Bless: A soft word for a hard world

Published here, for you.

For someone who doesn’t really believe in anything, I say “bless” a lot. It’s not quite a verbal tic. Nor is it yet a crutch. But it’s something I reach for more often than any other word: in messages, in conversation, oftentimes it’s muttered aloud when I’m alone like an accidental prayer sent into the room. It’s the final punctuation of a chat. My preferred email sign-off to close colleagues. It’s the soft exhale at the end of a text. A shoulder squeeze in language form. I use it to thank, to sign off, to recognise beauty, as a reaction to absurdity or, even sometimes, because of the delicate miracle of someone just doing their job well.

I have reached a point in my life where I can no longer tell if I am using “bless” ironically or sincerely, and perhaps that doesn’t matter anyway. The thing about it – aside from its versatility – is that it feels vaguely wrong. It has holy roots and, despite being a staunch atheist, I now bestow blessings………without the authority. I’m drawn to its soft edges, its vague mysticism and its total lack of punctuation. There’s something so satisfying about its lightness. “Bless” doesn’t insist on a response. It doesn’t demand reciprocation. It is small and complete.

Bless the barista who drew a smiley face on my coffee cup. Bless the woman in the cinema who audibly gasped at the first jump scare in Alien: Romulus. Bless the Google Doc that recovered itself. Bless the recurring leaks in my ceilings where, after living in many apartments on the top floor, I finally caved and moved to one below the top floor to avoid further issues – only to be struck with a new leak a month in. Water finds a way, and sometimes that way dodges the apartment above you in order to target you directly. In moments like this, when the universe seems entirely at fault, all you can really do is let out a “bless”. And then maybe call Marco the Plumber.

Then there’s also the darker stuff. The weeks where every news headline is a gut punch. Where I tell myself I won’t listen or read or scroll anymore, for my own sanity. There’s the discovery that faith (excuse the term) in science is slipping – regulatory bodies gutted, public institutions discredited. There’s the ever-concerning slow death of democracy that seems to play out before our very eyes. There are stories you think will be bigger, all swallowed up by algorithmic sleight-of-hand.

There’s Gaza. There are tensions between Israel and Palestine that seem at an all-time high. There is contradicting opinions from everyone, all at once. There is “don’t speak up”. There is “silence is complicity”. There’s so much coming at us from all directions that we level-out completely.

And it’s here, in this quiet cultural tailspin, that “bless” returns. Never as an answer. Not even as a balm. But as shorthand for complexity. For meaning withheld. For the things I don’t know how to hold – the human things, the political things, the tiny griefs and the unwieldy ones.

It’s how I imagine people react when I post a photo of my late stepdad with the caption “forever in our hearts”. It’s how I react when a stranger sneezes in the street and nobody says anything, and I find myself whispering it anyway: bless you.

But it’s also how I make sense of walking past someone so disarmingly attractive that my entire perception of beauty shifts on its axis. Where you must recalibrate what you thought beauty was: so blessed.

It’s how I describe a moment where nothing is right. When the washing machine leaks. When the car park is full. When my bank app won’t load or I’ve bit my lip, and I can feel an ulcer coming on. Bless this mess I’ll think. What else is there?

Maybe, originally, I heard someone else say it or it fell out of the internet, I can’t remember the origin. But somewhere along the line, “bless” stops being ironic. The same way “fam” did. Or “it’s lit”. Language has a way of sliding in, uninvited but suddenly indispensable.

I now say bless without obvious quotation marks. Without the buffer of tone. I mean it.

And if, by some chance, there is something out there listening – some great celestial force keeping score – then maybe it’ll hear me. And maybe one day it’ll bless me right back.