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Good Morning. It was as I walked out of the cafe, warm mug in my hand, that she said it. ‘May goodness find you in 2022…’ The phrase struck me as it landed, these were richer words than the usual ‘have a good one’ or ‘see you tomorrow…’ This was a kind of coffee shop blessing. Some spell of lovingkindness had been cast on me as I entered the new year… and it put a spring in my wintery steps. A blessing is an ancient incantation which can easily become a contemporary cliché. ‘Bless you,’ we say, as someone sneezes - which might derive from the plague days of the middle ages. If someone said ‘God Bless You’ when you sneezed, it would save your life.’ Maybe ‘God Jab You’ would work better today. A different theory is that a sneeze was your body expelling a demon. Saying ‘Bless You’, after someone sneezed, protected them from harm as the demon made its dash for freedom. In the biblical story, the creator blesses all creation so that a blessing becomes, as one scholar puts it, ‘a force of well-being active in the world.’ The modern English word ‘bless’ is linked to ‘benediction’ and a blessing is more than praising someone - it’s wishing them a divine grace on their day. Like other neglected spiritual practices, the notion of blessing might need to be untangled from the super-trawler nets of industrial religion. A blessing is not the preserve of the devout. We can frame our own, casting a generous grace on each other’s lives. In his last book, the Irish poet John O’Donohue composed a series of everyday blessings. A Blessing for a Farmer and one for a Nurse. A Blessing for someone who did you wrong. A Blessing for Old Age. But as well as offering each other new blessings, we can reimagine ancient ones. For example the novelist Jeanette Winterson, in a new study on Artificial Intelligence, describes how the original Hebrew blessing in Genesis - ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ - might instead be translated as wishing you ‘More life in a time without boundaries.’ Walking home, in the halo of my January barista blessing, I recalled a haunting new folk song, The Lost Blessing, by Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. Inspired by a tradition of Scottish Gaelic incantations, it’s a luminous prayer of steadiness for our age of uncertainty: ‘Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home…’ May goodness find you this year… and may you find more life in a time without boundaries.