Sacred Signs
by Romano Guardini

HOLY WATER

WATER is a mysterious thing. It is so clear and frictionless, so

"modest," as St. Francis called it. It hardly pretends to any

character of its own. It seems to have no other end or object

than to be of service, to cleanse what is soiled and to refresh

what is dry.

But at some time you must have gazed down into the still depths

of a great body of water, and felt it tugging to draw you in, and

have got a glimpse of the strange and secret thing water is, and

of the marvels, terrors and enticements that lurk in its depths.

Or, at another time when it was whipped to a boiling torrent by a

storm, you have heard it rushing and roaring, rushing and

roaring, and watched the sucking vortex of a whirlpool and felt a

force so grim and dreary that you had to tear your thoughts away.

It is indeed a strange element. On the one hand smooth and

transparent, as if it hardly existed in its own right, ready at

hand to wash away dirt and satisfy thirst; and on the other a

restless, foundationless, enigmatic force that entices us on to

destruction. It is a proper image for the secret ground-source

from which life issues and back into which death recalls it. It

is an apt image for this life of ours that looks so clear and is

so inexplicable.

It is plain why the church uses water as the sign and the bearer

of the divine life of grace. We emerge from the waters of baptism

into a new life, born again of water and the Holy Ghost. In those

same waters the old man was destroyed and put to death.

With this elemental element, that yields no answer to our

questioning, with this transparent, frictionless, fecund fluid,

this symbol and means of the supernatural life of grace, we make

on ourselves, from forehead to breast, from shoulder to shoulder,

the sign of the cross.

By her consecration of it, the Church has freed water from the

dark powers that sleep in it. This is not a form of language.

Anyone whose perceptions have not been blunted must be aware of

the powers of natural magic inherent in water. And are they only

natural powers? Is there not present also a dark and

preternatural power? In nature, for all her richness and beauty,

there is something demonic. City life has so deadened our senses

that we have lost our perception of it. But the Church knows it

is there. She "exorcises" out of water those divinities that are

at enmity with God. She blesses it and asks God to make of it a

vehicle of his grace. Therefore the Christian when he enters

church moistens forehead, breast and shoulders, all his person,

with the clean and cleansing water in order to make clean his

soul. It is a pleasing custom that brings grace and nature freed

from sin, and man, who so longs for cleanness, into the unity of

the sign of the cross.

At evening also we sign ourselves in holy water. Night, as the

proverb says, is no friend to man. Our human nature is formed and

fashioned for light. Just before we give ourselves over into the

power of sleep and darkness, and the light of day and

consciousness is extinguished, there is a satisfaction in making

the sign of the cross on ourselves with holy water. Holy water is

the symbol of nature set free from sin. May God protect us from

every form of darkness! And at morning, when we emerge again out

of sleep, darkness and unconsciousness, and life begins afresh,

we do the same thing. But in the morning it is to remind

ourselves of that holy water from which we have issued into the

light of Christ. The soul redeemed and nature redeemed encounter

one another in the sign of the cross.