02/11/01

Blessings: in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve blessed a car dealership in the neighborhood where I grew up and a police station in the district where I now live. Over the years, I’ve blessed homes and autos, fields and farm animals, gymnasiums and racetracks, churches and schools, religious articles and statues (big and little), shrines and ships, and people of all sizes and descriptions, individually and collectively, especially at the end of Mass. I’ve asked God to bless the Illinois General Assembly, the Cook County Board of Commissioners and the Chicago City Council. Catholics say grace before meals and ask God to bless the food they will eat. We ask God to bless our projects and our plans. Why all this blessing?

“To bless” can mean to praise (bless the Lord!) or it can mean to consecrate to the Lord, to call down God’s favor on some person (God bless you!) or on some thing. “To bless” means recognizing holiness in God, the “font of all holiness”, or bestowing holiness from God on His creatures. Our faith tells us God made the world holy in creating it from nothing and then, after the fall, restored its holiness in the redemption by Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit. While people, made in God’s image and likeness, can receive a holiness that unites them to God personally and subjectively, material reality is also under God’s protection and is loved by Him. To think that only people can be blessed and not chalices, churches, cars and animals betrays a mindset that does not respect material reality. Things and buildings and artifacts can be consecrated to the Lord, even though they cannot be interiorly transformed by God’s grace. Just as a great work of art deserves respect because it “borrows” from the subjectivity of its creator, so nature and material things speak to us of God and take on a particularly sacred quality when, within the economy of redemption, they are specifically dedicated to God and set aside for use in the liturgy or for our daily use on our way to salvation. To bless is to bring God’s grace into every dimension of creation. Every time the ancient belief that matter is evil and cannot participate in any way in the order of grace rears its ugly head, the Catholic Church responds with another blessing, much to the chagrin of puritans of all stripes.

		‘We are a blessed people able to bless others. We make God’s blessing visible in the sign of the cross and other blessings given us by the Church, blessings we pass on to other people and things.’

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing” writes St. Paul (Ephesians 1:1). All of God’s work is a blessing, and when the Church blesses she does so because, through Christ, she is the instrument God uses to make the world holy. The greatest source of blessing are the seven sacraments, which are acts of Christ himself; but the various blessings done by the Church herself are also sources of grace. The Church uses material objects—candles, oil, water, ashes, pictures and images—to accompany her prayers of blessing and encourages the faithful to make use of these in their homes and workplaces. Catholics do this more readily and unselfconsciously before they are assimilated into our puritanical culture. Controversies about crucifixes in classrooms or even in Churches are symptoms, I would suggest, of some Catholics having become more puritanical in the last generation.

When parents teach children to bless themselves, they show the youngsters how to make the sign of the cross on their body. One of the definitions of “to bless” in the Webster Collegiate Dictionary is “to make the sign of the cross upon or over.” As the outline of Christ’s cross, which is the source of every blessing, is traced on our body, we bless ourselves by saying: “in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” This gesture and these words are a profession of faith. The sign of the cross was first traced on our bodies at baptism, when water was poured over us in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In baptism, we were made holy by being brought into Christ’s relation to his Father. Freed from original sin, we became members of Christ’s holy people, his body, the Church. Sanctifying grace is the life of the Holy Trinity in us.

The words we speak in blessing ourselves are a profession of faith in one God in three divine Persons. We say “in the Name”, not names; but then we name three Persons who are one as God while distinct in their relationships. Calling God “Father” is not a poetic metaphor, for He truly does engender a Son from all eternity. Jesus is Son of God not because He was born with a male body as a human being but because, from all eternity, He was engendered by the First Person of the Trinity. The mutual love between Father and Son is truly Spirit. Naming the relations which constitute the divine Persons of the Godhead is neither intellectual guesswork nor the result of cultural conditioning. Among those who are afraid today that using the revealed names for the Persons of the Trinity “makes God masculine” the temptation exists to abandon revelation and take refuge in philosophy, where insight into who God is remains tied to whatever terms the philosopher chooses to use. The concern is real; the solution betrays the faith.

We are a blessed people able to bless others. We make God’s blessing visible in the sign of the cross and other blessings given us by the Church, blessings we pass on to other people and things. Part of the pleasure of living in a society where different faiths can live in mutual respect and dialogue is listening to others pray. Listening to God being blessed by a rabbi in the original language of the Psalms is an important moment for all of us who look to Abraham as “our father in faith.” Listening to the Almighty, the All-Merciful, being blessed in Arabic by a Muslim, even though we are conscious of the great difference there is in our understanding of who God is, can be for us a moment which deepens our own faith in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Into this societal mixture, Catholics bring a formula of words and a gesture of faith which succinctly express our response to God’s self-revelation in Jesus. Let us make good and frequent use of the sign of the cross and each day bless God as we bless ourselves in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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