Dear Friends in Christ,
I wish you a blessed Feast of the Theophany of Christ! We celebrate the revelation of God made manifest to us today – the Epiphany of God the Trinity.
We bless water today because in the waters of the River Jordan was the Trinity manifest to us. We take the blessed waters home with us to sanctify all aspects of our life and to ask God to reveal Himself in our daily lives in our homes. We are not asking for God’s magic but rather for God’s majesty to become visible in our at home daily lives. May God reveal Himself to you today and always.
Bishop Kallistos Ware writes in his book THE INNER KINGDOM:
“What are we doing, then, at each celebration of Epiphany, at every Blessing of the Waters, is to reaffirm our sense of wonder before the essential goodness and beauty of the world, as originally created by God and as now recreated in Christ. Nothing is intrinsically ugly or despicable; it is solely our distorted vision that makes it seem so. Through the power of God incarnate shown in His Baptism in the Jordan, all persons and all things can be made holy, can be transfigured and rendered Spirit-bearing. All things are capable of acting as sacraments of God’s presence. As we express it in one of our Epiphany hymns:
At Thine appearing in the body,
The earth was sanctified,
The water blessed,
The heaven illumined,
And humankind delivered
From the bitter tyranny of the enemy.
Water, earth, sky, the human body and the whole human person with its emotions and afffections-through Christ’s Incarnation and Baptism these are all reborn, transformed, hallowed. The Great Blessing of the Waters is in this way a proclamation that the universe around us is not a chaos but a cosmos. There is glory in everything; this is a world full of wonder.”
May you be so blessed this Theophany to be given the purity of heart necessary to see God.
Fr. Ted
