💛❤️💙
Preparing for ordination, I took a shamanic journey, a type of waking dream by drum-beat, into the imaginal realm where my mind meets the unseen. Under the big Scots pine at the top of the lane I found myself in a firelit circle. The master healer clasped my right hand, Bear my left; other presences ringed the flames, their faces half-glimpsed, some familiar and some not. I leaned in to play my hand through the fire. They laid me on a prayer-rug, comforted by firelight-warmed darkness.
As I lay there, flamelets settled on my skin like little petals, each one gently repeating the same refrain: I bless you, Ben. The phrase returned, over and over until I felt literally made of blessings, a composite of tiny holy offerings. With the words came images: the Aga from my grandparents kitchen chimed in, my grandfather’s giant old white mug with the rose, the hurl-scuffed Kilkenny field, the forest and the quarry, glimpses of old carpet and sunlit amber glass, every place and object that ever loved me was adding its voice. Their collective song poured in and in, flowing in and flowing in, until I was full to the brim with the life that had been given to me by everything and everyone.
In that saturation an obvious truth surfaced: I couldn’t exist outside what I receive. Food, roof, breath, heartbeat, the grief that primes me for tenderness, each is on loan from the great commons of being. Life itself is the blessing of all the interactions, the form of me so packed with relationships that nothing is purely mine.
A memory of Pentecost is sparked by my playful flamelet friends: flame resting on every head, not just the prophets. The blessings weren’t gated; they were for everyone, proof we are one pool of blessed, resourced life. I think of all the times scarcity has schooled me, how doing without sharpened my gratitude when nourishment finally returned. I think I learned how to love through suffering and through witnessing suffering. I’m not sure without being dipped in the very real sauce of life, in this fragile vulnerable body, that I would have the depth of love that I experience now, or the depth of gratitude and joy, because they’re related. Lack, loss, hurt, are not only binary ‘bad things’; without their contrast I don’t know how I would see the gifts.
Then the Master Healer turned me around and gave me a shove. Get out there, do the thing. I saw my own fear like shoelaces knotted around my ankles. The instruction was blunt, it surprised me, and got my attention, because it rang true: gifts that stop with us aren’t gifts, they’re clutter. Blessing is a circulatory system. Flow is it’s nature.
So here, reader, is my attempt to pass it on. Imagine your own circle of fire, of friends, places, beings, objects.. the fabric of your life. Let the ordinary artifacts of your days parade past: teaspoons and cups, commuter train window, the song that finds you when you need it. Feel how each one says I bless you even if the words never form. Can you notice how the body you inhabit is woven together from the offerings of soil, sunlight, and strangers you will never meet? The love of ancestors you can’t remember.
If life still feels sparse, oh boy, I hear you. The gifts may not arrive wrapped the way we ask; physical pain, heartbreak, or a voice that pushes when we’d rather stay curled up. Yet every one is an invitation to relationship, to recognise yourself as part of the living circuitry that keeps the world alight, alive, in flow. There are gifts in the core of every suffering, I have lived this, I have been loved back into wholeness to a degree far exceeding any suffering I’ve ever experienced. That help is always available, no one is excluded. Of this I am certain, and I’m certain of very little in this life, because it is so very precarious, fragile and unpredictable.
My morning beneath the pine showed me that I am composed of gifts; what are some of yours? They may not appear on demand in this moment, but I hope they visit your minds eye in the days to come. Receive them. Welcome them. Let them remind you of your belonging and worth, just as you are, right now. Let that help you turn outward, if you wish, and bless back, until the whole circle is burning bright and no one stands outside its warmth. We have the power to do that, together.
