Blessing

As 2 February marks the Candlemas, so 3 February brings us to the commemoration of St Blaise, a figure of some import in the Middle Ages who has fallen into relative obscurity today. Indeed, I wouldn’t bring him up in these pages save for the fact that some parishes (such as ours) continue a wonderfully quirky tradition in his honor: the annual blessing of the throats.

Blaise was famous, among other things, for saving someone from choking on a fishbone. It became de rigueur to take a pair of tapers blessed at Candlemas the night before, to cross them under a person’s throat, and to pray that they would be delivered “from every ailment of the throat and from every other disease.” I confess that I continue this tradition in part to “keep Church weird,” an operative dictum of mine. Yet even I don’t light the tapers, as had been the elder custom, lest I touch off someone’s hairspray.

This is but one example of blessings held throughout the Church year—bread blessing at Lammas, beer blessing at St John’s, quilt blessing at graduation, &c—all of which raise the question as to what exactly blessings are for. What constitutes a Christian blessing? What seek we to accomplish? And that’s worth talking about more generally, even if particular instances of blessing can seem a bit arcane.

First and foremost, a Christian blessing reveals an item for what it truly is, the purpose for which God has intended it. It’s like blowing the dust off of some forgotten treasure. Blessing water, for example, does not change the water into something else, but rather reaffirms the purposes for which God has given to us His good gift of water: cleansing, refreshing, bringing life to the earth.

On Palm Sunday we bless palms; at Rogation we bless seeds and tools and good rich earth; on St Francis’ Day we bless our animals. Such events remind us that these things have been entrusted to us for our good use, that we might use these gifts in service to our neighbors and our community, for the benefit of humanity and the greater glory of God. And of course we bless people, men and women and children, to reaffirm that each and every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, known and loved by Him, with an eternal destiny manifest in Jesus Christ.

A Christian blessing is also a prayer. It is a prayer of thanksgiving, intercession, and protection. If we bless a car, surely it is a prayer that God guide and keep and protect us in our travels, and especially our children. We bless vestments, paraments, and Bibles as a prayer that through these things we may draw closer to God and God to us. We bless oil for healing as a tangible prayer, a prayer made solid, to restore our loved ones to wholeness and health. A blessing, then, is a prayer that we can touch.

Which brings us to our third and final point: a blessing is where faith intersects with life. It is the Church thrust out into the nitty-gritty, the daily grind. We bless people and places and things so that they might be hallowed, set apart, for the work of Christ’s Body in the wide wild world.

Ours is a God made flesh in Jesus Christ, so that we can see and touch and taste Him in the Word and in the Sacraments. His promises likewise are made solid, made flesh, so that He may go out—in and with and through us—into a world still very much in need of resurrection. A blessing is a continuation, an extension, of the Incarnation by which the Creator and Creation are made one in Christ.

So that’s why we bless throats as St Blaise’ Day, conveniently situated in the midst of cold and flu season. It isn’t magical thinking. We bless in order to reassert what a miracle the human body is. We bless as a prayer of thanksgiving, and a petition that God bring us health and peace of body and soul.

And we bless in order to take God’s blessing out from the four walls of our sanctuary; out into every corner of Creation in space and in time; out to reach the least, the lost, and the lonely; out to manifest God’s Kingdom in the particular life that we are given, as we serve gladly and await patiently the harvest at the end of the age.

In Jesus. Amen. 

-Eminent Grand Prelate Sir Knight Ryan Stout