Holy Wisdom Church
Our wholehearted celebration of Christmas gives us a clear vision that is not bound by time, place, culture, race or ethnicity. In the Incarnation, God became so much one with humanity that Jesus could slip into our world unnoticed. Until the Baptism in the Jordon little is really known of God who took on our humanity. The Baptism in the Jordon revealed to the world the three persons of the Trinity, the father who spoke that this is my beloved Son, the Son being baptized and the Spirit in the form of a dove hovering above Jesus.
Connected with the Theophany of Christ, this manifestation of the God-man, the church has created a special day of the Blessing of the Baptismal Waters. As the new Adam, Jesus’ baptism symbolizes the cosmic fact that everyone and everything can be washed, and renewed.
Initially, water was blessed to use for the baptism of the catechumens. Eventually, the blessing of water in church practices took on many symbolisms and uses. Some of these practices take on an almost magical ability. Here, as a visible reminder, we use the water to bless our homes, ourselves and drink it for good health of mind and body.
Too often the world, material things, has been linked with evil or that which takes us away from God. The blessing of the water is a visible sign that all creation is filled with the holy-making presence of God. So what has caused us to lose a sense of the Sacred in this universe of ours? Many believe the universe started as a fluke and operates by chance. They believe the universe is not trying to accomplish anything nor does it have a purpose and we humans have no special place in it. We are simply an accident and our seeking meaningfulness is only a ‘pie in the sky’, a superstition.
There are those though who have a feeling that all living things, not just human beings, are living from the same life, like leaves on a single tree. Each life, taking some particular form, whether human, animal or plant is the basis for a sympathetic affinity, indicating a unity deeper than our everyday superficial relations. Are we not all filled with a mystical longing, for belonging, for a profound union in ultimate meaningfulness?
A scientist wrote that the world consists of communication-interactions among its components or members in which matter, energy and information is exchanged. If so, we can recognize and celebrate this symbiosis as a gigantic Eucharist where each feeds all the others with each one’s own being. Any symbiosis that is a sharing of life so as to make one whole being is an image of the Trinity, the original symbiotic Unity. “It is that presence of the Trinity as a pattern repeated at every scale of the cosmic order that makes the universe the manifestation of God and itself sacred and holy”.1*
We are familiar with the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ, imaged as an organic unity, a single living organism. Each member makes a particular contribution drawing the whole into tighter communion. This living body can be seen to even extend to those who are not official members of our church, maybe not even Christians. There can be a sense of the sacred, the feeling that God is somehow resident in the interactions of these shared relations, shared lives, contributing to the unity of the whole. It is the actions of the members toward one another that constitutes the unity. The Persons of the Trinity love one another to the extent of” indwelling” one another.2 The members of the Mystical Body are to love one another and share the various gifts of our lives. See water as the symbol of the depth of life and the calling of cosmic transfiguration.
As we begin a new year and a new liturgical season, we can trust the voice of God the Father who invites us to walk with Jesus, to experience the friendship of him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
1* God’s Ecstasy by Beatrice Bruteau page 14
2 Ibid.
To conclude, I quote His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s message when in 2005, he stated:"... Water, then, signifies the depth of life and the calling to cosmic transfiguration. It can never be regarded or treated as private property or become the means and end of individual interest. Indifference towards the vitality of water constitutes both a blasphemy to God the Creator and a crime against humanity"
Discover Christ anew in the persons and events we encounter.
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
