Showers of Blessings
Posted by Abi-Ru Shirzan Ghosh on June 8, 2009
I’ve been thinking about what shapes blessings take. There are the flamboyant ones—the brightly clad and strongly perfumed Good Things that you can see—and smell—coming from a long way off. There are the ones that are like longed-for, long-missing, long-expected guests, too. Those are the ones you invite again and again, urging them to come and pleading for a visit. In anticipation you clean your spiritual house and scrub your spiritual face. Then you wait. And wait. While you sit disconsolately on your front porch peering into the distance, a whole host of unexpected blessings slip in the back door and climb in the windows and wait for YOU. Maybe I don’t mean you. Maybe I mean me.
Here’s one of my experiences. I am part of a spiritual group that meets every Friday evening in a teahouse. Unlike any other spiritual group—right?—we sometimes endure tough times, periods of dissension and disagreement. Then Abi-Ru (that’s me) grows down-hearted. This happened recently. Things had somehow gone wrong, and I was—well, sorry for myself. Hazrat Inayat Khan says that self-pity is the worst poverty. Spiritually then, I was flat broke—busted, pretty much penniless.
And then, instead of the larger group that generally assembles, ‘only five’ of us were there that week. I decided to add disappointment at the small number of participants to my silent boo-hooing and ‘gee, Abi-Ru, life treats you so unfairly!’ interior monologue. My four companions immersed themselves in the poetry we were discussing as if it were a pool of sparkling water. When they splashed a bit of liquid beauty on me, I dropped onto the dust of my misery, complaining inside about how hard the ground was and how those droplets of enthusiasm meant—situated as I had decided to be—that I was rolling—wallowing, actually—in mud. (I know that none of you has ever descended into these self-indulgent depths, so I'm explaining fully so that you can understand what the situation was . . .)
The final indignity was that, that night, there were these two guys across the room who kept looking at us and whispering conspiratorially to one another. So then the aspect of ego responsible for self-criticism (which leads ultimately, of course, to despair) began telling me, ‘You see how ridiculous you are? You come here on Fridays and make a public spectacle of yourself. Of course strangers look at you and laugh.’ (I didn't SEE them laughing. But, of course, I could not be fooled by that.)
After a while, the two men approached—hesitantly, but with friendly smiles and faces full of light. The one who was a bit older said, in a strong Turkish accent, ‘Hello, I am Ejder. I'm a professor of Religious Studies here to visiting my nephew.’ He gestured toward the younger man. ‘He goes to the university, and a friend told him about your group. We came here to join you.’ He looked down. ‘But then we heard how eloquent—is this the right word?—is your discussion and we thought that our English is not enough good. But then my nephew told, ‘Why must we feel shy and sorry for ourselves when there are friends waiting to welcome us?’ I think that he is right. So may we sit and talk along with you?’
And so they brought their light and friendship into the circle, transforming the evening for Abi-Ru. ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,’ St. Paul exhorts his readers in the thirteenth chapter of Hebrews, ‘for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Our tiny group of five had had company all along. I just had not recognized the angels—not even the ones my eyes could have seen, had they not been blinded by self-pity.
Amazingly, blessings like this one are not so unusual in my circle. This makes me think that—well, they may not be at all extraordinary.
When I was an evangelical Christian kid, I loved the song ‘Showers of Blessing.’ It was the only ironic song I could find in the entire hymnal (which I searched diligently during many hour-long sermons.) The chorus satirized a rather demanding believer who refused to recognize her [own true state and petitioned for more obvious signs.
The verse went:
‘There shall be showers of blessing,’
This is the promise of love.
There shall be seasons refreshing
Sent from the Savior above.
Then the chorus responded:
Showers of blessing!
Showers of blessing, we need!
Mercy drops 'round us are falling,
But for the showers we plead!
Sometimes, I guess, when the mercy drops go unnoticed, God sends along the showers as well. When the blessings that have crept in unregarded—the angels we entertain unaware—grow clamorous enough, even the distracted can sometimes be persuaded to pay attention. That is in itself a blessing, I guess.
Oh. And about that spiritual poverty. By the evening’s end, I had a whole treasury full of gold.
