Touched by Blessing. Gunilla Norris

sounds gory! However, ancient people held blood to be a symbol for life. So to join one’s blood, that is, one’s life force, and to commit one’s self to another person’s well being, was a powerful vow of mutuality.

      Even now, in Sweden, where I come from, it is still the custom whenever we make a promise we intend to fulfill to “thumb on it”. Vi tummar pa det, we say. With this little ritual act of commitment, one’s promise is no longer casual. This custom is left over from times when we would cut our thumb so it would bleed, and one’s friend would do the same. In the mingling of blood was placed a promise, a vow of constancy, an offering of self. Even now, in some places in the world people become blood brothers and blood sisters in this way.

      These customs reflect that blessing is a prayer that invokes the life force to be with those we bless. When we recognize that something has blessed us, we sense how the life force has somehow given us the strength to live more fully.

      Blessing is a heart-full practice. The heart pumps blood, and the blood circulates to every part of the body. We are constantly infused by the flow of blessing from our physical heart. When we bless others and are blessed by others, we are also circulating energy, support, and the wish for one another’s best interests. Our hearts are in it.

      A received blessing always takes place in the here and now, in a specific time and place. It is usually on the edge of the unknown and meets the need of a moment. It is also true that blessing is in the air all the time, though we might not have a practice of invoking it or feeling it.

      To live in the awareness of blessing is to practice a very human art that sanctifies the simplest of things. For instance, blessing our food before we eat it brings about deeper nourishment. Turning on the light when it’s dark, understood as a blessing, sheds more light than what electricity delivers. Opening the faucet and feeling clean water run over our hands or drinking a cup of clear water is to wash and drink blessing. Without water we cannot live. Opening the window and breathing the morning air will inspire us with more than we know. Holding the hand of your child, a friend’s hand, or the hand of a spouse or a stranger…even perhaps the hand of an enemy…will keep our hearts open to blessing.

      I love the African aphorism that Bishop Desmond Tutu often shared: “I am because we are”. It tells the truth that mutuality is at the core of life. We cannot do without each other. The Swedish Nobel Prize winner for poetry, Tomas Tranströmer wrote in a poem (and I loosely translate here), “We are that place where Life is working on itself”. We need each other’s reflection to do it, to bring illumination into each other’s living spaces.

      We are made whole by each other’s loving presence and being. To become aware of this, even just a little, is to participate in miracles. Blessings that reach into our hearts and those that emerge from our hearts make a force for goodness that does not quit.

      To end this note I want to include what the Sufi poet, Hafiz, wrote. It speaks of a spiritual mutuality that is astonishing. If what he wrote is true, we have the possibility to live in a radiance of such enormity it cannot be imagined.

      “God revealed a sublime truth

      to the world

      when He sang,

      I am made whole by your life.

      Each soul, each soul completes me.”