✒Benediction
A poem
I wrote a benediction. I wrote it in a poem.
Before I give you the poem, I’m going to give you lots of information about benedictions. Then I’m going to give you a lot of information about symbolism. Then I’m going to give you the poem.
This is the way we teachers operate. We drown what is essential in endless, rambling commentary.
I witnessed my first benediction in college.
Google will tell you that a “benediction” is “the utterance or bestowing of a blessing, especially in a religious service,” and though I suppose this is technically correct, Google buries the lead. Such a bland definition cannot possibly describe a benediction as witnessed for the first time.
Imagine. You get to the end of a church service and start packing up your things when suddenly, everyone in the pews around you starts putting their hands out to their sides, palms up. At first you just thought it was the guy next to you asking for gum, but then you noticed the posture spread like some kind of virus. While you look around in confusion, wondering if you should follow suit, the guy on the stage barks out something like “Go thee in the peace of the almighty Jehovah to strike down the foes Of The Lord!” and everyone in the congregation says something like, “It shall be done.”
Then the music plays and the people Of The Lord meander out the doors to wander off to Mexican restaurants for $2 margs, or back to their back yards to throw balls, or to grandma’s house, or wherever else they head after invoking this most ancient of rites.
Benedictions are bonkers, also epic. Not something you see in everyday life. Some vestige of magic dawdling around in puritan congregations across the world: an occult practice hiding in the workaday religion of car part distributors and cereal salesmen.
I grew up Southern Baptist.
We existed within this niche dispensational gap between high and low-church. Our hymns were old (but not too old). Our sermons were dry (but not academically so). Our language may have been hip-hoppity-hallelujah but the pastor always delivered it in the powdered tone of a mortician handing you the receipt. We said ‘amen’ sternly. We called our friends’ dads ‘brother.’
We did not do benedictions. The movement of hands it called for was too risky, likely seen as too close a thing to sex, or God forbid… dancing.
When I first saw a benediction I remember it being weird, but not too weird. I was accustomed to strange church things as I’d experienced southern evangelical CHURCH four times a week for the first twenty or so years of my life. In that time, I’d seen women deliver Sunday specials with a dozen cowbells, their hair dyed black as octopus ink. I’d watched men tally the ROI of souls brought To The Lord via a church sponsored revival. I’d participated in sword drills and seen the flannel graph instant replay of the bible six times through. Then there was the tent evangelist out on bail who was invited to come speak to our junior church. I asked him “Why were you in jail?” and he, leaning over with his hands on his knees so low that I could see his grey comb-over and bald spot, put his eyes on level with my tiny face and said, “well sonny, two very lost and sinful young ladies said some very untrue and mean things about me…”
You know, church.
So when I witnessed my first benediction it was mostly just weird that I’d never seen one before. It was weird only insofar as it was weird. The gestures and words seemed normal, if unfamiliar, and that unfamiliarity was odd. Something was going on at church that I wasn’t mumble-whispering along to by pure force of habit.
Since then, I’ve thought about benedictions from time to time. I’ve even drawn an illustration of the fundamental parts of a benediction on a napkin using a sharpie:
A benediction is as much a symbol as it is blessing, and religions tend to see symbols in doctrinal terms: rigid, formulaic, and absolute; whether you accept the dogma or deny it, you are still using the same formulation. You can use this formulation or abuse it. You can trust it (as congregants tend to do) accept it with spiritual openness, or, if it irks you, you can mock its fundamental message by inverting and subverting it. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan pulls this trick in Ulysses with the mass: vestments become an open bathrobe, the cross of Christ a razor lathered in bits of stubble, the chalice of wine a shaving bowl.
Besides learning from Joyce the wisdom that some books will be analyzed to death, nay, to necrotic reanimation, I also learned from his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that symbols (especially religious ones) don’t require inversion or adherence. They can mean anything. They are flexible as silly putty and way more fun.
We don’t need to invert the symbol to use the symbol. The symbol is an orientation, and perhaps an action shared between objects. Instead of considering a benediction as God, Clergy, and Folks (congregation) lets try A, B, and C and see where this gets us.
We can imagine any number of real world analogs for God if we abstract God. God is “the cloud on high that brings about special revelation.” We could see this cloud as AI or our ancestors or Mrs. Jenkins from second grade.
Each of these formulations begs a new dynamic between the component parts. If the cloud is Mrs. Jenkins then the clergy is a student of hers, or perhaps her dog. She gives unto the student special revelation in the form of a paddle and the student tells the first graders that they’d better be ready for this mean old hag! Her dog on the other hand has received her gentle words of “Good boy! Good boy!” to mean that he owns the patch of grass called “backyard.” The congregational “folks” he’ll tell about it are that nosy tabby from next door, the errant squirrels, and that bird which keeps landing on the rosebush.
Once you have the figuration down, your brain can shuffle through the infinite options. As an example, here’s five formulations that “work” with myself in the “clergy” [B] position:
A: James Joyce's ideas about the flexibility of symbolism. B: Me, via this essay. C: You. A: My wife who sifts through current safety research. B: Me, preaching the virtue of buckling my kids car seats (every ride, every time). C: My boomer parents. A: My students. B: Me, trying to explain furries. C: My wife. A: Substack telling me that you read this. B: Me, no longer as worried about the futility of spitting inane thoughts into the web-void. C: My anxieties. A: The fifth glass of bourbon. B: Me, drinking it. C: My hangover.
Notice that the “folks” position doesn’t have to be corporate, the “God” or “Clergy” positions need not be singular. Symbols like this can stretch a very long distance. But they are ultimately limited by their central function. In the symbol of “benediction” there will always be a hierarchy, a path on which the energy/enlightenment/blessing etc. must flow downward from the dispenser of blessing to the distributor of blessing to the receivers of blessing.
And contrast that with this version of a benediction:
This image (the doodle, not the voice of Smaug) is egalitarian and accurate to life. I love the reality it symbolizes: that every individual exists in a web of mutual benediction, that we can all give a blessing and receive one, that we are clergy and regular folk and God all wrapped into one. That if God exists anywhere, he exists in the nexus of combined energy that makes up the center of the circle, in the empty center where the power we generate flits and sparks into something whole.
… But even though I like this image, it doesn’t seem as useful to me as the earlier hierarchical one for the purposes of art. Religious symbols last for a reason. They resonate within us on some primal level and communicate things we don’t know how to speak. So as I give unto you the benediction that I’ve written, I’ll use one more “A,B,C” formulation to explain how I got to writing a weird-ass poem that means basically nothing.
A: Walt Whitman writing “Oh Me! Oh Life!,” a poem featured in Dead Poets Society and recited by Robin Williams. A poem about the feeling that you don’t matter in the grand parade of humanity.
B: Me, watching the movie, reading the poem, and writing this poem that updates “Oh Me! Oh Life!” into a benediction fit for the absurd and gooey present in which we live, a poem for our strange days measured out in coffee spoons and lived in the shadow of consumptive, ecological collapse, a poem for our exhaustion with everything, a poem that forms a benediction that helps me (for a moment anyway) remember that I live in a world so dense with beauty and meaning and purpose that I trip on it every time I take a step forward.
C: You.
Benediction
Oh life! Oh gee! Oh make this thing new and fresh as a peach! Delightful in its old age, lovely in half cast shadows, full or low light, raw and radiant as a fresh, red wound.
"Our language may have been hip-hoppity-hallelujah but the pastor always delivered it in the powdered tone of a mortician handing you the receipt." Dude, I laughed out loud! Excellent, excellent writing.