Keep breathing and abide

Although we often equate blessings with God’s benevolence, thinking they constitute a sign of God’s favor in the form of prosperity and abundance, they often work in ways quite contrary to such a notion. I have come to see with greater and greater clarity that a blessing is at its most potent in times of disaster, devastation, and loss. When God’s providence seems most difficult to find, a blessing helps us perceive the grace that threads through our lives.

 

A blessing does not explain away our loss or justify devastation. It does not make light of grief or provide a simple fix for the rending. It does not compel us to “move on.” Instead, a blessing meets us in the place of our deepest loss. In that place, it offers us a glimpse of wholeness and claims that wholeness here and now. A blessing helps us to keep breathing – to abide in this moment, and the next moment, and the one after that.

 

From The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief 

by Jan Richardson, Wanton Gospeller Press, 2020

 

 

How the Light Comes   I cannot tell you how the light comes. What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining.   That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us.   That it loves searching out what is hidden, what is lost, what is forgotten or in peril or in pain. …

I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does.   That it will.   That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming or arrive in a shape you did not foresee.   And so may we this day turn ourselves toward it.   May we lift our faces to let it find us.   May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes.   May we open and open more and open still to the blessed light that comes.

from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

by Jan Richardson (2015)