I said “blesh you” for forty years

On singing every word to a God I don't believe in the way everyone else in the room did

I said “blesh you” for forty years

For most of my life, I could not say the word God. Or bless you. When someone sneezed, “bless you” wouldn’t come out of my mouth. What came out instead was “blesh you.” People rarely noticed. They heard what they expected to hear. My own kids grew up thinking that’s just what people said when someone sneezed, because that’s what they heard me say, for years, without ever knowing why.

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I wasn’t being cute, or even obstinate. I physically could not make the real words come out. It didn’t feel right. It felt like a lie. Whatever “God” meant to me had gotten tangled up with a version I didn’t believe in, wasn’t interested in, wanted no part of. So my body found a workaround. It found a word close enough to pass and different enough to be true.

That lasted almost forty years. Then, slowly, over the last six, I started being able to use the word a little more. Last summer I accidentally became obsessed with Forrest Frank’s music, had one of his songs as my most-played track on Spotify for the year…I played it on loop for weeks. I’d sing along, and still skipped the parts where he sang God or Jesus. I could hold the melody. I couldn’t hold the word. It still wouldn’t comfortably come out of my mouth.

Last week I went to his show at the Tacoma Dome with my husband, twenty thousand people in a room, and I sang every word.

I’m not a Christian. I don’t subscribe to the God most of the people in that room grew up worshipping, or the way they worship. But I believe in something bigger than any one religion’s claim on it, and last week I wasn’t responding to their theology. I was responding to the coherence. Thousands of people pointed at the same thing, at the same time, singing and praying together, feet stomping hard enough to move the bleachers. It was wild - the sheer amount of energy in one concentrated place. In a world this fractured, that kind of collective agreement is rare enough to feel like its own force. I find it’s more and more important to surround myself with concentrations of humans that amplify something worth amplifying, ones that feel similar to this.

I’d pulled three oracle cards that morning, before I knew any of this was coming.

Trapped Heart: step outside your comfort zone.

Beautiful Heart: open your wings and fly.

Adventurous Heart: set sail on a trip of a lifetime.

I was ten days into a Jupiter return in Leo, which I’d already been calling a threshold. I didn’t need the cards to tell me something was shifting. I needed the room to show me what it felt like when it did.

The whiplash came fast. Earlier that day, my husband walked in wound tight, trying to cram a week’s worth of tasks into a single morning before camping. I got defensive before I understood why, then caught it and told him the truth instead of swallowing it: I’m not mad, this is a lot, I need you to come down a few notches and meet me here.

Then a stranger was oddly rude to me over a sandwich order I’d been nothing but polite about. Then the freeway…people going fifty or people going ninety, nothing in between, tailgating, swerving. We got a great (free) parking spot and then had cars pulling in close enough to make me nervous - seriously, do you need to be 2 inches from me? At some point I thought to myself, I don’t need to worry about this. Whatever will happen will happen, and we’ll deal with it if it goes wrong. Then, I just said it out loud: I’m giving this to God. Not the car. The worry.

I don’t know that I’ve ever said that sentence and meant it before. Actually, that’s not true. I do know. I have never said that and meant it. Even now, as I said it, it still had a tinge of a joke, like I was trying it on to see if it fit. You know, in case it didn’t, I could just laugh it off.

That’s the part I can’t stop turning over. Not the concert itself, but the forty years before it, and the exact night that word finally came all the way through. Something got separated from what it used to mean. I’m not saying anyone else’s God. I’m saying mine. I’ve spent years getting closer to it, but still feeling like I had to justify what I meant by it because it felt different from what most organized religions teach. Or perhaps, I just couldn’t accept the world wholesale at the version being presented to me.

That whole day was proof of the same thing twice, once in a room full of strangers in agreement, once in a car surrounded by people at war with the pavement. I got to feel both. And I got to notice, in real time, that I didn’t need the world outside to regulate itself before I could. When I allow myself to surrender to the bigger picture, and to be in service to what is, life gets to be less stressful. I can’t control people’s actions or opinions, nor outcomes, experiences, or judgments, but I can control how much I get sucked into this temporary transactional world.