Bless You!

Allergy season is here and hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear someone sneeze, followed by someone saying “bless you” or “God bless you” to the sneezer. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t really matter if the parties involved appear to know each other or not, it’s just considered good manners to say “bless you” after someone sneezes.  I can certainly understand why I’ve been taught to say “please” and “thank you,” but saying “bless you” after someone sneezes seems a bit peculiar to me.  When my daughter was little she would get extremely irritated if I didn’t immediately bestow the obligatory blessing upon her after a sneeze. “Mom, I just sneezed,” she would whine dramatically, as if she had severed a limb. How dare I be so careless as to not bless her? (Someone should have called child protective services.) Curiosity got the best of me the other day, as it often does, so I did a little research into how all of this “bless you” business got started.

Blessing sneezes has been documented as far back as AD 77 and explanations abound about its origins:

-According to legend, it was believed that your heart stops beating (it doesn’t) when you sneeze and the phrase “bless you” was said to encourage the heart to continue beating.

-People used to believe that your soul left your body when you sneezed and could be taken over by the Devil or evil spirits, so saying “God Bless You” was a way to prevent such entities from invading the body.

-On the other hand, there is an old belief that sneezes were a sign of answered prayers or good luck, and that saying “bless you” was just a way of acknowledging someone’s good fortune. (If that’s the case, I need to go get some lottery tickets asap.)

-Another explanation centers around the bubonic plague outbreak. Sneezing was thought to be an early symptom of the illness, so blessing the sneezer was done to ward off the disease.

These days we aren’t too concerned that sneezing can affect someone’s heart or soul.  We continue to say “bless you” because we’ve been taught that it is polite, but considering the true meaning of the phrase can make this common custom more meaningful to us.  One of the definitions of “bless” is “to give honor or glory to (a person or thing) as divine or holy.” So what we’re really doing here is acknowledging the presence of the Divinity in another person. Wouldn’t our world would be a much better place if we “blessed” with our actions as well as our words? So I apologize to my daughter and to everyone else whose sneezes did not receive the proper response. Bless you!

Sources: Dictionary of Superstitions, David Pickering, snopes.com