which he would have seen the stars, and maybe the first light of dawn. Blessing works like that in times of depression. You notice it where you least expected it.
So what I’m really saying is be prepared for surprises, even in times of depression. An unexpected email, something funny being said over supper that distracts us from a gossipy dead-end conversation, from which nothing good can be salvaged without sounding insincere, or from words of forced gratitude said as Grace before a meal. Better to be silent and really plumb the meaning of the Grace, and then pour a glass of wine, break a piece of bread, be present to the Presence and to the blessing of the moment.
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