The Blessing of the Epiphany Water
The traditional blessing of the water and salt.
It is a beautiful custom when water is blessed on the eve of Epiphany in commemoration of Jesus’s Baptism to come. It becomes a powerful, grace-filled sacramental that protects us from evil. The prayers of blessing are rich with words of shielding from and the vanquishing of evil by God through the humble means of salt and water.
I have grown closer to sacramentals as I have grown older. I have come to be so much more ‘Incarnational’ in my prayer life and my view of the natural world.
As the world has slipped dangerously close to cyber everything - in just one more disconnect from the “dearest freshness deep down things” - I feel a kind of urgent need to seek the connection Jesus made with the physical world in taking on its flesh and blessing all he touched, ate, drank, smelled.
We must not forget our physical nature, for God blessed it and made it holy by taking it on and entering our physical world. We are not, and never will be, just spirits. Our bodies come with us even into eternity. Sacramentals are small daily reminders of this truth. We become holy in body and soul.
I have always marveled a bit that we can bring home holy water from Church - this grace filled sacramental used whenever we are tempted, or whenever we sprinkle it on our children at bedtime.
The whole world of nature and each individual thing in it is a portal through which the Divine calls to us.
It is why I love Holy Water. And why the chalk marks of Epiphany written over our doors bring a kind of comfort. They seem to sing ‘God with us’. Really. Concretely in the things He has made.
Sacramentals can be used poorly. There can be abuses and superstitions surrounding them, I know. I have been wary of these abuses in the past.
But as I intentionally draw closer to the natural world it seems so right and just that God would want so much to use the beauty of water as a portal for his grace to be sprinkled lavishly upon us in protection against the evil one. I have come to have a great delight in it.