Dear Friends:

As I reflect upon last Sunday's Annual Congregational Meeting. along with all we been able to accomplish together during this unprecedented time of change, challenge, and chaos, something occurred to me. We have been blessed, deeply blessed, in spite of and perhaps even because of the change, challenge, and chaos we have faced.

During our virtual Parish Retreat last fall, a group of us read John O’Donahue’s beloved collection of blessings, To Bless the Space between us. In it, he writes, “The force of a blessing can penetrate through and alter the inner configuration of identity. When the gift or need of the individual coincides with the incoming force of the blessing, great change can begin.”

This kind of change and reconfiguration means that a blessing is not always a comfortable or convenient thing. Sometimes the blessing most needed is one that involves confrontation and calling out, that requires standing against what is not of God. Such a blessing may be difficult to give--or to receive.

In our gospel for this Sunday, Jesus heals a man in the grip of a destructive spirit, and we see how a blessing comes by facing the chaos rather than turning away from it, and makes way for the wholeness we crave. It brings release to what has been bound; it invites and enables us to move with the freedom for which God made us.

“The human heart,” writes John O’Donohue, “continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of a life’s journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.”

As we move through this season of Epiphany, a word that means “revelation, manifestation, or appearance,” I invite you to stay tuned to what blessing God might be invoking in order for you to reach a greater sense of wholeness. Are there parts of your life, your own soul, or the community you inhabit, that have become bound—that seek out what is holy and crave its blessing, but fear the change that would be involved? Is there a habit, a belief, a relationship, an aspect of your life that confines you or others? Something that limits the freedom with which you or they move through this world—perhaps without your even realizing it? Can you imagine what release would look like? What would be first step toward that release?

This day, this week, in this Season of Light, may you give and receive a blessing that will help you and others enter more deeply into wholeness for which we all are made.

In Christ,

Amelie+