Always bless me goodnight
Right above the stairway door in my childhood home, there sits to this day a bottle of Holy Water. Every night as we filed up the stairs for bed, my dad would take it down and bless each one of us on our way up. At about 12 years old I was not as diligent about my nightly blessing, and I began to have horrible nightmares. Call it coincidence, but I call it grace, as soon as I started making sure I got a blessing before I went to bed, the nightmares stopped. For all my daily experiences with parental blessing, the scene in The Sound of Music where Maria is about to walk down the aisle and Mother Superior blesses her always bothered me. Then at a friends wedding, the priest asked us all to bless the couple and I thought that was plain weird. I don't have the power to confer blessings. We have priests for this sort of thing! Well, it turns out I was wrong. We can bless our people, especially our children. We should bless people, and especially our children. And I found s