Conversational Blessings   


A few years ago I began noting examples of certain brief encounters that made a big positive difference. I thought of them as "conversational blessings," meaning special gifts, mercies, or favors bestowed through ordinary human contact. As I saw more clearly how these little moments could matter a lot when I received them, I found myself paying more attention, and I also became more careful with what I said in everyday passing encounters. Later I asked friends to recall examples of similar blessings they had experienced. They reported that such encounters were rare and usually simple, even ordinary, moments, in the market, on the street, or in the workplace or school. The encounters they described nearly always contained the qualities of respect, acceptance, and authenticity.   

As I continued to think about these moments of grace, I learned that a dear lady from my childhood, now nearly 98 years old, had been placed in a nursing home by her son and his wife. Given her health situation, and despite the daily attention of her caring son, she was no longer able to live alone in her home of 60 years.   

I had phoned her every month for many years, and always on her birthday. She was my late mother's closest friend and my Godmother, and I grew up with her sons in the same church. When I learned she had been moved, I phoned her, and we had a warm conversation about her friendship with my mother and the "old days," and I reminded her of the times she fed us kids bologna sandwiches, and cleaned up our scraped knees, and admired us all into adulthood. She kept asking me, "Did I? Oh, did I?" And then, "Oh, I really did all that, didn't I?" "Yes," I said, "you did." She sounded relieved to know again what she had forgotten but had always been true -- that she had been a good mother and friend, a thoroughly good person. Through this simple conversation, she had been affirmed.   

The story of "The Rabbi's Gift" as told by psychiatrist/author M. Scott Peck suggests the essence of these conversational blessings. The story recounts the abbot of a dying religious order who seeks out the counsel of an ancient rabbi who is praying nearby and asks him for advice on how to save the order from extinction. They talk and pray together, but the rabbi says that, unfortunately, he has no advice to give. He says "The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you."   

Returning to his fellow monks, the abbot tells them the rabbi couldn't help and had offered only a cryptic remark about the Messiah being one of them. The monks puzzled about what this remark meant. Then they began to wonder if it could actually be possible. "Could it possibly be Brother Thomas? Or Brother Philip? Could it even be me?" As they contemplated this thought, they began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And, as they did so, people began to sense an aura of respect surrounding the old monks and were attracted by it. Eventually, some young men inquired about joining the monastery, first one, and then another. Within a few years the order had once again begun to thrive, a witness to the power of acceptance and respect.   

Can you imagine what would happen if we, like these monks, treated each other with extraordinary respect?