it might not mean what you think it means
it might not mean what you think it means
language can be tricky...and sometimes it can reveal things we didn't notice
I have learned several languages during my life so far. Some have been mainly for reading and my ability to speak is super limited (Biblical Hebrew and Greek, a smattering of Latin). Some have been only spoken and my reading is rubbish (Egyptian Colloquial Arabic…and the reason I’m so specific about that is because that particular dialect is very different than Arabic spoken in other nations). One I learned exactly enough for the trip I needed, no more and no less (German), and one I Duolingo-d for a while before finally it hurt my brain too much (Scottish Gaelic). There’s Scots, which *is* a language (not only a dialect, though it has dialects), but in the place where I live tends to show up in words and phrases rather than full-time use. And then there’s French, my longest-standing second language which I began learning aged 11… I can generally get up to speed conversationally after a few days immersed, but in between trips I can read ok and listen to podcasts with semi-success but my ability to put together an independent sentence is embarrassing.
And here’s where things get interesting.
Anyone learning a language will have heard about cognates — words that look or sound similar across different languages, helping us remember or giving us a little hook to hang the rest of a sentence on because our brain goes “oh, I know that one!”
And the sinking experience of the false cognate…which sometimes is just flat-out not-even-close, and sometimes is related but not, as in Hebrew lechem (bread) and Arabic lachma (meat). The same root (neither of these semitic languages has vowels!) means very different things, especially if you’re a vegetarian! Or if you’re reading the Bible and the town Bethlehem — beit lechem, house of bread — becomes the house of meat and changes all the metaphors of Jesus about eating his flesh. (shudder)
The false cognate that has been on my mind a LOT lately is the French verb blesser which looks suspiciously like it should have something to do with the English word bless.
I was talking recently with primary school children about what it means to bless someone, like when they sneeze and we say “bless you” — we’re wishing them health and wellness. Or to give someone a blessing, is to speak goodness into someone’s life, to offer them hope and healing and love and…well… “good things” is what we talked about with the children. God things. To give something godly, something of Love, into someone’s life with your words and actions, is to be a blessing (or a conduit of blessing).
However, the French verb blesser means “to injure.” Even worse in the past tense when it comes out as blessé which also looks pretty, unlike the thing (“injured”).
That’s…pretty different.
Now maybe for those who live in the southern USA who say “bless your heart” and don’t mean any of the things I talked about with the children, the French word is closer to the intent. But for the rest of us who talk about being blessed, counting our blessings, being a blessing, offering a blessing, etc etc etc…not so much.
However.
I have been thinking a lot about blessings that injure, and whether that’s a thing. We might just say “well then it wasn’t a blessing, was it?” But…was it?
Sometimes when people say “I’m so blessed” they’re talking about pretty fleeting things, the ephemera. So blessed with my favourite latte or fancy holiday or perfect outfit for a night out. Sometimes people count their blessings and it sounds like a shopping list they’ve ticked off…car, house, job, family, big tv, all-inclusive resort trip, fancy stuff.
And yes, those things can be a conduit of goodness in one’s life, especially when things are hard and frankly a caramel macchiato or the countdown to a week in the sun is the only thing making life worth living today, or all those material things are just outward signs of great inward accomplishment and hard work. Sure, that could be a kind of blessing.
But I wonder sometimes if it’s the kind of blessing that injures. Perhaps that injury might actually be to someone else, (if something is made, say, by child labour or other exploitative practices) or to the earth (how much damage did it cause to manufacture and ship). We rarely think about whether the things that we count as blessings could have injured someone else on their way to blessing us. Or perhaps sometimes that injury is actually to us… often in the impoverishing of our understanding of blessing. When those adiaphora are all the blessings we can count, are we not actually the poorer for thinking they are all the conduits of goodness and love in our lives? What a lack of imagination we have if that’s all we can see when we look inward or around. And what happens if those things then disappear — in a natural disaster, for instance, or an act of war, or even through poor choices? Does that mean we are no longer blessed, there’s no longer any evidence of Goodness and Love entering our lives? Are those things we count even conduits of Goodness and Love capital G capital L? Or just conduits of fleeting shallow happiness or self-congratulation?
And then we get into trouble…when we think our material well-being is the sum of our blessedness, first of all we have bought a capitalist lie and there’s a whole wellbeing industry ready to sell us more and more blessing because it turns out that, unlike real blessings, there can never be enough. But also in this mindset, we look at those with less and our thoughts run to “oh, how sad for them….I’m so blessed not to be in that situation.” And that, my friends, is a blessing that injures. And we add insult to injury if the person or situation we’re looking at was actually injured by making/selling/moving/serving the very thing we have counted as a blessing.
Or we think “I want to bless someone” and we attempt to do so without listening, learning, finding out what they have to offer and what they see as blessing…we give from our shallow understanding and sometimes do more harm than good (see toxic charity as an example, but also the vast majority of interactions between earnest Christians and de-churched people, who left for a reason and it usually wasn’t Jesus). Those are blessings that injure.
I wonder what it would look like to take the time first to really listen to myself, to God, to the space around me, and to ponder the blessings I’ve received. What Goodness and Love has come into my life? How did it come?— by which I mean, by what vehicle? through another person? through coincidence or chance? through my own hard work? through the accident of birth or familial connection? through an experience? (and if so, who/what was involved in that?) Even if we say it’s from God (not everyone would, though I would), there’s still a mechanism God has used to bless you… What was the conduit through which that Goodness and Love came/comes?
And then to wonder…are there any things I have called blessings that are actually injurious to me, to others, to community, to creation? Can that be redeemed, or do I need to think of them differently, use them differently, or let them go?
Once we see real blessing clearly, and once we are honest about how that Goodness and Love comes into our lives, we’ll be far better able to be a blessing to others, too. Not from a shallow happiness but from a deep pool of Good Things that never runs dry.
In other words, we could be a blesser, a conduit of blessing, without blesser...please, may it be so.
PS/latergram: I have been thinking for hours about this and wondering if I should have made explicit a connection to what’s going on in Israel/Palestine. Please note that I don’t say this with any authority or voice of my work in any way, but as a human being who has been invested in the area and had friends there for 20 years. Seeing blessing as for me and not for you is blesser, not blessing. It is injurious. And the longer it goes on, the wider the injury gap becomes. And if your blessing requires the injury of another, then it is unjust and insupportable. If your blessing doesn’t lead to becoming a conduit of blessing for others, it probably isn’t a blessing either, because real blessing overflows in goodness and mercy, not in injury. We need more imagination in this situation. And more heart. More conduits of Goodness and Love that aren’t actually just cover for getting what one person wants at the expense of another.
Note: this is true in many places in the world, this is just one place where the ramifications of an impoverished understanding of blessing are injuring many, literally.
As a tiny PPS: two of my favourite cognates — yes, I have favourites that make me smile — are between Scots and Gaelic. You might think that makes sense because they’re from the same country but the languages are from different families and have very little mutual intelligibility. But now and then there are wee cognates that just are so fun. One is the Scots word shoogly and the Gaelic word chugallach (that’s one of those guttural ch sounds you expect in German or Hebrew or Scots). Both mean what they sound like….wobbly or shaky. It’s fun how those two words sound so similar and also like exactly what they are. It’s not clear to me (maybe someone knows) whether that’s a crossover word from one language to the other, or just a cognate that arose in each independently, but it’s fun. And then the last one is the Scottish Gaelic word tioraidh which means goodbye. It’s pronounced…wait for it…cheery but with a little hint of o in the middle. and of course all over the UK we say “cheers” or “cheerio” or “cheery-bye” (hilarious since in Gaelic you’d be saying bye - bye, which is what it’s like trying to get off the phone with someone here - bye bye bye bye by) or I even know one person who says “cheery bubbles”. so….tioraidh!