When a child was born to a family in Celtic Christianity, the midwife spoke a blessing on the newborn. New things need blessings.
As we enter this new year, what would it be like to enter into the kind of radical authenticity in which we each wrote our own blessing, memorized it and spoke it throughout the year. Sure, it might change here and there a bit but such is the organic quality of life.
What are your longings? What does you heart sing into being? Shat stirs you down in your gut? What are your hopes for this year in your life and the lives of those you love? What would it be like to put pen to paper some morning and write down a few words?
My friend, favorite theologian and mentor John O’Donohue has written a series of blessing that will stun with their beauty and clarity, but any one of us can write and speak a blessing. People speak them over meals all the time but they can be spoken over a birth or even over a new year.
Here is mine for this year. Write one for yourself…
When the winds of change whip up behind the barns of life
may God protect the candle-flame of discernment.
And when people in my life shift and change, God grant
that my ballast of mornings and candles to keep my boat
riding low in life’s oceans.
May those who love me feed my hunger for connection
and may those who harm me be the subject of forgiveness prayers
so that smoke does not build up in my throat and block my song.
Let the mountains skip and the vast plains dance around me
as I live into this undulating life and
so that in the slow evenings of candles, crock-pots and friendship,
scotch and cheese, and a snoring black dog
I may, when all has been said and done,
rest in the knowledge that I am loved
and that all manner of thing shall be well indeed,
and enough.