A Soul Matters facilitator once shared, “I guess after plan A fails, I need to remember there’s still a whole alphabet out there.”

Who of us doesn’t need a little help remembering that? Especially after enduring Covid for so long. And the ongoing reckoning with racism. And the world’s inability to deal with climate change. And political division. You get the point. It’s easy to feel demoralized, daunted, and defeated these days. With so many things going wrong, it’s easy to overlook the many things going right.

For Unitarian Universalists, this tunnel vision is the central tragedy of the human condition, not just of our times. We respect those who frame the human problem as sin or twisted wills, but it’s nearsightedness that our religion is most worried about. Which is also why blessings are so core to our faith. They are our way of widening our view.

You see, unlike some of our sibling religions, we don’t say a lot of blessings. But we do point to them. For us, blessings are not so much about giving something to each other as they are about helping each other notice all that’s already been given.

And it’s not just about widening our view to see the gifts and blessings themselves; it’s about widening our understanding of life. Pointing to blessings repairs our relationship with life, allowing us to see it as generous instead of indifferent or threatening. And that’s no small thing. Because when the world seems stingy with us, we start getting stingy with others. In contrast, those who feel blessed have little trouble passing blessings on. Life spills into us and we spill into others.

And in that overflow, it does indeed get a whole lot easier to notice that there is, most certainly, a whole alphabet out there.