For Your Birthday

Today is my "half birthday" (my actual birthday is April 22, six months from now).

In morning quiet time, I ran across this beautiful birthday blessing in John O'Donahue's To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings.

I wanted to share it on my blog this day, in hopes that is serves as a blessing to many of you on the "echoing-day of your birth."

For Your Birthday

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day

The blueprint of your life

Would begin to glow on earth,

Illuminating all the faces and voices

That would arrive to invite

Your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,

Who loved you before you were,

And trusted to call you here

With no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you

Into becoming who you were meant to be,

Blessed be those who have crossed your life

With dark gifts of hurt and loss

That have helped to school your mind

In the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,

Blessed be those who looked for you

And found you, their kind hands

Urgent to open a blue window

In the grey wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,

Your health, eyes to behold the world,

Thoughts to countenance the unknown,

Memory to harvest vanished days,

Your heart to feel the world’s waves,

Your breath to breathe the nourishment

Of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,

May you open the gift of solitude

In order to receive your soul;

Enter the generosity of silence

To hear your hidden heart,

Know the serenity of stillness

To be enfolded anew

By the miracle of your being.

— John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

Originally at Musings of a Musical Preacher Read the original ↗