The Blessing

In the morning when you rise
I bless the sun, I bless the skies
I bless your lips, I bless your eyes
My blessing goes with you

In the nighttime when you sleep
Oh I bless you while a watch I keep
As you lie in slumber deep
My blessing goes with you

This is my prayer for you
There for you, ever true
Each, every day for you
In everything you do

And when you come to me
And hold me close to you
I bless you
And you bless me, too

When your weary heart is tired
If the world would leave you uninspired
When nothing more of love’s desired
My blessing goes with you

When the storms of life are strong
When you’re wounded, when you don’t belong
When you no longer hear my song
My blessing goes with you

This is my prayer for you
There for you, ever true
Each, every day for you
In everything you do

And when you come to me
And hold me close to you
I bless you
And you bless me, too

I bless you
And you bless me, too

What We Know

When we listen to this beautiful song and read the lyrics, we know what a blessing is. Knowing what a blessing is can make tears well up, unbidden; we exclaim about how beautiful the singer’s voice is, how magical this song she sings, but as beautiful as the singer’s voice, what gives this song its timelessness is what we know about blessings. We know about them because being blessed by someone who has the love and power to bless us is an archetypal event–something that is common to all people in all ages. Whether it conjures up images of priests and censers, or the trembling hand of a grandmother, laid on her new great-grandchild’s head, or that of a tribal elder passing his hands over the youth and blowing smoke all around the young man’s head, we know what a blessing is.

Many of us have received blessings from our parents or grandparents, and many of us have not. Many of us spent our childhoods and young adulthoods waiting for that blessing, and it never came. Some of us have sat at the bedside of a dying parent and received nothing, no gracious word, no hopeful epithet to suit us. Some of us were blessed and given charges by the people we loved most, and went out into life under this banner. Whatever our individual experiences with blessings, we know what they are.

The word “blessing” comes from the Proto-Indo-European word bhel, from which blood, boulder, phallus, and blind derive. A blessing has life in it, like the blood. Also like blood, it carries a unique code–like DNA–specific to the one being blessed. A blessing has the mass, weight, and substance of a boulder; people who have been rightly blessed carry the weight of that blessing with them their entire lives and have something of substance to pass on to others. Like a phallus, a blessing is generative and powerfully procreative. It has the masculine strength of the warrior with his spear, and like the warrior, a blessing is protective as well as defensive. Its phallic energy causes many scenes of blessing to be symbolically rendered through male figures, even though every person, male or female, carries this energy. Finally, a blessing comes from a place as dark as blindness, for it arises from the unconscious, from what we know without knowing how we know it. A blessing is prophetic, having deep spiritual and mystical origins arising from some ancient tap root with fructifying power.

A blessing is an invoking of God’s favor, an expression of approval and good wishes, and an act of praise verbalized over another human being. We do not write our own blessings; we wait sometimes our entire lives to be blessed by someone else. And because we externalize the need to be blessed and are always looking for the priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, or fairy godmother who will lay hands on us and bless us, we forget that, deep down inside, our own priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, and fairy godmother has a ready blessing.

नमस्ते

Of all the traditions among other cultures that I wish we would adopt in the Western world, my favorite is the practice of bowing to another person in greeting. I love the Hindu and Buddhist greeting, namaste, for it means “the divinity within me honors the divinity within you.” I can think of few other ways in which a greeting can invoke more powerful blessing than this one. So, today, namaste. The divinity within me honors the divinity within you. I invite you to bow to yourself, and to meditate today on the blessings that have been spoken over you and to you, and the ones you wish had been but never were. I invite you to meditate until images of your own blessing come up inside your soul, and then become logos. I invite you to breathe those words over yourself, speak them to yourself, and bow to yourself. Then, take a bit of that blessing, and bow to a person you love, and bless him or her.

I’ve been very bad about updating lately due to the demands of everyday life, not the least of which is that I’ve started work for my certificate in Jungian studies and am writing a paper for the seminar that occurs this week. I find it impossible to do justice to the Jacob and Esau series while also writing for the seminar, so thought I’d have an intermission during which I post some of what I’ve been reading over the past month.

creating a life

I’ve been reading Creating a Life by Jungian analyst James Hollis and Jung’s Symbols of Transformation at the same time. Hollis is the head of the Jungian studies program I’ll undertake over the next two years. Creating a Life is the book a person should read after reading about (and hopefully undertaking) the developmental tasks of middle age (40+ years), for it points you in the right direction after the razed earth policy mid-life seems to demand.

I appreciate Hollis’s honesty about the work of a therapist, because it made me feel much better about having quit my work as one. He writes:

“Were therapists required by “truth in advertising” legislation to tell their reality, then virtually no one would ever enter therapy. The therapist would be obliged to say at least three things in return to the suffering supplicant:

First, you will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself. Decades from now you will be fighting on these familiar fronts, though the terrain may have shifted so much that you may have difficulty recognizing the same old, same old.

Second, you will be obliged to disassemble the many forces you have gathered to defend against your wound. At this late date it is your defenses, not your wound, that cause the problem and arrest your journey. But removing those defenses will oblige you to feel all the pain of that wound again.

And third, you will not be spared pain, vouchsafed wisdom or granted exemption from future suffering. In fact, genuine disclosure would require a therapist to reveal the shabby sham of managed care as a fraud, and make a much more modest claim for long-term depth therapy or analysis. “

Hollis concludes this topic by suggesting that depth therapy or analysis will not cure anyone, but will, at least, make life more interesting by helping one discover the “complex riddles wrapped within” and thus, hopefully, bring them and other inner contents into consciousness.

purgatorio

I found Creating a Life comforting, even though I know that bringing these contents into consciousness heralds an inevitable, purgatorial descent in mid-life that is shunned by most. Having surrendered most of the so-called convictions I acquired and lived by in my 20s and 30s, I experienced my 40s as a psychological postapocalyptic wasteland peopled by fellow pilgrims who were very, very few and quite far between. I thought I was alone in grieving the dearth of mentors in whom the Wise Old Man or Crone archetypes had been made manifest, but Hollis showed me that I don’t perceive or grieve the loss of mentors alone. He writes that we have very few initiated adults among us because most will not take the path of ego-annihilation demanded by the initiation process.

When Jesus said that none were worthy to follow Him unless they took up their cross first, He meant it. One can never be raised in the image of the God-man until he has first suffered and died, suspended between heaven and hell, eternity and this mortal world. Yet because of the pain of this suffering and in spite of our best intentions, we end up trudging along the paths our parents and grandparents trod before us. We don’t want to suffer; we will not die. We keep feeding the ego with its constant cries of “I want, I need,” catering to its demands and claims and its need for status and collective approval. We end up being older, more tired and fearful versions of our old selves. Our lights grow dim from flickering; we shrink back from the challenge before us and eventually shrivel into mere shadows of the selves we were meant to be.

As I have said while writing about Jacob and Esau and as we will see as I progress with the series, nobody–and I mean nobody–attains wholeness while forging through life on an ego-based, selfish path. This is why, as Stephen Covey says, we are called to imagining and implementing “win-win” solutions in every single conflict. Anything less does not demand the little deaths demanded by compromise. The fact that we are polarized as a nation along political, religious, cultural and socioeconomic lines illustrates just how unconscious we are to saving our own lives, how impossible the likelihood that we will yield and thus grow.

a bloody blundering

My 12-year-old daughter asked me the other day whether I’d choose to go back in time if I could, if I’d want a “do-over” for any part of my life. I imagined being 12 or 16 or 28 or 36 again, mulling over the mistakes and blunders I’ve made, the people I’ve hurt, the stupid decisions I’ve made. Did I want to go back and change something, anything? After awhile I told her that I wouldn’t want to go back under any circumstance, for in spite of these mistakes and regrets, the first half of my life was, as Hollis writes, “a great and inevitable mistake, a bloody blundering.” An inevitable mistake, a mistake that had to be made.

To be young is to be a fool living among fools, no matter how wise we imagine we are. The wisest old folks you know (if you can find any) will tell you they were fools when they were younger; the trick is to learn from having been one and to press on toward wisdom and clarity. This is how it is with me; I’m pressing on, creating a life for myself. As it says in Proverbs, “if you are wise, you are wise for yourself; if you are foolish, you alone will bear it.” Having carried the results of my own follies for all the years since I did them, I’m wiser for having carried them. I’m lingering in a place where I am happy and miserable, content and full of yearning, clear-eyed but stumbling blindly, sane in the craziest way possible, grateful to be where I am at this moment in time, this ripe moment, this beautiful, pregnant moment.

Ever so slowly and laboriously, I’ve been writing about being cheated, using the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau as a springboard because this was the idea that came to me one day as I cleaned house. Perhaps bringing into the light of consciousness what had been hidden before was a sort of house cleaning I needed in my spirit. Whatever the case, Jacob and Esau presented themselves to be part of the cure.

When dissecting a story, myth, or fable for analytical purposes, we look at it and mull it over from as many angles as we can, much as a person views a painting or sculpture from many angles. One of the things I like most about visiting art museums is the benches placed here and there in front of major pieces of art. One can sit and mull, absorb, sketch, write, and finally interpret the work.

INHERITANCE

One obvious question that arises when mulling over the story of Jacob and Esau is what was the blessing these brothers wrangled over? What was the fuss about? What constituted a Biblical birthright or paternal blessing? Is there a difference between a blessing and a birthright? How can we apply this knowledge today?

The Biblical birthright referred to the special privileges and advantages that belonged to the first-born son. The first-born son was the priest of the family and received a double portion of the father’s wealth. He inherited whatever honorable title and judicial or royal authority the father had. Jesus Christ was said to be “the first-born among many brethren.” To the Hebrews, the Biblical birthright was quite important.

Although the birthright was just that, a right, it was a right that could be removed by God or the father of the first-born son. Although Reuben was the first born of the sons of Israel, God removed his right to become high priest and gave the right of perpetual priesthood the tribe of Levi, from whom Jesus was descended. Because of Reuben’s poor conduct, God also removed the double portion of wealth he should have inherited. In another Biblical case of disenfranchisement, King David passed his judicial authority to Solomon rather than to his first-born son, Adonijah.

The only Biblical case of a first-born son who willingly gave up his own birthright is that of Esau, who traded his birthright to his twin brother Jacob for a bowl of lentil soup. Esau’s action is particularly scandalous because only God or the father had the authority to confer or rescind the birthright and its attendant blessing. Esau’s decision to give up his birthright for something temporal and cheap wasn’t only willful, it was arrogant and showed the height of disrespect. In effect, Esau told his heavenly and earthly fathers that their treasures and titles were worth no more than a bowl of soup.

During patriarchal times, the effects and bounty of the birthright were not clearly defined except by custom. Once small clans or tribes grew into larger entities or nations, the royal right of succession applied to the firstborn son. Eventually, the rights of the eldest son became specific:

• The rights, authority, and spiritual functions of the priesthood accrued to the firstborn son and his family, including the right to give prophetic blessings.
• A double portion of the paternal property was given to the firstborn under Mosaic law.
• The eldest son succeeded to the official political authority of the father. Thus, the first-born of the king was his successor by law.
• The eldest son became the head of the family when the father died, and was thus responsible for the family property and property.

THE BLESSING

The spiritual and prophetic blessing given to the first-born son differs from the entire birthright, although the blessing can (and should be) part of the birthright of the first-born. In Biblical times, because parents were inexorably bound to Yahweh in a theocracy, spiritual possessions were assumed to exist alongside the temporal. Parents thus saw their children through spiritual as well as physical eyes. When the parents became elderly and frail, or whenever they thought it was time to confer this spiritual blessing, they called the children to them and, laying hands on them, blessed them.

The blessing can be divided from the birthright, as was the case with Esau and Jacob. Initially, Esau traded only his birthright to Jacob, reserving the blessing for himself. Jacob and Rebekah, their mother, conspired together to cheat Esau out of his blessing, too, and managed to succeed (Genesis 27). Thus Jacob received the birthright because Esau willingly gave it up; but the prophetic, spiritual blessing he received through deceit.

Biblical blessings such as the one Esau lost had several elements, which Gary Smalley and John Trent identify in their book, The Blessing:

• Meaningful touch
• Spoken words
• Expressing high value
• Picturing a special future
• An active commitment

As Smalley and Trent write, “Esau was willing to trade [the birthright] away without a second thought to meet a momentary hunger pang, but losing the family blessing was another story. When Esau lost his blessing from his father, he was devastated” (19).

As I mulled over the story of Jacob and Esau, it was helpful to understand that the birthright and blessing were two different things. Esau was never able to regain either; Jacob received the blessing and the birthright, but as far as anyone can tell, never inherited his father Isaac’s material property.

In my personal myth, what is my birthright? Where is my blessing? What meaningful touch and words were conveyed to me by my parents? And if my parents failed to convey a unique picture to me for my future path, what did God have to say about it? For what birthright and blessing was I willing to wrestle all night with an angel? For what have I been willing to be crippled for life? What truths and callings keep welling up inside of me, unbidden but irrepressible?

As I wrote last, I’ve been writing about how I’ve navigated the experience of being cheated in order to illustrate how depth psychology and faith can combine to help a person get through difficult circumstances and grow. Approximately seven months into the experience of being on the short end of the deal stick, I was vacuuming one day and a still, small voice inside me told me that one of the principals in an agreement my husband and I had made had the “spirit of Esau.”

Though tedious to write about, this personal situation is useful. As I untie the knot of this story, you’ll be able to see what I saw, as I saw it, in much the same way as I saw it. Seeing is everything. St. Paul wrote that everything that becomes manifest is light; it’s good to see what’s what.

When Spirit gave me Esau, it was a clue. Like all clues of legendary proportion, it would lead to a buried treasure; but I didn’t know this at the time. In fact, I actively resisted thinking about Esau and assumed this knowledge had come out of me. After all, I’m no fan of Esau and Jacob. Theirs has been one of my least favorite Bible stories because of its nearly complete incomprehensibility to me. I have to admit that until recently I hadn’t even bothered to decipher the meaning of my dislike for the story, which also kept me from looking at it in symbolic ways.

Thinking that my own prejudice had brought Esau up in this thought-while-vacuuming, I concluded that I must be bitter. Though I wasn’t feeling bitter, I nevertheless diagnosed myself as bitter and unforgiving. A Bible verse from the book of Hebrews came to mind, one that warns Christians to “see to it that no root of bitterness spring up, and by it many be defiled.” I certainly didn’t want to be bitter, much less ‘defile’ everyone around me with my bitterness against our treacherous partners. “You’d better do something with your bad attitude,” I scolded myself. “You’d better get with the program!”

Like any good Catholic girl being scolded by her stern inner Sister Perpetually Judgmental, I snapped to attention and went to my Bible. “I’d better read that verse in context,” I said to myself. “So I can check myself out and see what this verse actually means.” And go to the Bible I did, to the book of Hebrews, chapter 12 and verse 14, which says:

Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled; that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau, who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you know that even afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears. (Hebrews 12:14-17)

As I’ve written before, God speaks to each one according to his or her own symbolic language. Buddhists get Buddhist hints and roadsigns, Christians another. A devout Muslim hears and sees God one way, while an atheist gets his sychronous insights another. The Spirit does not stop moving in the world or in our lives simply because we disbelieve. “Love never ends,” St. Paul wrote. God by every name or by no name at all never stops loving, and never stops giving.

So it was that I, a Christian, was led along the way to my true self through Christian words and symbols. But I have no doubt at all that I would have been led by every means available regardless of my faith, because everyone who seeks shall find. It is a spiritual law that seekers are also finders. This is just how good God is. God is very good.

THE LAW OF WITNESSES

One of the most boring books in the Bible has got to be the book of Leviticus, called the Vayikra by Jews. The third of the five books of Moses, Leviticus is full of laws. Laws of the Temple, laws of cleanliness, laws of birth and death, giving and taking, working and not working. Along with Numbers and Deuteronomy, it is tedious and almost entirely uninspiring. I avoided reading Leviticus as much as I could as a younger Christian. For every one time I’ve read Leviticus, I’ve read Psalms or Song of Solomon or even Isaiah as many as five or ten times.

One year, though, when I was much younger than I am now, I felt strongly impressed to read Leviticus. I felt I was to read it with love and the sort of attentiveness that expects a blessing. And so I did. I read Leviticus and thought about the book in present-day terms rather than relegating my head and the book to the ancient past. I began to see patterns and deep truths in the laws of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and even the counting and classifying of the book of Numbers. I saw that laws had purpose and meaning and were not merely constructs of an ancient, backward people.

One law of which I’m especially fond is the rule of witnesses in Deuteronomy, which states that no one can be condemned on the testimony of only one witness. All facts, this law says, are to be established “out of the mouths of two or three witnesses” (Deuteronomy 17:6). This law is also applied to New Testament church discipline, since St. Paul taught that a church elder or pastor should not be accepted unless “two or three witnesses” were willing to testify. Two or three witnesses; keep this in mind.

The year I saw that these ancient laws can have meaning here and now was a very good year, for one of the primary things I learned was from this law of witnesses: Facts come with two or three. What this means, among other things, is that whenever truth is welling up within me, or coming at me from the outside, it will come in two or three ways. I may miss it if it comes only once, and since the universe is bountiful and God is good and giving, He will give me more than one chance to get a clue.

The day I was vacuuming and Spirit mentioned Esau, I balked and did not go there. But Holy Spirit loves me and knows how to get me to where I need to go. Holy Spirit knows that I willingly go down the “I’m wrong and I’d better straighten up” path. I will follow Sister Perpetually Judgmental when she is pointing out my own flaws, but if I have the idea that someone I love has a “spirit of Esau,” I’ll recoil from that idea. I don’t want to think such a terrible thought about someone else, for deep down inside I’m afraid of Esau. He’s a wicked, godless person. I surely don’t want anyone in my life to be wicked and godless.

So I followed Sister Perpetually Judgmental to the place where I would not look at my cheating partner, but would look at my real or imagined root of bitterness instead. I went straight to the book of Hebrews where in the very passage about bitterness that I so needed to read was yet another witness of (you guessed it) ESAU.

I still often miss first witnesses; but I rarely miss the second one. I can’t recall the last time I had to be given three or more wake-up calls before I woke up. So the day I read that passage from Hebrews, I knew I’d have to deal with Esau. Esau and his brother Jacob and what they meant on many different levels.

So this is my gift to you today, dear reader: the law of witnesses. Try it out. See how it works for you. How many times of seeing something does it take before you see that you see it?