Kelsi Vanada

Dear Friends,

I’ve always felt bad for Esau, the brother whose birthright blessing is stolen from him by his conniving younger brother, Jacob. (This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I’m the eldest of three, I promise!) It goes right to my heart when Esau “cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry, and said to his father, ‘Bless me, me also, father!’” (Genesis 27:34)

Reading with my modern sensibility, it seems stingy of Issac to bless only one son—and if it’s the wrong one, then too bad. But I do know that what we may think of as a blessing in our tradition today is different from the concept of deathbed blessing in ancient cultures. The Oxford Annotated Bible tells me, “It was believed that such blessings irrevocably released a tangible power that determined the character and destiny of the recipient” (emphasis mine).

What the Episcopal church means by blessing (“a sacerdotal pronouncement of God's love and favor”) is not quite the same as how I encountered it in my Evangelical upbringing. I learned early on in my attendance at an Episcopal church during grad school that only ordained bishops and priests can give a blessing—but rather than feeling stingy, this felt weighty in a special and powerful way.

An important person for me at that church was a wonderful woman named Nora, whose discernment committee I was part of as she was discerning a calling to the priesthood. I’ll never forget what Nora said when she described the impact on her of the blessed bread and wine during the Eucharist: when it had been consecrated, she saw a kind of energy streaming from the body and blood.

I’ve never had that experience with the Eucharist myself, but I hold onto it as a sign of the tangible power of the elements that have been blessed for our use. Blessings are powerful and beautiful. I hope you’ll join me in considering where else we find blessings in our liturgy! (As a starting place, I’ve found the definition of blessing in the Episcopal Dictionary of the Church helpful as I continue to learn about our tradition.)

Peace,

—Kelsi