NOT long after my ordination, I was walking through central Liverpool, when a man came up and asked me, with a sense of real urgency, if I could bless his phone. I thought it odd, but, mindful of my parochial duties, I duly obliged. “Thanks, Father,” he bellowed back down the street at me as he moved on. “My accumulator will definitely come in now.”
He then waved the phone’s screen at me, which was open on the William Hill betting app. I did watch the pivotal match of the tournament later that evening, and saw England beaten 2-1 by Croatia. In Galatians, St Paul reminds us that God is not mocked.
A betting app remains one of the strangest things I have ever been asked, even unwittingly, to bless. As my time in ministry grows longer from those days of cleaner-collared naïvety, however, so, too, does the list of things that I have been asked to invoke the blessing of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, upon. From civil marriages to new houses, from graves to the water of baptism, they are mostly part of the normal rhythm of parish life, put into the diary with little thought. Inevitably, it is the odder ones that stand firmer in the memory.
Many of these odder ones take place in churches themselves. The blessing of the new lavatory of St Barnabas’s, Jericho, with the ceremonial first flushing of the water closet by the Bishop taking place whilst the choir intoned Vidi aquam, will not be something that I forget for a while.
Even weirder, of course, are theological colleges. As sports rep at Westcott House, Cambridge, I was told that I would need to allow time in the schedule of our annual cricket match against Ridley Hall for a “censing and blessing of the stumps”. It had been suggested that this might be more for the partisan intimidation of our Lower-Church opponents than any desire for the invocation of the actual benediction of God. Regardless of motivation, it was clearly efficacious, as we won the match by a sterling eight wickets.
After ordination, I was once asked to bless a specific chair in the infamous Trisha’s Bar, in Soho, in which somebody had apparently died. I did inform the Roman Catholic manager that I was of the Established Church, but it didn’t seem to faze him: “Our lot are rubbish at that sort of thing now.” So, in the early hours of the morning, with lock-in cigarette smoke taking the place of incense, I flicked holy water over the chair. Little droplets of it landed on a poster for Rocky II, rendering that, I suppose, holy, too.
SOME might baulk at these examples, but is not the point of blessing to thrust the divine on to the ordinary? We talk so often, to the horror of the late Dr Barth, about the relationship vice versa — finding God in clouds or guinea pigs or the M25 — but rarely think about how we have a calling to sometimes thrust the holy into the day-to-day. To imbue an ordinary object with something of the holy by the act of blessing is quite a radical intrusion of the holy into the mundane.
Nicola Vestey Canon James Currall blesses the newly repaired tower and belfry of St Andrew’s, Tain, in Scotland, in June 2024
That is, perhaps, part of the necessary rhythm of modern religion, occasionally intruding on the reality of the city with the truer reality of God. It isn’t only in dens of iniquity, however, or on the rougher side of things that blessing is called upon to invoke God in the city. Most blessings occur in a more quotidian pattern.
There is the “blessing of the backpacks”, which has now become a ubiquitous part of the calendar. On a Sunday at the start of September, children are encouraged to bring their new rucksack or pencil case to church to have it blessed as a sign of God’s being with them at the start of the school year. The medievals would have loved it, doubtless instituting great processions for “Satchelmass”. In modern north London, the Revd Andy Coates tells me how he gives each blessed backpack or pencil case a small wooden cross — a symbol that the blessing might remain with the child for the length of the school year.
Just as much of a fixture of the annual round for many parishes is a service of pet-blessing. Animals that, at least nominally, purport to be domesticated are ushered into churches across the land, sometimes on a day near to the feasts of one of those remarkable animal-friendly saints Francis or Cuthbert, and are expected to behave Christianly to one another.
This is often wishful thinking. I recall hearing the tale, at a church where I covered an interregnum, of a poor gerbil frightened to death in the pews by the mere sight of a Great Dane. The wolf may live with the lamb in future, but clearly not yet. Still, most pet blessings pass without such horrors.
More dramatic an example is the Epiphany blessing of the Thames. The clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, meet on London Bridge to bless Old Father Thames with a wooden cross, and remind him not to snake back into his erstwhile pagan ways. The cross is thrown in and joins the gaggle of dropped iPhones and Tudor coins and Luftwaffe armaments that sit on the river’s bed.
There is always a slight air of first contact about these blessings. Yet they seem to end pleasantly enough. Cassock-alb and cotta have met together, Trent and San Francisco have kissed each other: a reminder that blessings bless those who perform them as much as those to whom they are directed.
BLESSINGS can play a remarkable part in moments of national drama, too, breaking through the narratives of the day with a sort of raw holiness. At the death of the late Queen, the new King came back from Balmoral to London first by plane and then by car. Plenty of people lined the roads of the stretches of A-road and suburbia between Heathrow and St James’s to catch a glimpse of their new sovereign.
The current Queen has described how moved she was to see, outside a church in west London, a clergyman with his hand raised in benediction, invoking the blessing of the Holy Trinity upon the pair. For that moment to stand out in a season when history was indubitably made says much about blessing’s power.
While urban ministry is full of the fruits of modernity to bless — and the great moments of national life can be seen as almost a blessing in themselves — I would argue that it is slow-changing rurality that still offers the most widespread culture of blessing. Part of that is, I suppose, due to the natural ability of the countryside to cling on to patterns and tradition. From holly wreaths to hounds, prams to ploughs, there are few things that a country parson will not be called on to bless, even in our supposedly post-secular age. Part of it is, though, due to a closeness and deep awareness of those patterns that invoke those times when we most seek the presence of God: birth and death.
I have blessed beer, in the tradition of the Parish Ale, and then dutifully consumed the first pint. I have blessed dogs of varying degrees of good behaviour. I was sent, in part of my research for this article, to the service of blessing for the scarecrows of the Cornish parish of Pelynt. I think, though, to my mind, the apex of rural life is to have blessed amusingly shaped root vegetables, while, in a box pew at the back, a parish choir sang Maurice Greene’s “Thou visitest the earth and blessest it”. That truly is the divine in the ordinary.
AlamyThe clergy and congregations from Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr meet in the middle of London Bridge for the annual blessing of the Thames, in January 2024
Greene’s anthem is a particularly good one for exploring our theology of blessing. There is something about what linguists call the “iterative aspect” implicit in the archaic language which serves the concept of blessing more accurately than the cruder tenses and aspects that we use now. It implies that blessing is something that happens once and yet continues to happen — seven whole days, not one in seven, and all that.
Yet it is not only in our nation’s conurbations, or in its slices of bucolic green, that blessing is found. Other nations take it to even greater extremes of daily life than we do. When I worked briefly in South Africa, an older priest told me how, in the early days of his first incumbency, wondering why it was that so many of the laity seemed to pop out after reception of holy communion, he found that there was great competition to have their car blessed first at the end of the service; and so a habit of bringing vehicles to the door had developed.
Ecumenically speaking, the Orthodox Church is a particularly enthusiastic blesser of things. In Russia, every major piece of kit, from new infrastructure projects to power-plant control rooms, from nuclear submarines to satellites destined for space, are all given the appropriate flash of the icon and splash of the holy water by the Russian Orthodox Church. Such things are taken seriously: in 2017, an archpriest of the Patriarchate of Moscow was blamed for “not praying hard enough” during a satellite blessing when the object crashed out of the sky, having failed to enter into orbit.
The Russian example, however, also shows us perhaps the knottier side of blessing: blessing in Russia today is an act both political and religious, an explicit attempt to sanctify the regime and its ends. It raises an additional question: are there things that are beyond the scope of blessing?
This isn’t just a question about nuclear weaponry. Certainly, the Church of England’s continued willingness to invoke the blessing of Almighty God on random inanimate objects, while not blessing the unions of people of the same sex, means that the question how we dispense the blessing of God is live in the Church at the moment. Certainly, those on the side in favour of same-sex blessings argue, the Church’s liberality in dispensing blessing elsewhere does make specific exclusion a rather sore point. All sides would agree that to bless is, of course, one of the duties of the Christian. Yet how that actually plays out has all the theological and practical variations that one would expect.
WITH such complexities in mind, what I thought of as the simple duty of a clergyman in his parish all those years ago in Liverpool actually becomes knottily theological. Power, sex, and violence all seem now to be involved. It makes the blessing of the betting app look positively clear-cut, theologically. One’s view, I suppose, is about what we think we are doing when we bless something, and, more importantly, what we think God might be doing as well.
AlamyAn Orthodox priest blesses representatives of the media at the Baikonur Cosmodrome launchpad in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, before a launch to the International Space Station in March 2018
Perhaps the apparent randomness of the situations in which blessing can remain efficacious, moving, and effective is a sign in and of itself about its breadth. Perhaps we are not meant to know the specifics of how it works in the way in which we would of a Strimmer or a microwave. Blessing might still be the assertion of the Church’s spiritual power over a place or a thing, but, given such a variety of blessing, one might well see it as being as much a symbol of the Church’s lack of control.
Indeed, in his address to the Conference of European Churches last year, our former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams suggested that this was partly what being blessed was all about. Those who are blessed are freed from “obsessive longing to define their world and secure their control”, and so can “look for the gift of God in the world”.
Such a theology might sound abstract — indeed, we might fairly assume that it is not what is going through the consciousness of a gerbil or a marrow or a submarine as it undergoes a blessing — and yet it is undeniably expansive. All things come from thee, O Lord, and of our own do we give unto thee, as I have prayed many times over the harvest gifts. Once we acknowledge that origins, endings, definitions, and control belong not to us, but to God, there is a liberation that occurs. Blessings are our daily reminders of that.
The Revd Fergus Butler Gallie is the Vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton, in the diocese of Oxford.