A priest begins a blessing by holding up an arm and pointing it toward the audience. As he speaks the words of the blessing, it’s as though an inner glory exits his body at his fingertips and travels through the air, his fingers acting like nozzles to direct the glory’s trajectory. He beams out the blessing, and then the blessing is over.
There’s something about the movement of the body that’s important to the performance of a blessing. In fact, without the bodily movements that accompany a blessing – the arc the arms trace, the shapes the mouth makes – it’s difficult to imagine a proper blessing even happening in their absence. In other words, could an armless priest or a mute priest adequately perform a blessing? If an armless priest stood up to give a blessing, he would have to rely on some other bodily movement to enact the blessing, to project the blessing outward from himself, to spray forth his inner glory. Perhaps thrusting his head forward would work. He might use his legs to kick out the blessing, but this feels off too. The arms and hands and mouth seem to be the optimal outlets for blessings.
The Vulcan salute – the hand gesture popularized by the character Mr. Spock on Star Trek in the sixties – was devised by the actor Leonard Nimoy who based it on the configuration of a Jewish priest’s hands as he delivers the priestly blessing. The way the ring and the bird finger from a vee, it’s not an easy gesture to perform, as the actors in the series learned. Some, even after years of giving the salute on the set, could never perform it very gracefully and had to effortfully arrange their fingers beforehand, raising the hand pre-configured into the salute position. It’s not a casually formed configuration of the hands, especially when you first try it. It requires practice. In the performance of a blessing, the movements of the hands and the arms are purposeful and deliberate, the opposite of scattered and directionless.
In a Catholic mass, there is a clear beginning to a blessing: the congregation is asked to stand before a blessing is delivered. Once the faithful are in blessing position, the blessing is delivered. The arm of the priest is raised into position and the movement of the arm is followed through to its open-nozzle position as the words begin. The words end and the arm is returned to a casual position, marking the end of the blessing.
Do invisible fluids literally pour out of priest when he gives a blessing? Is this even possible? Blessings do behave a lot like more ordinary fluids such as water or milk. They flow from one point in space to another when set in motion by a movement of the body, diffusing outward from the source like a drop of dye in a clear solution. I don’t think it’s an accident that blessings are often accompanied by literal fluids. There is an ancient Hindu tradition, for example, of pouring milk over statues in acts of blessing. Ritual purification through immersion in rivers is prominent in many of the world’s religions, both Eastern and Western. Christian priests apply oils to foreheads, sprinkle holy water from silver scepters and swing clanging buckets to send clouds of burning incense snaking out toward the people in the pews who inhale its aromatic particles. Somehow the transfer of these fluids as an accompaniment to the blessing is seemly and appropriate, as though the blessing itself is composed of fine droplets of liquid.
A sneeze is made up of actual droplets of liquid: moisture, microscopic life forms and other organic materials. It begins inside a human being – in the lungs – and ultimately is ejected from the mouth and the nostrils, diffusing into the environment. It’s not surprising that this outflow of fluid from the body often prompts a blessing in response. A soft sneeze elicits a soft blessing – ah-choo bles-shoo – while a loud sneeze prompts a more dramatic response – ah-CHOO BLES-shoo. It’s like we rhyme our blessing with our sneezes. I’ve even heard of a woman who had such loud sneezes that her next door neighbors would yell back their blessing to her. Two human outflows mirroring each other, one contagious, the other meant to suppress or counteract that contagion, one fluid responding to another in a dialogue of fluids.
Blessings, it would appear, enjoy the company of fluids, but are blessings themselves actually fluids? It’s just a personal anecdote, but a very strange experience in New Orleans several years ago leads me to believe that something strange flows out of humans, something powerful yet invisible. I was waiting outside an auditorium at Tulane where Rufus Wainwright was about to perform. It was an impossibly blue day. Wearing a crisp white shirt, I was soaking up the energy of the sun, thinking to myself how perfectly the breeze balanced the heat, when my face began to beam and I felt a fluid slip out of me. It wasn’t a liquid fluid, but it felt like a spiritual version of wetting my pants, like some spiritual sphincter had relaxed and I was incontinent of the fluid it had been holding back. I felt embarrassed, as though everyone would be able to see a kind of spiritual wet-spot floating around me. Had something actually spilled out of me? Difficult to say. What I can say with certainty is that it felt like something had spilled out of me.