"Count your blessings, name them one by one.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
When upon life's billows you feel tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one ..."
This multiply-blessed columnist lives in one of the most multiply-blessed cities on earth, Canberra, federal capital of multiply-blessed Australia.
The average-thinking, well-nourished, life-grateful Canberran, heeding the instruction to count his or her blessings, would need lots of time and an iPhone's nifty calculator to do the task justice.
But wait! What are blessings? What looks at first like a blessing but may be something else altogether?
For example, I got the idea in my head earlier this week that the recently-unveiled-in-the-parly-triangle statues of pioneering female parliamentarians Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney are a blessing/confer a blessing on this city.
Was I right or was I wrong?
In something I was writing about the engaging statues for a previous edition of The Canberra Times I at first called them a "blessing". But then, unsure, I edited that emphatic word out and found other ways to think of sculptor Lis Johnson's bronze figures.
Blessings are especially on this columnist's mind at the moment (and the catchy Count Your Blessings hymn is forever going around head since Sunday School in the olden days) thanks to a fine, new, thought-triggering essay on the subject.
Charles Comey's very readable long-read piece Blessings For Atheists appears in (one might even say confers a blessing on) the latest online The Point.
Irreligious folk (and each census finds more and more Australians have "no religion") who love life and who feel naturally disposed to count their blessings come up against the problem that blessings are usually thought to come from God.
Comey is a lifelong atheist but a deeply-grateful blessings-counter and thinks about what an atheist's blessings can be.
He reports: "When we [Comey and his wife] realised [because of COVID] we were going to have to come up with a structured homeschooling school day [for two young boys] my wife happened upon a blog that mentioned naming a few blessings before starting school each morning."
"We tried it and liked it, and the word stuck. The point, I figured, was to appreciate what we had ... we could let a little light into the room by each naming something we were glad about.
"[But] my reason for writing this essay is that what emerged out of this activity was not what I expected. In fact something strange asserted itself over time. Once I got the hang of it, naming a blessing was not the same as appreciation. And it was not the same as gladness ... But this act of naming a blessing is something I desire to fish out and understand if I can."
READ MORE IAN WARDEN:
It feels quite wrong to precis and paraphrase what Comey fishes out over several thousand considered words (readers, do read it for yourselves) but ours is a tightly-corseted space and precis we must.
What Comey fishes out includes: "We tend to call something a blessing when we want to emphasise that it was not gained through our own efforts ... "
Then, "a blessing is an inlet onto the fact of a more general goodness and buoyancy in life".
Then, and most importantly for Comey (we know this because he bursts into italics): "A blessing is a gift with two benefits. On the one hand, it makes such and such a material difference ... on the other hand, it is a blessing because through it we access a praise ... out of proportion to the gift itself."
"It took me several weeks to hear what a 'blessing' was, or could be, and how it differed from appreciation. That was how long it took for the true context of blessings to arise, with its faint sensation of letting go. It was only after several weeks that the things we named on any given day as a 'blessing' began to prove that each thing was not essential, and thus began to say: look at the ability of the human heart to love what is given to it."
To the extent that one always senses a city's excellent public art blesses the city and its citizens I see now, admiring Comey's fished-up, secular definitions of "blessings" that I was right in the first place to think of the statues of the Dames as a blessing.
How well the cheerful bronze sheilas meet his criteria! How inessential they are. Useless loveliness is the best loveliness there is. The Dames and their installation were not won by common Canberrans' efforts. We didn't so much as imagine them.
No, they are an unsolicited gift, a uselessly lovely and heart-buoying gift from powers-that-be who more usually spend the money on useful kerbs and gutters and drains and car parks.
And so, to be the real capital B thing Canberra's blessings need to meet Comey's thoughtful, semi-spiritual criteria. Are the Canberra Liberals a blessing? Was Zed Seselja? Are we blessed by, say, Canberra's trams, by the existence of The Canberra Times, by the annual pageants of Summernats and of Floriade?
Comey-enlightened now, let us all look at aspects of Canberra, whether man-made (like the inessential National Arboretum) or nature-bestowed (like this inessential city's inessential bush setting and the inessential presence of parrots in our parks and gardens).
Do we find the Canberra phenomena we examine tweaking the heart into feeling love for these gifts? We do? Then they are blessings and we are truly blessed by them.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist.
We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on The Canberra Times website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. See our moderation policy here.