Blessing the Doorknob

The ‘blessing tradition’ fires up every Sunday. Southerners bless everything. If you didn’t grow up here, you wouldn’t get it. But we’ll bless you anyway.

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It’s Sunday morning. I sit at the breakfast table. The yellow egg yolk spreads slowly across my plate. It creeps towards the grits, the bacon and the butter-laden, jelly-coated sourdough toast. My tongue licks the air with anticipation as my fork prepares to feed it.

Just before the egg touches my lips, The Voice whispers, “Did you bless this egg?” Can’t get away with much on Sundays.

What’s the big deal about blessing things? Isn’t a simple heavenly nod or a wink sufficient to evoke divine approbation? Does The Voice also have Ears? Must we constantly recite benedictions? Conscience is a Dictator.

I’m reading an article about Harley Bikers, so-named the Sons of Abraham, charter members of the Fat Tire Association. Following Washington’s egalitarian theme, they need invocations for their medicinal fundraiser, ‘Herbs for Everyone.’ A local church has offered to bless them.

Southern blessings come with a cost…the sermon. Refreshments are required to survive most scriptural expository. A full belly helps. Bikers usually fit that profile.

Southern religious convocations are all about food. Fundraisers are a close second. It’s a holdover from the past when pot-luck suppers and food on the grounds identified a typical Southern Sunday.

These church feed-bags morphed into annual, week-long campground ‘revivals.’ Congregants are stupefied after hours of outside messianic preaching and blessings. The gastric food overloads offer relief. If the ecclesiastical pontifications couldn’t save you, the food would. Either way, you couldn’t lose.

The Sons of Abraham arrive for refreshments, endure the homilies and finally get to sit on their machines. The ‘Blessers’ make their rounds, laying hands on their bodies and their bikes. They solicit heavenly beneficence upon both, including fundraising success. The article is silent on the accounting of contributions. Money, after all, is fungible. Weed is ubiquitous.

Blessing oratories are common in Georgia. Nothing’s exempt when entreating The Benefactor for favors and convivial accords. My grandfather, named Pop, was a ‘prayer warrior.’ His finest hours occurred during large Sunday family dinners. Starving family members suffered through his appeals.

His particular talent was recalling in minute detail the sequential ancestry of most menu items. He blessed each ancillary food group that was related to the specific item being venerated.

My grandmother was quick of wit and sharp of tongue. She could slice someone up one side and down the other while simultaneously suturing the incision. She always anointed the wound with the benediction, “Bless their little heart.”

We ate a lot of ham. Pop fondly beseeched The Hearer to reward the departed pig, always called by name, its extended family, the corn that fed it, the sausage that it made and the pickled pigs feet he kept for snacks in a glass jar at his office desk. It spoiled my cousin’s appetite. She later became a leader of the Vegan Movement.

One Sunday he got into a ‘blessing swoon’ and drifted off the trail. He got lost on a dissertation that included a theological thesis on the value of door knobs. The blessing might still be ongoing had my elderly aunt, named Sister, not fallen asleep. She woke as her face fell into the squash casserole.

From that time on the blessing mantle fell to my father, a man short on words but long on appetite. From him emanated the most succinct invocation of all time: “Good food, good meat, good Lord, let’s eat.”

Today, supplications tend to be shorter, often just pictures, Instagram’s, texts and on-line appeals like, “Holy Moly, look what dropped into my lap.”

Public entreaties that employ the laying on of hands are politically incorrect. Exception is made if hands touch only head and shoulders, nowhere else, and then not without a witness who records the entire ritual on a body cam that’s admissible in court.

We’ve come a long way from the days of indiscriminate blessings. The Rewarder has to sort through billions of requests. One wonders how much gig memory storage the computer has.

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But here I sit now, the fork poised at my lips with the egg yolk dripping from it. I ask for blessings but get hung on the Eternal Conundrum: “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg.” To be safe, I bless both their little hearts.

Somewhere in the distance I hear a choir singing Blessed Assurance, just as my tongue tastes the huckleberry jam.

Bud Hearn
March 13, 2015