Untangling Cliché: "Bless," Blessing," "Blessed."
Friday, May 28, 2010 at 8:13AM | by Otter When I was a kid growing up among evangelicals and Catholics and pagans in New Orleans, one of the really difficult things for me was that my stoner friends couldn't figure out what my church friends meant when they talked.
Phrases like "praise the Lord" and "bless God" just didn't have any purchase on their ears or minds.
Most Christians had a good idea of when to use such phrases. But they couldn't have defined them for you.
And this raised a lot of questions in my mind about whether Christians really meant anything in particular by them, or whether they were just sort of noises uttered at appropriate times, like Marines saying "Hooya!" or whatever they say when they're excited.
One of the chief offenders was "bless." It's central to the way religious people talk, but it doesn't really get used in everyday language. And to listen to the way people use it without really knowing what it means is enough to make you a lifelong supporter of a constitutional amendment that doesn't let subcultures speak unless they can define what the fuck they're talking about. I'm pretty sure it was Marshall McLuhan who referred to "the comforting noise" that people need to be surrounded with in order to feel that the group is intact and stable, and way too frequently people who have faith in God are inclined to paper over the frightening cracks in the wall with cliché rather than real breathless imagination. Evangelicals (particularly from World War II to 1990 or so) have been really egregious about sitting in their circles and saying things to each other without any specific meaning.
I think there's tremendous damage to the soul and the self that lies down that road.
Anyway, my heart was blessed to receive this:
From the Mailbag:
~What does it mean to be “blessed?” What does that really look like?
The Hebrew word barak is related to the words "kneel" and "gift." And what it really has to do with, or rather, where the word comes from, is the exchange of gifts.
Keep in mind that the Hebrew Bible (that is, the Old Testament) imagines its god(s) as an ancient near eastern king, and before such a person a good subject would kneel to offer and receive gifts, favors, boons, or whatever.
To "bless" God in these terms is to imagine him as such a king, and yourself kneeling before him and offering your gifts. (Please don't be put off by the word "imagine." You can't say anything to god or about god without imagining somehow. Try it if you doubt me. Remember that the imagination is your path to god and god's path to you.)
It means to be fortunate. To have what some people call "good luck." And it imagines that luck or good fortune in terms of a gift from a powerful king.
By the time of the New Testament the Greek words used to cover the Hebrew forms of "bless" are typically more abstract, from the root-noun eulogia, "to speak well." Here the idea seems to be simply derivative from the idea of "commendation." Where the Hebrew got a gold watch, the Greek got a letter of praise for his file. At least that's the idea encoded in the language itself.
From the same email:
~Is “the blessing” earned by obedience or is it, like salvation, a gift?
It's a gift by definition. But if you must think theologically instead of poetically, I think it depends on what you think the gift in question really is.
Right now, I've got an intense consciousness of being gifted that comes from this playlist I've just made in which Led Zeppelin's "Going To California" backed up against Theresa Andersson's "God's Highway," followed by The Lost Dogs' "Breathe Deep." That so worked for me. I can honestly say that struck me this morning as a cool little party-favor from the universe, or god, or whatever you want to call it.
Was that "earned"?
Well, God or nature gifted me with a lot of musical intelligence and a receptivity to lyrical genius and the weird gifts of Robert Plant and Theresa Andersson and Terry Taylor. I "earned" it by putting the music together just so. And the universe conspired with itself to make that choice possible, and felicitous.
But I'd challenge you to stop thinking theologically: that question "is it a gift or earned?" is the language of Roman fatalism crashing against Christian Judaism, and it's pretty useless, I think.
You don't need to live with first century philosophical problems unless you really want to.
Instead I'd just challenge you to look at your life and ask, "What's made my jaw drop with wonder and awe, and what made me grateful just to be alive, to have been in this place at this time with these people (or alone)?"
In other words, decide for yourself what's a "blessing." Bite that fruit of knowledge and know good from evil.
If you've got nothin', you're not blessed.
If you have a superabundance, "blessing" is almost as good a word as any.
But the best word will come from your own imagination of god, your own experience, your own articulation of what god really amounts to.
From the same email:
~Are some people/families/nations more “blessed by God?” If so, what does that say about the suffering faithful?
I really think this gets to the question of gratitude more than "gift." Everybody's got something good in her life... but it takes a strong character to cultivate a lasting gratitude for the good things.
Jews have excellent genes: they're probably disproportionately brilliant and talented, and have been proven to be gifted with a strong resistance to alcoholism, to take just one measurable example. As textual exegetes and the producers of a collective imagination, there's something almost supernaturally weird about them.
That's a "blessing," a gift.
They've also had a hell of a bad time in history, possibly because of that gift.
Is that bad time a "blessing," a gift? I think it's one of the geniuses of their literature that they see themselves as suffering specifically in order to bring their gifts to the world, like Socrates or Jesus or Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. (Go back and read the book of Jonah with an eye on the play between Israel, symbolized by Jonah, and the surrounding nations symbolized by Ninevah: they see themselves as suffering for bringing a gift to the world.)
In other words, they've very often decided to be grateful (though frequently with wonderful irony), to see that suffering frequently comes as the price of a gift. In terms of your question, they count themselves blessed, and count their suffering as being the price of that blessing.
Americans have many gifts, obviously. Some they have created (and yes, that's still a gift, as one's talents and resources and industry are the product of the universe's rather mischievious caprice), some have been just freakish luck.
Is a starving child in the developing world "blessed"? Why or why not? I don't think that's a question you can answer for another person. All you can really do is increase the gifts in that person's life, and thereby make real the idea that your god is a god who blesses. If you claim god is a god who blesses while somebody is starving, you're putting a terrible burden on their gratitude, and quite likely lying, to boot.
Two more questions from the same email that I think are related:
~What is the role of the Old Testament in the daily life of a believer today?
~If we are no longer under the Old Testament Law, why would we still be using the same "system" for blessing?
If I understand your question rightly, I think only the believer can answer that for herself.
But it's not a "system." It's a description, it's a metaphor, it's an imagination.
And not a bad one: please don't think I'm dissing the language of blessing.
I just want to explain that once you've made up your mind that an ancient near eastern king is the best available metaphor for your god (I don't think it is, but it's your god, not mine), the metaphor of "gift" for the good things in your life (no matter what they are) is a really appropriate one.
Ancient near eastern kingdoms being what they were, it also helps imagine the bad things that happen to you: the Hebrews imagined a character in the court of the king called Ha Satan, The Adversary, who stirred up trouble. Every court or government building had one (and still does): the guy who just makes mischief and schemes behind the scenes.
So for the Hebrew / ancient Israelite, "blessing" was the gift of the king. Anything bad was the scheming of one of the god's less sympathetic entourage.
If you want to know what the "system" is, look not at your Bible but first at your life. Is it embued with good things? Or is it brutal and beset with difficulty?
Now consult your imagination: how do you see God? As the giver of gifts? Or as capricious?
Or perhaps there is the chance that you'll acknowledge life is filled with both blessing and struggle, and that the giver of the true, deep, beautiful things is worth worshiping, and that everything else is a price that must be paid for the gift of having lived at all. And that would be very Jewish of you.
And you might add to that that it is your charge now to see to it that the universe increases in love, in cultivation, in depth and love. And you might add that it is better for you to perish in doing well than that darkness should increase.
And that would be very Christian of you.
Reader Comments (6)
I love this post. Thank you.
If I'm being honest, right now, my life feels brutal and beset with difficulty and I'm drowning. I've been begging God to be real. Begging him to help me. Begging.
This is lovely, and I do acknowledge that my life is filled blessing as well as struggle. The struggle just seems to overshadow everything else at times. It's good to be reminded though, that struggle is a part of life, and to have lived at all is a gift.
This is good. Perhaps it will help me to see past my own struggles. I'm so selfish. It's hard for me to see beyond myself. But I'll try.
I think the number of people who know how you feel would surprise you, Elizabeth. I know you'll find your way. It might not look like anybody else's, but you've sort of disqualified yourself from borrowing anybody else's story.
Wow. Just...um...Wow. Thanks D_O. I love you, man! :)
Thanks, Jennifer. You're very kind.
"Or perhaps there is the chance that you'll acknowledge life is filled with both blessing and struggle, and that the giver of the true, deep, beautiful things is worth worshiping, and that everything else is a price that must be paid for the gift of having lived at all. And that would be very Jewish of you.
And you might add to that that it is your charge now to see to it that the universe increases in love, in cultivation, in depth and love. And you might add that it is better for you to perish in doing well than that darkness should increase.
And that would be very Christian of you."
This really spoke to me today. I was sitting in church this morning, my mind wandering from the sermon, wondering why there is so much evil in the world. What you wrote above gives me hope.
I think, given the parameters you set down at the end of your post...that I am very Jewish. And very Christian.
And I'm very good with that.