Ten Blessings

Over the past few years, I have tried to take time to name ten blessings of the day.  I think that the idea is that I am supposed to do this every single day.  Sometimes I am pretty consistent; other times I have forgotten, often for days at a time.  However, I think that it's a simple, and potentially powerful thing:  just to take time to name ten blessings ever day.

I learned this practice from a member of my last parish.  Harriet was a retired airline executive who had traveled all over the world.  She was also the daughter of a minister who had grown up in a small town in Minnesota.  When I met her, she lived within a few blocks of the church, in a small house decorated with Norwegian Rosemaling.

Harriet once gave a moving Adult Forum on her travels, and how she found a place to worship no matter where she was in the world.  Her Forum was called "The communion of Saints."

I say that I learned this practice from Harriet, but it was not until near the end of her life that I learned it.  Fiercely independent, she found herself in a nursing home.  When I was planning to visit her with communion, her executor told me that Harriet had this faith practice.  Every day she named ten blessings.

"Make sure you remind her to do this when you go to visit her," she said.

So I did.  I got out my communion, and I went to visit Harriet at the nursing home where she didn't want to be.  We talked, we shared communion, and I asked her what her ten blessings would be that day.

When you are living in a nursing home, it's not so easy to find the blessings.  She had to think about it for a bit, and be creative, and resort to the simplest things, like being alive.  I remember that one of her blessings that day was a box of chocolate.

Ten blessings.  Every day.  I have never read about it in any book.  It's so simple.  Anyone can do it.  If you can count to ten, you can name ten blessings.

The Jesuits have a practice called "seeing God in all things."  Somehow I think this practice relates to that one.  There are times and places where it is easy to see God.  But in all things? How do you do that?  Start by naming ten blessings, wherever you find them.

A woman who lived close to my church lost her home to a fire.  We took up a collection to help her.  When I called her on the phone (I didn't know her personally), she said that the fire was, "the worst blessing."  I was taken aback.  She said the blessing was in the outpouring of care from her neighbors.  She saw God in all things, although I am not sure how she managed it.

When I think of Harriet's life, I think of the ways she was blessed.  She was a pastor's daughter from a small town, and she ended up traveling around the world.  But she never married, and I suspect sometimes she was lonely.  She had blessings and she had burdens.

And every day she named ten blessings.  Maybe some days they were so small they didn't seem like blessings.  Maybe other days she could have named twenty.

But at her funeral I claimed the promise of the saints:  the promise that they have received more blessings than they can count, more than the stars they cannot see.  We can't hold that promise in our hand, but we can name ten blessings.

Every single day.