“Girl, you gotta just submit and let people bless you.”

an essay on old ladies and new stories

Here’s a story I don’t tell often:

When I first started public speaking, I experienced this weird thing where old ladies kept blessing me in ways that felt super awkward.  Walking off the stage after I spoke at an event at St. Mary’s cathedral in Memphis, a  British woman in her 70s walks straight toward me and in front of God and everybody, embraces me. Not a friendly “thank-you” hug, but it was like embracing-with-the-intent-to-bless.

I had just read aloud an essay about my call to ministry; how it involved stand-up comedy and suicide and AA and pornography strangely and it was about seeing the gospel from the underside of our lives. And before I knew what was happening, red cardigan covered arms enfold me as this stranger whispers in my ear “God has given you something.” She kisses my cheek not breaking the embrace even a little: “Jesus walks with you.” Again she kisses me.  Again she whispers a blessing but always she keeps embracing me.  Me.  A heavily tattooed Lutheran who swears like a truck driver. I didn’t feel worthy - it felt like God’s own self blessing me with warm breath and a scratchy sweater.

I sat back down and think, “What the hell just happened?”  My friend Sara, having seen the entire interaction, slides into the pew next to me and says, “Girl, you gotta just submit and let people bless you.”

It’s hard though.  

But she’s right.  We need to let people bless us.  Maybe letting ourselves receive blessings is part of the Christian life.  It’s just not one that people talk about much because we’re so busy worrying about what we should be doing for others.    

A week or so after the scratchy red cardigan old lady blessed me . . . just as I finished preaching (this time at Church of the Beloved in Edmonds, Washington), it happens again.  Almost exactly like the last time, only this time it’s a Franciscan nun in her long brown habit. With a hand on each of my shoulders, she looks me in the eye without a hope of me turning away. “You have been blessed.”  She chokes up and embraces me.

I think looking back that maybe God had somehow caught on to the fact that 70-year-old women are the only people whose blessings even I can’t resist.

For most of my life, when asked how I am, I would answer by referencing the last shitty thing that happened to me. But after a lifetime of seeing the glass as half fuck-you I wish now that I could tie these kinds of moments together with ribbon and don them in my greying hair. I want to make a wreath of them, a potpourri of blessings to make myself more beautiful. Because, readers, I so often have done the opposite. I so often have mined my memories for ore to fuel a coal fire of hurt.

Maybe as we grow older we get to tell different stories about our lives than the ones we have worn smooth by repetition.

I have a couple of those stories that are true, but are just not serving me anymore. Maybe I will thank them, release them and welcome these two into the rotation. And then, maybe I will find a scratchy cardigan of my own and refuse to stop embracing a younger woman who needs to be softened by submitting to a blessing.

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