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Any moment of prayer—of blessing ourselves and others—is by definition a soul moment.
There is scientific evidence, according to Paul Pearsall, clinical professor of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, that the heart itself holds the key to the soul. Not just the sentimental idea of the “heart” that we give as a valentine to our lover, but our real, beating, pulsing, blood-pumping organ. In fact, the heart, according to Pearsall in his book The Heart’s Code, has its own form of intelligence.
Our heart both receives and exudes a special kind of energy, and facilitates a storing of information within all the cells of the body. He points out that what we call the soul is at least in part the sum total of these cellular memories. The soul can be described as the effect that who we are, deep within, has on our total being, including our physical makeup. He proposes that we in the West have been too brain-focused in our approach to information and communication. Rather, he says, we should pay attention to what our hearts are constantly telling us, and how our hearts may even, with every beat, be sending out subtle signals to other souls, in a network of blessing—or curse.
Blessing others begins in our hearts—apparently, both physically and spiritually. The ancient wisdom that saw the heart as the seat of the emotions was not merely metaphorical, according to Pearsall. If this is true, then praying for our hearts to be open to God, to be open to peace can literally lead to peace filling up the world, the universe.
Jesus taught that we should bless those that curse us (Lk. 6:28). When we send words out into the world—even angry words directed at other motorists who can’t hear us in their insulated cars (I gently remind my husband)—it still matters. And conversely, when we consciously seek to love our enemies rather than curse them, no matter what they have done to us, something is changed in the universe.
It is like a spiritual “butterfly effect.” It is said that a butterfly fluttering its wings in Africa can cause an avalanche in the Alps. Love’s avalanche can start with as small a movement as the stirring of our heart toward someone else, in forgiveness and compassion.
How does anything wonderful begin? We need whimsical examples sometimes to wake us up to the very simplest of truths. Children know that a smile can work wonders. We forget this, and our fixed, worried adult expressions simply engender more tension and create more separations between us in the world.
The author J. M. Barrie (1860—1937), Peter Pan’s creator, must have known something about the power of blessing (not to mention flying). He has his famous forever-child Peter Pan say, “When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” Can you think of a better explanation? A butterfly, a goldfish, a child’s laugh—who can estimate their power?
It is the God of the butterfly and the dewdrops and the stars who also connects us as souls to each other and to all of creation. In blessing ourselves, in blessing others, we are merely tapping into that source through words that are timely, and inner attitudes that, we hope, fit our words. And so, let us bless others in everyday life, in order to practice our finger exercises, our “scales,” as Madeleine L'Engle used to put it. When you bless, use words of Scripture, or your own words, or beautiful phrases you come across in your reading. Learn to bless, and spread the blessing. Teach yourself again how to laugh; as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer.”
Isabel Anders is the author of Soul Moments: Times When Heaven Touches Earth of which the above essay is an excerpt.
