I was raised Catholic but gave up the faith for lent. I can remember people showing up for dinner and being told “That food’s already been blessed so just dig in”. Another case would be giving a blessing to troops headed for battle. I get the basic idea, but it seems like a ‘Blessing’ is like a magic spell, making whatever object that is blessed more protected or pure or holy. In the case of the food or the troops, I doubt, like hell, that this is the case in real life. So what does “Blessing” something actually do?
When I eat, I say a prayer thanking God for the food and asking a blessing on it. What does it actually do? I don’t know. It’s something I do out of faith and gratitude.
I’ve also been the receipient of priesthood blessings, and I’ve found comfort and guidance in those. Not a magic spell or anything like it, IMO, but a way to connect with deity.
YMMV
My Unitarian pastor once told me a joke: A minister sits down to dinner at home and absently starts putting food on his plate and tucking in. His wife looks on aghast. He notices and asks, “What’s wrong?” She says, “My dear, I’ve never in my life seen you take a bite of food without blessing it!” He glances over the table and says, “It’s all leftovers – it’s been blessed before!”
If you get into a pie fight with a demon, you can use the blessed pie to punch a hole through his chest.
Seriously, though, I always got the impression that the mealtime blessing was mostly an expression of gratitude. But that’s my experience with religious folk. That may not explain your “already been blessed” thing, though, unless they mean that a prayer of thanks has already been said.
+1 on attack rolls and +1 on saves vs fear.
What?
It makes the person doing it feel better.
If blessing actually did anything, there would be priests on the sidelines of every sports event being paid to bless constantly. The gubmint would have a whole monastery doing nothing but blessing this country, our troops, & whoever lobbyists paid them to bless. People with hay fever would be uber.
It had to be said.
I’ve been wondering this since I was a kid in Catholic school. I was told that to “bless” something was to offer it to God. But God effectively owns everything, anyway, so it wasn’t clear to me what it meant.
It certainly didn’t mean “to make something holy”. Without getting into defi nitions of “holiness”, people treated such things in a very different manner – something like radioactivity. The priest would take the Hosts left over from communion and they’d have to be properly disposed of. the same with the water we altarboys used to wash off his fingertips 9which contained fragments of the Host he offered up in Mass). That water, riven through with holy paticles, had to be dunped into a special trough that, i was told, went into a special trap in the ground. a sort of Holy Waste Dump.
Blessed food wasn’t anything like that – you could simply throw out the leftovers and scrape the bones and things into the trash. If we were offering it to God, by the way, how come we were eating it?
Other things could be blessed – priests would bless houses on Epiphany, and they’d bless cars. On certain days they’d bless pets. on st. Blaise’s day they’d bless your throat. Exactly what all this was supposed to do or change was never made clear to me.
it sort of seemed to be an all-purpose request that God keep an eye on the blessed item, and keep it from harm. This was never much of a success, as far as I could see. blessed houses got damaged, blessed cars crashed, and blessed pets died about as often as unblessed ones. The nuns told us stories about throat problems cureed by the St. Blaise blessing, but it didn’t invariably seem to happen.
I had a priest bless my xmas tree once. As an atheist my internal :rolleyes: was going haywire, but he meant it as a nice gesture so I didn’t mind.
Funny thing is, that particular tree turned out to be one of the best trees we ever got, and kept fresh all through the holidays. Was it the blessing?
Well of course not, it was my keen eye for great xmas trees! 
As I recall, that same night I got us a parking spot right in front of the building so we didn’t have to lug the thing for several blocks. It was a parking spot to be proud of in a place where parking 3 or 4 blocks from your home is SOP. Was it the blessing?
Of course not! It was my incredibly keen parking space senses. They’ve been honed after years of living near NYC.
Ahh, Good times.
Ehhh where was I going with this? Oh yeah, my dad was a big catholic and he would usually bless the house by going around it with the most foulest smelling stuff ever. It was some type of incense, but like nothing I’d ever smell at the goth clubs/shops in the city - that stuff smelled good. I always wondered what that was all about.
For what it’s worth, I see Wikipedia has an article on Blessing.
"What does “Blessing” something actually do? The same thing any other superstitious ritual behavior does.
Is it me or does this thread smell of poo all of a sudden? 
Kinthalis’s dad must have just blessed this thread.
There actually is an organization that only prays for the President, you know. They’re called the Presidential Prayer Team. I offer this in informational sense, not judging in any way.
As much as I want to.
:eek: Dammit, you just broke my brain. 
Well, in a lot of religions you give the parts you don’t eat to the gods - you burn the entrails and the skin and stuff and you eat the good parts. “Uh… 'cause that’s what They told me they like best!”
I know. Not in Catholicism, though.
Imagine how I felt when I saw a “Presidential Prayer Team” window sticker on my parents’ car.
My parents aren’t Catholic, so this may not apply, but in their prayers they usually specify what they want the blessing to accomplish. “Bless this food for the health and welfare of those eating it.” We joke that if you snitch food before prayer you’ll die of food poisoning*, due to the lack of extra blessing-protection.
- Hasn’t happened yet, though.
Can you in turn non-bless something by damning it?
God damn Texas.
God damn Texas.
God damn Texas.
When come back, bring blessed pie.