Apart from some very broad-stroke generalizations about “helping people,” my job has very little in common with medical professionals. Science and math were not my forte in school and I do not have the steady hand of a surgeon, the precision of an anesthesiologist, or the nerves and stomach of an ER nurse. But there is one similarity that creates an instant bond, an empathetic sense of camaraderie. We are always working. Whether it’s strangers in a bar, or members of our own families, people love to seek out our unpaid professional opinions. So as we prepare to spend the holiday season with friends and loved ones, know that while your second cousin is asking you about their weird rash, I will be preparing to bless the Thanksgiving meal, as I have every year since I started seminary. When it comes to saying grace, even 5 minutes of theological education bumps you up to the top of whatever hierarchy of elders previously existed.
I should not have been caught off guard the first year this happened, but I was. And extemporaneous prayer doesn’t come particularly natural to UUs, so I think I fumbled around on my phone as quickly as I could for some acceptable little poem about harvests and gratitude from the UUA’s “Worship Web” website.
Determined to make a better showing the following year, I spent a little more time preparing. I took some time to think about what it was exactly I was being asked to do when I was asked to say the blessing. What does it mean to bless and be blessed?
That word is thrown around a lot in the south. Sometimes said with good intention and sometimes with hidden motives. Written on signs and breadplates and crocheted on pillows. Bless this food. Bless this house. Bless this mess. Bless her heart. God bless you. It’s the way a great aunt signs a birthday card. It’s your parents kicking you under the table when you start to dig in before grandpa has prayed over the meal.
It is a word with many purposes, but without, at first glance, much weight.
And yet, here is this passage from Genesis, where Jacob wrestles with someone, a man, an angel, God, perhaps Jacob is wrestling with himself. There are many different ways to interpret the who, but the what is clear. He wrestles him all night long, he throws his hip out of socket and even as the dawn is breaking he refuses to give up the fight. “I will not let you go, unless you bless me,” he demands. This seems like an awful lot of work, an awful lot of pain for a pleasant platitude you can find on a sign at Homegoods.
What weight does a blessing carry that Jacob, a biblical figure known for being a striver and power-grabber, would go to those lengths to get one? In the story, the blessing comes with a new name, a new responsibility to his family and community, and the experience of having been seen wholly and fully by God.
This passage is beloved by feminist and LGBTQ biblical scholars. Folks who spend their time studying and parsing and analyzing a text that so often is used to deny their rights, their leadership, and their humanity. Feminist theologian Phyllis Tribble says this passage is an encapsulation of her life’s work studying the Bible. She says, “I will not let go of the book unless it blesses me. I will struggle with it. I will not turn it over to my enemies that it curse me. Neither will I turn over to friends who wish to curse it….I shall hold fast for blessing. But I am under no illusion that blessing, if it comes, will be on my terms — that I will not be changed in the process.”
And here we begin to understand some of the power. The blessing for Tribble is to see herself in this text, her gifts and leadership and humanity and experiences. To know she is part of this narrative. But she also recognizes that something might be asked of her in the process. In the story from Genesis and for the scholars who study it, a blessing is both affirmation and transformation. To be blessed is to be seen and to be called.
This is what Rabbi and author Ariel Burger means when he explains that the Hebrew word for blessing comes from the same root as the word for your knees, explaining, “the way that knees are what you need to bend, when you carry something heavy. There’s a way that a blessing is heavy to carry. If someone blesses you, they really see you, and they give their seeing of you to you. There’s a certain sense of responsibility that comes with that. To be witnessed is a responsibility, too, as much as to bear witness.”
To be blessed is to be seen and to be called.
To be seen. I love how he puts this, “They give their seeing of you to you.” The give. It is a gift. A blessing is like someone giving you a mirror that shows you who you truly are deep down, in all your beloved beauty and brokenness. It is intimate. Equal parts tender and terrifying.
In the New Testament, the word used most often to mean blessed is the greek word, makarios. Makarios, sometimes translated as happiness, isn’t an act but rather a state of being. It’s not something we can gain or lose or possess, but rather something that we embody, something that we are. When we bless something or someone, we are not conferring divine favor. We are simply holding up a mirror, so that the person can see they already possess the spark of the divine. They are already a beloved child of the universe. They are makarios. And when we bless our food, we don’t make it holy. It already is holy, a miracle of the earth, providing nourishment and pleasure. Blessing it is just a way of naming that reality so we partake of it with the proper reverence.
And hopefully the proper responsibility.
This is where the transformation comes. That calling part. Because once we see who we are, whose we are, and what we have, we have no choice but to ask how we are meant to use those gifts.
In ancient Greece, makarios was a word most often used to describe the gods, it was a word of the rich, powerful and elite. The new testament flips this script in a radical way. Mary is described as makarios. In the magnificat, Mary’s radical, anti-imperial song about casting down the mighty from their thrones and filling the hungry, she says all generations will call her makarios, blessed. It’s the word used in the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor, the hungry. It’s the word Jesus uses to describe hosts whose guests can not repay them and those who wash the feet of their servants. Makarios. The word becomes associated not with the spoils of the rich, but with a life lived in service to others, with living in the light of this sacred blessing by behaving in accordance with sacred values.
Put simply, to bless something is to uncover and name the divine inherent within it. Once you see the food on your plate as sacred, why wouldn’t you want the people who picked it to be treated with dignity, given a living wage. Why wouldn’t you want to protect the water and soil that nourished it. When we are shown the divine within ourselves, how could we not want to participate in the work of the divine, to care for creation, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly. A blessing does not leave us where it found us but leads us forward into the holy work we were put on this earth to do.
To receive a blessing, is to be seen for who we are, to understand, through that witnessing, what we are called to do, and to recognize that both of these are extraordinary gifts.
At the time of my ordination, I had 5 Thanksgiving blessings under my belt and was starting to feel a little smug about my way with prayerful words, but I’m still not sure that I understood viscerally the idea of a blessing before that day. One of the final parts of the ordination service is the “charge to the minister.” Here you ask a mentor, someone who knows you well, who sees not only your gifts but also your struggles and your growing edges, to give you your marching orders. To help you name what work is yours to do in the world. The charge my mentor gave me ended not with “Go forth and live out the UU principles and values.” It ended not with “go forth keeping love at the center” or “go forth and work for justice and build the beloved community.” No, the last words given to me on that day were, “Go forth knowing that you are blessed and share that blessing with the world.”
I had been seen and in seeing someone see me, my calling to justice and love and community, was awakened. It was in that moment of being witnessed, that I understood my responsibility to the communities I would be called to love and serve and journey alongside with a new and striking clarity. And that was such a profound grace. A gift beyond measure for which I have nothing but gratitude. Yes, there are days I need to bend my knees to carry it but that too is a kind of a gift. Rabbi Burger tells us “a blessing is something that’s heavy, and at the same time, it lifts us up. It’s liberating to live for something bigger than ourselves,” he says.
So this year, if you are asked to say the blessing before Thanksgiving dinner, remember that a blessing is not just a formality before we can carve the turkey, but a gift worth wrestling an angel for. Give it its proper due. Bear witness to the moment—the people who are gathered, the joys and sorrows they bring with them, the love between them, the food you are about to partake in, the resilient and hurting earth that produced it, and the people who picked and shipped and prepared it. See and hold the fullness of what is present in that room and name all of it holy. And let that act of seeing and naming awaken in those around the table their own callings and sense of responsibility—to one another and to the planet. Remember that a blessing does not leave us where it found us. It calls us to transformation. And then finally, offer thanks. Offer unabashed gratitude for this chance to pause and witness, and for the worthy vocations that witnessing will call forth. For it is a gift to be alive, to let ourselves know and be known by one another, and to have good work that is ours to do in the world.
We are blessed indeed. Happy Thanksgiving.
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2025