Unofficial blessings

I like blessings.  I like giving them, and it’s pretty cool to receive a blessing too.  It’s one of the powerful things that congregations experience.  In our life together we get to share in blessing new babies, youth coming of age, marriages, ordination, members involved in denominational leadership.  In offering a blessing to something or someone, we get to agree together, in the presence of God, that “This is good,” or “This is holy.”

These past few days I have had the opportunity to be involved in what could be called unofficial blessings.  Last week a woman in the neighborhood died who, although she never came to our Community Meal because of her inability to leave her home, regularly received carry-out meals from friends.  She had requested to be cremated and the family had no memorial service for her.  Last Wednesday, upon request of her friends, and with permission from her husband, we held a brief service of remembrance for her outside her apartment.  We prayed, we thanked God for the blessings of her life, and we signed a card for her husband.  An unofficial memorial service.

At the end of last week a young woman and her boyfriend who live a block from our church and who have been attending Community Meal welcomed a healthy baby girl into the world.  Yesterday Abbie and I went over to their apartment, heard the birth story, and got to hold the child.  At their invitation I also offered a prayer of blessing for the child and them as parents, acknowledging the holy calling of parenting and the blessedness of this child.  An unofficial child blessing.

Both of these things happened outside the walls of the church, and at the fringes of our congregation’s web of relationships.  Does that make them unofficial, whatever that may mean?  It seems that the act of blessing one another often happens in a similar way – outside the programmed, structured nature of congregational life and within the relational world which we inhabit.  Here I’m thinking of blessing in a much broader sense than its ceremonial form – blessing others for the good that we see in them.  I’ve heard some people refer to what we do on Sunday mornings as “just practicing” for the rest of life.  This can apply to the blessings that we offer.