“If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.”

Meister Eckhart's telling remark is a very powerful reminder to us that one of the things that make us special as human beings is that we can feel and express gratitude. Gratitude is more than thankfulness; it is a relationship with God and God's creation which is characterized by awe, by the sense that what is around us is special and holy, and that we sense in a fundamental way the connectedness of things that we don't always understand, but know to be functional parts of a larger and more functional wholeness.

Most of us most of the time rush through our daily lives fighting traffic, fighting each other and ourselves.  We so often tend to relegate our sense of the sacred to those times when we make a concerted effort to try to "feel" something that we think we should feel, but are not sure what that is.

Yet it is in those quiet times in our lives, in prayer, in meditation, and in silence do we begin to relax enough to appreciate that something around us is OK just the way it is.  Not just OK, but pleasingly fulfilling in it's completeness.  Standing at the edge of the ocean, floating in a lake, taking the view from a mountain peak, we allow ourselves to experience something that takes us beyond our so often limited sense of what life is.  And our response is to feel awe at the beauty we see, to allow our sense of life to expand to include more than we normally allow ourselves to take in.

Original Blessing is not a specific doctrinal or theological set of principles that are easily and clearly defined, yet the sense of gratitude and awe is the first place to approach just what it means to recapture, to reclaim the Original Blessing.   And what is that Original Blessing?  Anybody who watches kids play has a sense of it.  Anybody who watches the clouds in the sky play over the land in fleeting shapes and shadows has a glimpse of it.  Anybody who has felt the overwhelming love of a parent for a child knows that something mysterious is grafted into our very souls.

Original Blessing, a term coined by theologian Fr. Matthew Fox, is a description of our  relation with God, with creation, with the universe that we find ourselves in.  The idea of original sin, gathered from the Genesis story of the explusion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, is that all humanity enters into the world filled with the sin of our ancestors, and that our job is to reconcile with God.  Yet we enter into a world that is itself a world of duality, of choices, of conflict.

God's creation is one that is filled with wild abundance of the things that help allow us to explore ourselves as children of God:  grace, virtue, happiness, love, compassion, caring, beauty, awe, goodness, kindness.  That humanity feels itself alienated from God, from each other, from life and from the Earth itself is all too evident by what can be gleaned from the daily news. Yet in the morass of conflict and confusion of daily life, there is also the opportunity to reclaim for ourselves the birthright that is ours:  that we too have a relationship with the Divine and that our lives are meant for a purposeful relationship and experience with Divinity not just on occasional visits to a church or temple, but in our daily lives.

Original Blessing is the acceptance of our lives as we find them:  we are creations of God, and we are created in God's image.  We are humans who experience separation and fear, but we are also humans who experience love and forgiveness, vision and fortitude, faith and hope.  When we stop fighting everything and everyone around us we begin to see that blessing hides behind all of the things we encounter in life.  Original Blessing is the recognition that we come to this world not as fallen beings--even though we may often feel profoundly separated, alienated and restless--but as beings who bear these human conditions as a wound that we seek to heal.  We discover that Original Blessing comes to us as much in darkness as in joy, for the dark night of the soul is the birthing place where we learn to let go.  We discover that we experience joy in creativity and in acts of selflessness.

Original Blessing is the experience that God seeks us through many avenues, not just the direction we expect.  One of the consequences of Original Blessing is that we become more open to the larger cosmic and macro-cosmic dimensions of life that exist beyond our earth, our solar system, our galaxy opening into a larger sphere of creation that encompases directions and activity beyond our comprehension.  We live in an almost incomprehensively large creation, and the variety and number of God's creations are limitless.  And all of it is Holy.

 Original Blessing is an opening to the possibility that we can find in life Sacramental moments that exist both in and out of time, of history, of place. It's an orientation toward recognizing the unique gifts that are given to us by everything around us, by the moments and situations in which we find ourselves daily.  It's about being aware of the possibilities for grace that exist around us and within us.  It's a reflective and celebratory orientation that sees creation not as a place of fallen-ness, but a place of birthing, of creativity, of growth and opportunity.  It's an orientation that sees forgiveness and grace as a divine inheritance that are ours simply by recognizing that we are indeed rich people.  We are all rich in the abundance of love if we only but recognize and embrace what is ours.  We are so much like fish in search of the water!  So often we stand upon whales fishing for minnows, not realizing that the greatness of God's life and creation are so rich with blessings that we are in effect, all wealthy beyond measure.

Each of us is a unique and blissful expression of God's joy in creation.  We are not mistakes, we are not the result of random acts of biology or chemistry.  We are all part of a greater wholeness of divinity, of creation, of life.  We have a purpose.  We have a greatness both within and without, and our job as human beings is to find the meaning in this, to understand that if there is a bridge between heaven and earth, it's us. 

This is who we are, and this is our Original Blessing. The only response we can make to God is to say "Thank You".