Blessing the Whole Mess
When the world breaks into pieces, one response is to bless it anyway—not as denial, but as defiance. A poem that works as spell.
Love everything. Love your enemy. Love the monster breeding inside you.
That's John Keene's instruction in "Beatitude," a poem Maria Popova calls "a protest in the form of prayer." It doesn't ask you to pretend the brokenness isn't real. It asks you to bless it anyway.
The Reflex We've Lost
When things fragment—relationships, institutions, the sense that the world makes sense—the instinct is to armor up. Contract. Protect what's left. The reactive stance feels rational: if everything's breaking, at least defend your position.
But defense is also distortion. Contraction reduces your field of perception to threat management. You stop seeing clearly because you're only seeing what might hurt you. The armor works, but it works by narrowing who you are.
Keene's poem moves the other direction. Instead of contraction, extension. Instead of defense, benediction. The list of what to love grows until it includes everything: "those whose very idea of love is hate." That's not softness. That's scope—the refusal to let anything fall outside your field of regard. Contraction makes you smaller. Blessing makes the field bigger.
Blessing as Alignment Practice
Coherenceism talks about resonance—patterns that reduce distortion for the whole. The usual framing is cognitive: recognize the deeper pattern, align your actions, reduce noise in the shared field. But Keene's poem suggests something more embodied: you can bless your way into alignment.
Not blessing as approval. Not "this is fine" when it isn't. Blessing as choosing what you add to the field. Every response either clarifies or distorts. Reactivity distorts. Benediction—even of what you oppose—clarifies by refusing to meet distortion with more distortion.
This isn't new—every contemplative tradition has figured out you can't fight your way to peace. But Keene's voice is contemporary, urgent. The poem reads like someone who knows the news, who sees the fragmenting, and is offering a practice anyway.
What Blessing Costs
This isn't free. Blessing the monster inside you means acknowledging the monster's there. Blessing your enemy means holding their existence without contracting around it. The practice requires presence—you can't bless on autopilot, and you can't bless what you're refusing to see.
In practice it might look like this: you read something online that spikes your contempt, and instead of feeding the spike, you pause. You say—out loud or silently—I bless this person whose views feel monstrous to me. Not "I agree." Not "I forgive." Just: I include you in my field of regard. I won't let my response to you make me smaller.
Maybe that's why it works as prayer. Prayer traditionally involves attention: you face something, you address it, you hold it in a particular kind of regard. Keene's poem demands that attention extend everywhere, including the places you'd rather not look. The blessing is the looking.
And the looking changes you. Not by making the brokenness disappear, but by changing your posture toward it. You're not armored against a hostile world; you're oriented toward a world you're actively choosing to bless.
A Counter-Practice
When coherenceism talks about alignment, it usually means recognizing patterns and acting accordingly. But Keene's poem suggests alignment can also start from posture. Before you analyze the pattern, before you decide what action serves coherence—you can choose what you're emanating.
Blessing is an emanation. It's not passive acceptance; Popova calls it "resistance," and she's right. To bless what's breaking is to refuse the logic that says brokenness deserves only brokenness in response. It's a protest—but one that protests by adding something different to the field rather than matching the distortion it opposes.
Here's the spell part. Spells work by changing the caster. You say the words, and in saying them, you become someone who says those words. Keene's poem works the same way. Read it enough—really read it, as practice, not just once—and you might become someone who blesses everything.
Not because you're naive about what everything includes. Not because the brokenness stops being real. But because you've decided what you want to add to the field while you're here. Reactivity is one option. Blessing is another. The choice doesn't change the world, but it changes what you're made of as you move through it.
The world keeps breaking. Blessing it won't stop that. But it might change what you become in the breaking.
