Blessings

[triskellian]

Someone in the finance department of the institution I work for always finishes his phone calls with 'bless you'. I just took a message from him for an officemate, and received his blessings along with his thanks, and thus was born a poll:

Poll Blessings

Comments

[lanfykins]

My boss tends to bless me after I sneeze.

This is normally instantly followed by an even larger sneeze.

I think I may be allergic to blessings...

[triskellian]

The woman who sits at the next desk from me has rationed my blessings, because I sneeze so much she gets bored of blessing me. One blessing now has to do me for the whole day ;-)

[bopeepsheep]

I have a limit of three sneeze-and-response occurrences - after you're 'thrice-blessed' it can only go downhill!

(imc, if blessed once, sneezes twice more by habit. If not blessed, he stops sneezing. It's curious.)

[white_hart]

I have been known to say "Oh, bless!" when told of someone doing something particularly lovely for another person. Or "bless their little cotton socks", but that's usually slightly sarcastic.

[triskellian]

Argh, yes, I meant to include that sense in the poll. Ah well, twas inevitable.

[dyddgu]

I was always taught never to discount or reject a blessing; after all, even if the blessee doesn't believe in $deity, the blesser does, and it is a politeness at the very least. At the not-very-least, it's good to hedge your bets...

[triskellian]

Yes; although receiving them sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable rejecting a blessing would strike me as rather rude, unless for some reason I felt the blessing itself was rude (perhaps if it was praising something I had done unwillingly or accidentally and didn't approve of).

[bopeepsheep]

I'm not sure about that - I get very uncomfortable at people 'praying for me' (and I know too many who do, despite knowing it upsets me), and it seems quite odd to be ok with being blessed in that way. But I'm ok with sneezing-response, as it seems de-faithed somehow.

Sometimes I go and get a blessing in church, when the option is there (I was confirmed so could take communion but don't). Sometimes I do actively want to be blessed; most of the time I don't and would resent it slightly in non-sneezing contexts. Gah.

[triskellian]

and I know too many who do, despite knowing it upsets me
Yes, I wouldn't like that at all. Praying for their own ability to deal with things is one thing, but making sure you know they're praying for you even though you don't want them to is just vindictive :-(

[ar_gemlad]

I bless people when they sneeze - or rather I say the words - but it's habit more than anything.
I receive blessings when I go to church, but I would feel uncomfortable being 'blessed' by a random person that I don't know. It seems somewhat of a violation (although that's way too strong a word for my level of feeling) to be blessed without having the option to not receive the blessing.
However, I wouldn't mind someone saying 'peace be with you' (as is our church's custom) or even 'Lord bless you', as that is a kind of intermediary request to God, rather than a 'thou shalt be blessed' demand.
Also, I wouldn't mind someone praying for me without asking - again it seems more intercessionary than demanding.

[triskellian]

Heh. This ties nicely into yesterday's conversation about telekinesis, y'know - is it still a blessing if you have to ask a god to do it for you? ;-)

'Peace be with you' seems entirely unobjectionable to me, but I'm not at all sure how I'd feel about someone praying for me. I think it would depend very heavily on who they were, and what kind of relationship I had with them and their religion. (And also with whether I suspected they were praying for me be saved from my godless ways!)

[ar_gemlad]

How about if someone prayed for you to be saved from your non-telekinesis ways?

(And is the Force a god or not?!)

[triskellian]

Hmmm. If they were likely to be successful, I think I might be able to tolerate that!

(For the purposes of the poll, the Force is a god if the person who believes in it conceptualises it as a god, and not otherwise ;-)

[undyingking]

I guess for me, blessage on sneezage is pretty much a reflex polite acknowledgement of their suffering... but maybe I should start making it mean something.

Follow-on question: do you say thank you when someone blesses you after sneezing? And if so, what do you feel you're thainking them for?

[triskellian]

I do say 'thank you' and I don't feel that I'm really thanking them for anything, any more than I'm genuinely blessing them if I say 'bless you'. It's just a standard call and response thingie. But now that I'm examining it, I am trying to stop saying 'thank you' as well as 'bless you' and I am reassuring myself that since that 'thank you' is often claimed to be bad luck, it's not impolite to omit it.

(Intersections and contradictions of superstitions and politenesses are probably beyond the scope of this comment ;-)

[undyingking]

often claimed to be bad luck

Ooh, I hadn't heard that. I wonder if thanking for other kinds of blessing is similarly ill-fortuned.

[triskellian]

It allegedly kills a fairy, too. Unless you clap your hands and/or say 'I believe in fairies'.