God bless you

The difference between taking the Lord's name in vain, and giving it in love

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat,

Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

If you haven’t got a penny, a halfpenny will do,

If you haven’t got a halfpenny, then God bless you.

There is truth somewhere in the adage that, if you’re in dire need of money, then ask someone who is poor. The lending of money, aside from the practice of usury, which is what banking is all about, arises out of compassion, and he has most compassion who is himself, or has been, in dire need.

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Two evenings ago, I was riding my bicycle home after work. On a back street in Meerbeek, I rode over a rut in the roadway, my bike juddered and my front light came flying off. It landed on the hard road and then split open into its component parts: the lens, the reflector, the casing and the two batteries. I pulled to the side of the street and luckily there was no other traffic. I spotted the casing, and, upon turning round, I could see the reflector glinting in the light from a far-off street lamp. Miraculously, I also found one of the batteries, and set about searching for the other one. “What are you looking for?” came an enquiry. I looked up from my prostrate position on my hands and knees. An elderly lady and gentleman were out walking their dog in the dark. I explained what had happened, and they were immediately concerned. My Dutch accent was not clear and I was in a flap. “The other battery. Without it, I have no light and therefore will need to walk home. Where can it be?”

“Oh, a battery!” the lady said at last. “A battery …” There were two parked cars. “Maybe it’s rolled under one of the cars,” she suggested. Then her husband pulled a face. “There’s a drain. I hope it didn’t go down the drain.”

I began to fear he was right. “Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done,” I said. “I must give up.” I was actually quite surprised. Most people would by that stage have perhaps shrugged and kindly said Oh, well, I hope you find it. But not this couple. They took my part, they began to search along with me. I took great comfort from that, even if the battery couldn’t be found.

The lady asked, “Don’t you have a mobile phone? Can’t you use it as a lamp?” “No, I don’t have a mobile phone,” I answered. At that, the man took out his own mobile phone and switched it to the torch function. He shone his beam of light around the asphalt and then, all of a sudden, exclaimed, “Is this it? The other battery?”

I stepped over to where he was and, sure enough, there on the ground in the gutter lay a battery. I picked it up and inserted it along with the other battery into the casing and switched the thing on. Nothing happened. “It’s plus for positive and minus for negative,” volunteered the lady. Of course! The poles had been reversed. I opened it and switched the batteries around, and, hey, presto! It worked!

There were smiles all around and then I said something to them that arose utterly naturally and which has caused me to reflect ever since Friday evening. I said, “God zegene u. God zegene u.”

For those who speak no Dutch, I can translate the words for you. They mean “God bless you”. What I can’t translate for you, however, is what I meant with them. Not for you. The couple I said them to know what they mean. Because I said them to them.

It is a remarkable thing how easily oaths slip from our tongues. “By our lady”, the act of fornication, the female part. All frightful words that even I have let slip in a moment of anger and desperation. Swear words are always the first words we learn in a foreign language. Isn’t that perverse? We start our acquisition of a means of communication by learning how to repel those we speak to. But you can ask a hundred polyglots how to say “God bless you” in the languages they know, and I would be surprised if they all knew. And usually the reason behind that is I’ve never had cause to use the expression.

On Friday, I had cause to use the expression and actually said it wrong. I missed off the final “e” of “zegene” (it’s subjunctive, which is very rare in modern Dutch). Tell someone to fuck off, and they will remember what you said to them. Tell someone God bless you, and they will remember what you said, and they will remember how they felt, and you will also remember how you felt, because it will have impelled you to say it: that feeling of warm gratitude for which you can offer no recompense on this Earth, other than to wish the blessing of the Almighty upon them. You don’t even have to believe in God, because in that moment, what you say to the other party is, “If there be a God, I wish upon you His blessing.” And that is the greatest philosophical leap you can make to understanding the grace of the Almighty. He resides in us, because He is us. He lives through us and we live through Him.

Voltaire is supposed to have once said that, if God had not existed, Man would have needed to invent Him. Voltaire was half-right. If He is non-existent, our invention of God is an invention of the better part of ourselves. And whether our acts of grace come from ourselves or from the deity, truth is they come, and that is good. And if he exists, God must have a place in which to exist and therefore cannot exist but in us. The monstrance that bears witness to God’s presence in church only functions to do that when it is seen. It is our presence, viewing the monstrance, that constitutes the evidence of God’s presence, because it is coterminous with our own presence.

The urge to wish God’s blessing on another comes as involuntarily as the urge to tell them to fuck off. But it is impelled by a far purer motivation, one that arises not out of a desire to repulse, but out of a desire to be at one, in gratitude and love.

They tell us at school to wash our mouths out with soap and water when we swear. They discourage us. But they never encourage us to wish God’s blessing on another. Swearing is impelled by the mind’s desire to repel; wishing blessings on others stems from the heart’s opposite sentiment.

God bless.