The Miracle of the Blessing

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

In my family there is a famous story, "The Miracle of the Blessing". It is more of an anecdote, really. The whos, wheres, and whens have long since been lost but it re-surfaces once in a while despite it's total lack of subtance and credibility. Let's assume for a moment that the events really happened for a moment while I regail you with the story.

It is told that a family member, sometime in late 1800's Utah, received a Patriarchal Blessing from a local Patriarch. She was less than pleased with the blessing and felt some sort of error must have been made on the part of the Patriarch. She fasted and prayed and, some weeks later, received her answer. She was to return to the offending Patriarch and demand a new blessing.

This she did. The Patriarch reluctantly agreed and arrangments were made. Boy, golly, was my ancestor taught a lesson when the Patriarch, through divine inspiration, delivered an identical blessing to the original. "I guess this is the blessing the Lord needed her to have", says my mother when recounting the events.

During my days of devout Mormonism this story was an inspiration, proof of the power of revelation and priesthood ass-kickness. I now have a new prespective.

If this even actually happened and is not just some faith-promoting rural legend the truth of the situation becomes clear to an objective observer. My ancestor received the same blessing not because of divine inpiration but because the man giving the blessings gave everyone the same blessing. And clearly, not a very good one or Auntie Birdie (or whoever it was) would have loved it in the first place. It is more likely that this uneducated hick just couldn't tell a very good story and likely left a wake of dissatisfied blessing-getters.

It has been some time since I have read the so-called blessing I received the summer I was 13 but the details of it are clear in my mind. It is a three-page load of fertilizer. It talks of me serving a full-time mission. It goes on about the faithful servant I will become. Anyone with true inspiration would have seen the questions and doubts already taking seed in my mind and put them to rest. A real seer and revelator would have seen the apostate I would become and warn me of it.

My guess is that if I went back to the same man who pronounced that load of turkey droppings on me and asked for a re-bless that I would find myself holding the same armload of crap he had shoveled me twenty years ago. And he would still be just as wrong.

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