May the Road Rise Up: Finding Meaning from the High Road

 

May the Road Rise up to Meet you.  This is the opening line from one of Ireland’s most common blessings.   This invitation to the rising road  can be taken on many levels.  It is really a blessing about the road that is your journey to the high road of meaning and purpose for your life.  The rising up to meet you is the way in which the travelling this road of life need not be a struggle and that the resistance to change be met half way.  May the road rise up to meet you is a blessing that recognises that the road of life is a road that rises up and widens into a high place where you connect the highest potential within you.  What is the highest potential within you?  Wisdom teachers who have travelled this road that rises up to meet you will tell you that it is the road of Love.  This Irish blessing is inviting you to meet this rising road within you by being willing to serve Love’s purpose.

This is the real blessing.  This road that rises up could be the way in which you make your life’s work an expansion of the highest good within you.  This high road that rises up could be the way in which you find meaning and purpose in your life.  This high road that rises up could be the road you travel to find the core values from which you live and love your one wild and precious life.  This road that rises up to meet you is what the poet Robert Frost referred to as the road less travelled.  It is the road that is reflected in all stories of who you take the Hero’s Journey into the discovery of who they are and why they are and travel with the intention to give their one wild and precious life to bless themselves and the world

 

This Irish Blessing Line

May the road rise up to meet you”

 

is a line full of power.  It empowers the one who learns to use it as a dynamic invitation.  It is not simply a blessing given to someone who is going on a journey in a physical sense.  The blessing invites a far deeper journey of the heart to the high road of Love’s purpose as intended in the life of the traveller.  The beauty of this Irish blessing is that for one moment it takes the focus of yourself and places it on the other.  This way there is for one moment the invitations to a deeper reality that the blessing invites and which is invoked by the one who use these words. “May the road rise before you.”

 

For one moment the two are one, which is the very nature of Love.  The magic of this Irish blessing, as with all blessing, is that it blesses the one who invokes it for the other.  If you are a father of a son, a mother of a daughter, a wife of a husband, would you not be willing to feel real empowerment in cultivating an ability to invoke the power of love to bless those you love The magic of this technique is that as you use it (and you may use it silently) you expand.  You expand into a deeper sense of unity and integrity.  What you bless is returned to you.  Let me suggest that you use this line not in any sense as a way of getting but as a way of giving and a way of giving what is best within you.

 

The road of Love that rises up to meet you is never ending.  It is a way of living life which invites the knowing of life that is forever a life transcending the form called a body.  The practise of blessing is not just for someone who is ordained as a priest or minister.  The practice of blessing is an invitation to a way of being in the world.  This is how the Irish poet W. B. Yeats states it when in one moment the road rose up to meet him.

 

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

From Vacillation by W. B. Yeats

 

Wherever you see someone having a hard time, you can bless them silently.  Imagine them moving forward and upward from where they are and see them walking to the higher ground where they will get a wider perspective on their life’s situation and a wider vision of how their life can be.  Through that vision they will see the world in a blessed way.  If you can learn to feel that, and see that for them, without trying to interfere and with heartfelt intention for their life’s journey then you are already blessed.  You are already empowered in a way many people do not value.

 

 

For too many people the road of life is a struggle.  For too many the road that rises up does not go higher but remains on the flatlands that represent an absence of meaning and purpose.  This is only the first line of a number of lines from this great Irish blessing.  Make it a line that you use in your everyday life and I think that you will find that your life will become increasingly blessed.  I love especially to use this line anytime I am walking passed a hospital or prison.  You can choose to use it anywhere you wish.  But do make it a practice.  It is the most practical of spiritual exercises.

 

In a way the commitment to using this blessing and this line may challenge you.  If you are committed to invoking the power of Love and inviting the road to rise up and meet you and the other then you will meet resistance along this road. There will be ruts which symbolise the places where you trip yourself up.  There will be holes in the road. These represent the unloved aspects of yourself.  These are those aspects of yourself that need to be repaired and become one in order that you travel higher for you to see a vision that is worthy of the best in you.

 

This line from this Irish blessing ‘may the road rise up to meet you’ is a form of silent prayer.  It can take you to the very top of the road that rises up should you be willing to commit to its practice.  If you are willing to invite its power as a willing servant of Love’s purpose then you will surely  bless this world.  This practice is especially powerful if you have any Irish ancestry because it connects to your lineage; it was the cultural source from which these words were written.  However, the words, while being important, are less so than the heart felt intention behind the words.  Such a conscious practice will begin to open the heart which has numerous benefits for your health.

 

This line of invitation that blesses the other has a very different focus than the way our culture teaches us to live.  It is a line that costs you nothing other than the willingness to feel empowered.  It is a line available to someone who feels abundant in the true sense of that word and feels they are blessed enough to invite abundance into the lives of others.  Another great poet, Khalil Gibran, says it this way.

 

You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?
And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to the over prudent dog burying bones in the trackless sand as he follows the pilgrims to the holy city?
And what is fear of need but need itself?
Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, thirst that is unquenchable?
There are those who give little of the much which they have – and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
And there are those who have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.
There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.

Speak to us of Giving from the Prophet by Khalil Gibran

 

This line ‘”May the road rise up to meet you” allows you to give in a very simple but empowering way.  Do the practice without looking for results but do it as a practice.  It is a true antidote to any form of meanspiritedness. It is an antidote to worry and anxiety.   It is a line that will align you with the very heart of existance in knowing that you are on the journey to creating higher forms of Love.  I hope you see that this blessing is not simply about the high roads of Ireland but is an invitation to you to take the high road of vision to find the meaning of your life as it is intended to be and is intended as blessing in the world.

 

Here is the May the Road Rise Up to Meet you Irish Blessing in full.

May the road rise up to meet you

May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

 

Finally here is a combination of gentle Celtic guitar with some beautiful photography and Irish prayers and blessings.