Subject: sermon

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:52:48 EST

Nearly every religion talks about blessing other people. In some  religions 
you bless animals and objects as well. Most people use the word  “bless” to 
mean send good wishes.  I found in research for the sermon on  “Choosing to 
Bless the World” that The I Ching says to bless means to help. The  Hebrew for 
blessing “bareich” means to draw God down into a thing, a person or a  
situation, to expand it with the Holy, to saturate it with the Divine. I called  this 
sermon “Giving Your Children Your Blessing,” but it could be about blessing  
friends and family as well. 
In the Hebrew Scriptures, in the 27th  chapter  of Genesis, you can read 
about Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac, when  he was old and feeble, giving his 
blessing to one of his sons.  He and his  wife Rebecca had twins, Jacob and Esau. 
Jacob was quiet and dark, and stayed  around the tents. He knew how to cook, 
and he was his mother’s favorite. Esau  was a hunter, the first-born of the 
twins. He  loved the fields and woods.  He was hairy all over. You may know the 
story of how Isaac called Esau to his  bedside and asked him to go bring home 
some wild game and prepare a savory stew  for him, and after he ate he would 
give him his blessing. Rebecca overheard  this. She told Jacob to go get two     
little goats and they  prepared a stew. She told him to go in, pretend to be 
Esau, and get the blessing  from his father. “How will he think it’s Esau?” 
Jacob asked. “He is hairy and I  am smooth, plus if he finds out, he will curse 
me instead of blessing me.”   
“Put this hide around your arm and he will think you are your bother. If a  
curse comes from  this, let it fall on me.”   Jacob fooled his  old blind 
father, and he got his father’s blessing, which was a declaration for  his life, 
that his relatives would be his servants, that he would be prosperous  and 
powerful.  Almost the moment they were through, Esau came in with a  steaming stew 
for his father to eat, and Isaac realized he had given his  blessing to the 
wrong son.  In this case, a blessing was something like a  wish, more like an 
arrangement of power, a super- will. 
Whole books  are written about a time that a person finally felt their parent’
s blessing. In  our culture there is a tremendous father-hunger in men and 
women who never felt  good enough for their father. There is mother-hunger in 
people who never felt  good enough for their mother.  There is a 
soul-satisfaction in remembering  times when your parents were proud of you, especially when 
they really saw you  for who you are, and they were well pleased with that. 
Here are a  couple of things I’ve noticed in my twenty-something years as a 
therapist.   1. People show love in their own way, and it’s sometimes not read 
by others as  love. We miss it altogether sometimes because we are looking for 
something else,  something that says love to us. We are speaking different 
languages of love.  
2. Sometimes a parents self despising spills out over their family. No one  
could be any good because they aren’t any good. If you love them, that just  
shows how little sense you have. They can’t imagine they have something their  
children need, any blessing to give at all.
3. Certain generations didn’t  believe in saying they were proud of you 
because it would “give you the big  head” as we say down here. Other generations 
of parents oooohed and aahhhhhhed  over every little thing, until if you didn’t 
get a big hooray, you felt  criticized. 
 
4. Children always seem to believe that their parents want them to be  
perfect. In a way, we do see our children as shining stars of possibility when  they 
are young, as if they will never have a mediocre job or get fat, or have  
marital problems or financial woes or make stupid choices with their lives.  
Parents have to ask themselves: ”Will I be happy if my children turn out pretty  
much like me?” If you are okay with that, then you’ll be okay. So children 
sense  this view of them as shining possibility, and they have this dreadful 
sense that  they will need to live up to that.  
Raising children is an impossible  job. No one does it perfectly well. That 
said, what are some ways for  you  to go about giving your children your 
blessing?
You already know the  answers. Listen to them. Spend time on them rather than 
only money. Know that  they will watch you like TV with the sound turned 
down: they will see what you  do and who you are rather than listening to what you 
say. So spend time and  energy becoming the person you want them to see. Ask 
yourself as you make  decisions: is this a decision I would want my child to 
make when she or he is in  this position? Is this  a stance toward the world I 
want my child to  inherit?  Your job is to teach them to be people who are 
pleasant to be  with. Give them well-thought-out limits and stay firm with them. 
Lack of limits  feels like  abandonment.  
Make little rituals with them,  light a candle at dinner, go for night walks, 
have special food on certain days,  set off fireworks, say bedtime prayers, 
make a secret family handshake, make  Tuesdays secret good luck days, or good 
deed days -- they will have ideas if you  ask. All the authors I read  
recommend reserving some time each day to hear  about joys, triumphs and frustrations. 
 Jean Nieuwejaar, in her book “The  Gift of Faith,” proposes  using this 
time  to reflect on the same 3  things every day:
1.      something from the day  which you each are thankful for 
2.      something  from the day that you each are sorry for
3.       something you each intend for tomorrow.
 
 Notice what they are good at. Ask them questions. Be interested in  them and 
proud of who they are, even if it’s not what you wanted.  Ask  yourself “
What would I want my parents to say to me? Say that to your kids. 
 
    What if you don’t feel that you ever got your parents  blessing? Some 
brave souls will actually go see their parents as adults and ask  about it. “Why 
don’t you approve of me?” or “What could I be doing now that  would please 
you -- describe the person I would be if you were going to feel you  had done a 
good job, that I had done well.”   Most of the time those  conversations don’
t satisfy. Parents will feel blindsided or ambushed, or  confused, or they 
will lie out of politeness and love -- “I think you are  wonderful.”  
Something else to try is this.  There is a  Japanese spiritual path called 
Naikan that is also a kind of psychology. In  contrast to the Western therapies, 
which follow the threads of pain in your life  to bring you wholeness, this 
method asks you to gather data on the support and  nurture you received, down 
to how many diaper changes you would guess you were  given, how many rides to 
soccer games, how many loads of laundry, Christmas  presents, meals you were 
given so you could stay alive and thrive. Even when  there are traumatic events, 
this spiritual path asks you to see those as part of  a whole picture, rather 
than as defining moments. Your life experience is built  out of what you pay 
attention to. If you are on your way  to work and your  car won’t start, your 
coffee spills, the copier is on the blink, you might come  home and tell your 
day that way.  You could just as well say “I didn’t have  any flat tires, no 
one ran into my car, the heat was working at the office, and  I went to lunch 
with friends.”
If you feel unblessed by  parents, this path would as that you consider three 
questions. 1. What did you  receive from them (counting diapers is part of 
that)
2. What did you give to  them? (Including Mothers Day cards, dishwashing, 
help with nursing home  care)
3. What trouble did you cause them?  
Maybe they were trying to  bless you, using a different language from what 
you were looking for. Maybe they  were unblessed themselves and couldn’t imagine 
how to pass that along.   Maybe they were as pleased with you as they were 
with themselves, which is often  not much.    Maybe you can find blessing for 
who you are amongst  your friends and chosen family, from your experience of 
love from the Spirit,  

For more information:
(psychologists) Mimi  Doe and Marsha Walch  “10 Principles for Spiritual  
Parenting”

( UU minister) Jeanne Nieuwejaar, “ The Gift of Faith”  
“Many Thanks” Angela Winter  The Sun, Dec 2004

Closing Words – Robert  Coles

So it is we connect with one another, move in and out of one another’s  
lives,  teach and heal and affirm one another, across space and time – all  of us 
wanderers, explorers, adventurers, stragglers and ramblers, sometimes  tramps 
or vagabonds, even fugitives, but now and then pilgrims: as children, as  
parents, as old ones about to take that final step, to enter that territory  whose 
character none of us here ever knows. Yet how young we are when we start  
wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final  destination.