by Laura Flanagan
In late May, I was privileged to attend a friend’s ordination to the priesthood. Ordained in the middle of Mass, the fresh priests then concelebrate the Eucharist. But before the close of Mass, they each bestowed a priestly blessing upon Cardinal Dolan, who knelt to receive it; after Mass, their first gestures as priests of God and his Church were to offer “first blessings” to all who come forward. I found it telling that this is one of their first acts as ordained mediators of grace: to raise their hands over the people of God and bless them. Even before they celebrate their first Mass, as “Father,” they bring the blessings of God the Father to his children in this particular way.
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| Fr. Peter, OP, blesses his parents. |
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all gave their children formal blessings, and Jacob even offered a blessing to some of his grandchildren. You may remember Esau’s plea, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” after Jacob stole the blessing Isaac had intended for him, and the surprise of Jacob’s crossed hands over Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, where he bestows with his right hand the greater blessing on the younger grandson.1
The power behind the blessings, of course, comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God himself directly blesses in Genesis as well; he blesses birds and sea creatures, Adam and Eve, and Abraham, the father of these sons and of many nations. Psalm 68 calls God the “father to the fatherless.”2 No person whose parents have not lived up to the vocation (or whose parents have been separated from their children while trying to obtain a better life for them) is truly without a parent to bless them.3 Blessings are definitely the purview of God, but they are often mediated through us.
We are able to request God’s blessing upon anyone and anything via our baptismal priesthood. There is an entire book published by the USCCB called Catholic Household Blessings and Prayers, and it doesn’t require an ordained priest to pronounce the “blessings” contained therein. Even in Genesis, where the father’s blessing is paramount, Rebekah’s whole family blesses her as she sets off to join the family of Abraham. 4 As a parent, I am given the specific responsibility to bless my children, and I do when Clare finally gets in bed every night. I use the blessing from Numbers:
May the Lord bless you and keep you:That same beautiful blessing was pronounced over me four weeks ago; my friend the new priest had chosen to use it for his first blessings.
May he make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you:
May he lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.5
It is not for nothing that the blessings of God are so frequently mediated through his priests, from whom we request myriad formal blessings in their ordained ministry. I often remind people that the sacraments exist for us. In the sacraments, grace is mediated through a Father we can see and hear because it aids us in believing the grace is real, while coming from the Father we cannot yet see. The same is true of sacramentals, like the blessing of God. So we bow down for the blessing at the end of our high holy days; we stop by sacristies for blessings upon our rosaries; we bless ourselves with water that a priest has blessed.
My parish has a transitional deacon with us for the year, and I intend to have him bring out the importance of blessings with the 6th grade students of the Old Testament. At the end of the year, after his ordination to the priesthood, we plan to invite those students and their families to one of his first Masses and to receive some of his “first blessings.” I hope this opportunity brings the context of their Scripture study to life, by showing how much value there always has been in the blessing from a Father; and giving them an opportunity to receive it from a Father they care about and know to care about them.
3 I also find Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son to be an important image here, the fatherly gesture of loving welcome reminiscent of how both ordinations and blessings are bestowed. How are we called to reflect that?↩
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