A Blessing for Creativity*
Spirit of Holy Imagination,
we ask you to bless our vision
with the wisdom to see what is possible.
Help us trust our desire to create
through color, word, shape, gesture, and song.
When our fingers tremble
at picking up a pen or marker,
connect us to the joy of playing
on the white page, drawing,
doodling, dabbling, dreaming,
letting our lives
be a canvas for expression.
When judgments arise
and the inner critic yells,
guide us to hear our intuitions
whispering the way ahead
with quiet confidence.
When our feet feel restless,
inspire us to play music
and dance freely
until peace descends again.
Connect us to the freedom
of making something
for the love of it.
Speak to us in dreams
of what you desire
to create together with us,
making the world
a great work of art.
Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” —Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
Blessings can be like warm bread for the hungry, a cold drink for those who thirst.
Blessings offer hope and encouragement, steep us in gratitude, nurture our courage.
They bring us present to the grace of each moment. The word comes from the Latin, benedicere, which means to speak well of. Blessings help to remind us of the love and beauty of the Holy One in our lives and assist us to take nothing for granted. They act as maps to navigate our human experience, orienting us back to gratefulness and praise.
They sustain us in bringing reverence to all of life from the most ordinary of tasks to the great thresholds of our lives. They immerse us in the holy rhythms of the sacred which are not of our making. In a world obsessed with the scarcity of time, blessings help us to expand each moment like a flower opening her petals on a sunny day. They invite us to breathe more deeply, enlarge our vision, and give honor to our experiences. Blessings help us to touch eternity here and now.
A blessing is an acknowledgment of the gifts and graces already present. All of the mundane activities of the day became opportunities to witness grace at work. They become meditations and remembrances.
When my calendar and to do lists become misplaced holy grails in my life, speaking a blessing is a way to put things back into perspective. When my heart aches and grieves over loss, a blessing is a sanctuary space within which I am held and met by the divine.
St. Benedict wrote in the Prologue to his Rule, “Let us then at last arouse ourselves, even as Scripture incites us in the words, ‘Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep.’ Let us then, open our eyes to the divine light, and hear with our ears the divine voice as it cries out to us daily. ‘Today if you hear God’s voice, do not harden your hearts,’ and again, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.’” (RB Pro:8-11).
The image of awakening calls us to shake off the slumber which creates a veil between reality and our perception. The act of blessing helps us to awaken and see more clearly. When we remember to bless, we consecrate life whether we are in the kitchen, the office, in church, or standing in a forest.
In both Jewish and Celtic traditions, a central practice is to bless the unfolding of the day, each activity, each turning point. Everything becomes worthy of blessing. The Talmud calls for 100 blessings each day and through this practice we can shape ourselves into beings who pay close attention and who remember from whom all of life flows.
I love this time of year as the nights grow longer. Here in Ireland, there is even more darkness than when I lived in Seattle because of the higher latitude.
We live in a culture that celebrates the flowering and fruitful energy of spring and summer, with a focus on productivity and output. And yet our bodies and spirits also crave the grace of autumn and winter to rest, reflect and replenish. In the rush up to Christmas, we often illuminate everything to push back the darkness and busy ourselves with gift-buying and preparations.
However, Advent and the preparation time before, at least in the northern hemisphere, is a season of descent into the expanding darkness. It is a time when we are called to ponder the mystery that is growing in the womb-space. It is also a time when we often experience the grief of our losses more acutely but push it away through busyness and distraction.
Join us for a holy pause before Advent begins to center yourself and listen for the gifts and invitations the darkness can bring to our lives. Whether or not we have birthed physically, we are all called to holy birthing in this time of deep rest and incubation. I am leading an online mini-retreat for Mercy by the Sea called A Midwinter God: Advent Preparation Retreat on this Friday, November 22nd. Registration closes Tuesday, November 19th at 12 noon Eastern.
And for Advent itself we will be offering a 25-day community retreat to celebrate the gift of blessing as a spiritual practice and way of being in the world. I am honored and delighted to be joined by several wonderful guest teachers who will offer practices of blessing. We will be launching with a two-hour live retreat to begin our journey on Monday, December 2nd where I will be joined by Sybil MacBeth who is the author of the very popular book Praying in Color.
Join us this Wednesday, November 20th for Centering Prayer with Therese Taylor-Stinson.
Today we also offer you another gift – Day 6 of our video podcasts for the Love of Thousands prayer cycle. This day’s themes are cosmology, myth, and song in the morning and becoming wise and well ancestors in the evening.
I leave you with a prayer for Day 6 morning written by our program coordinator Melinda Thomas:
Godde of Sorrow and Joy, our collective inheritance is filled with toxic patterns affected by war, famine, plague, racism, and the everyday slights that wear us down. And yet there is hope. Our collective memory is also filled with song and dance, laughter and love. Give us the courage to face the ancestral trauma unwillingly housed in our bodies so that as we do this work, we are empowered to disrupt toxic cycles and become a healing balm for this generation and generations to come.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
*Blessing written by Christine Valters Paintner for her book The Love of Thousands and appears in Day 6 morning podcast of our prayer cycle.
