Here is
something written by Kathleen Norris in her fascinating book “The Cloister Walk”: It is
the aim of contemplative living, at least in the Christian mode, that you learn
to recognise a blessing when you see one, and are able to respond to it with
words that God has given you. YES, in
response to that wildly colourful yet peaceful sky; YES, I could say back to
God, with a line from Psalm 65 – “The lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with
joy.”
We learn to recognise a blessing when we see
one… But this is tricky and subtle,
because “blessing” has long become a pious cliché. The old gospel song Count Your Blessings tells it all.
A blessing turns out to be something I am pleased about, which I think
God has conferred on me – other folks may not have been so blessed. A blessing can be unexpected money, or a
recovery from illness. For some it is a
miraculously free parking spot in the town. A
grandmother told me her grandson was “our little blessing”, although I knew
that was not quite the word that sprang to the child’s mother’s lips. So a “blessing” in popular usage is typically
all about me. There shall be showers of blessings, says another gospel song. Those blessings are often seen as a reward
for our faithfulness. Count your blessings, name them one by one,
and it will surprise you what the Lord has done… a sort of balance sheet of
spiritual rewards.
But actually
contemplative life and prayer is less and less about me, and growing up in
faith means that this ego that thinks it is
all about me, is tending now to wither and attenuate. That is a kind of growing freedom, and as
Kathleen Norris says, you learn to
recognise a blessing when you see one, and are able to respond to it with words
that God has given you. As far as
she is concerned, the word God has given us is YES – yes, to quiet beauty; yes,
to the whole of life, its mistakes and setbacks as well as its victories; yes,
to ageing, to mortality, to the advancing years.
Kathleen
Norris, as Christians ought to be, is steeped in the Psalms, because they so
often articulate what we need to say but can’t, or think we shouldn’t. And she quotes Psalm 65: The
lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with joy.
The land of sunrise is youth and vigour and all that promise and energy;
the land of sunset is the years of age and memory and the processes of letting
go and simplifying. Both, says the
Psalmist, you fill with joy. That is blessing. Blessing makes us still and content, and
fills our hearts. It is never a gift of
deserving, but always a gift of grace.
Part of the
gift is the wisdom which learns to note and attend to the blessing, as Kathleen
Norris says – we learn to recognise a
blessing when we see one. And it is God who fills the experience with
joy. I looked at the Hebrew. I think it says: ...you fill with your
joy. It is God who is delighted, it is God’s
joy we are encountering, and sharing.
Ego is not part of it. We are
enjoying what God is seeing. So it’s good
to have learned, in the land of sunset or even earlier, to know a blessing when
we see one. God is seeing it too.
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