Holy Water (Agiasma)

On January 6 the Church keeps Theophany, the feast of Christ's baptism, when the Trinity was made manifest at the Jordan — the Father's voice, the Son in the water, the Spirit descending as a dove (Matthew 3:16-17). The Fathers loved to say that the sinless Christ was not cleansed by the water; the water was cleansed by Him — and creation with it. The Great Blessing of Water, served on the eve and on the feast itself, is that moment extended into the present.

The service is one of the most magnificent in the Church's books. Its great prayer, attributed by tradition to St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, begins: "Great art thou, O Lord, and marvellous are thy works, and speech sufficeth not to sing the praises of thy wonders" — and goes on to praise the God before whom the sun sings and the angels tremble, asking Him to send the blessing of Jordan upon the water. The priest then immerses a cross in the water three times as the troparion of the feast is sung. Where geography allows, the blessing is also served outdoors over a river, lake, or sea — and in Greek practice young people famously dive to retrieve the cross from the water.

The same "Great art thou, O Lord" prayer sanctifies the water of every baptism: what the Church does for a font at a christening, she does at Theophany for the waters of the world.

Theophany water — the Great Agiasma — is treated with a reverence close to that shown the holy things of the altar. The faithful drink it at the feast and carry it home in bottles, where it is usually kept in or near the icon corner. The widespread custom is to drink a little with prayer, traditionally on an empty stomach in the morning, especially in sickness or distress; many households do this through the year. In the weeks after Theophany the priest comes with the new agiasma to bless each home, sprinkling every room — see the-house-blessing.

Holy water is the Church's ordinary instrument of blessing: icons and crosses, cars and fields, animals, seeds, and schoolbags are all blessed with it. None of this is magic, and the Church does not present it as such. Grace is not a substance that works apart from faith; holy water is drunk and sprinkled with prayer, and what it carries is not luck but the sanctifying presence of the God who was pleased to stand in the Jordan. The practice simply takes seriously that human beings are bodies, and that God saves us matter and all.

Alongside the Great Blessing of Theophany stands the Lesser Blessing of Water, a shorter service that may be held at any time of year — at the start of a school year or a new undertaking, on certain feasts, at the opening of a home or workplace, or simply when the faithful ask. The theology is the same; only the solemnity differs.

Behind both stands the Orthodox vision of a world made to be blessed. Water is the first thing the Bible shows the Spirit moving upon, and Scripture is full of healing waters — Naaman washing in the Jordan, the pool of Siloam, Christ's promise of "a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14). When the Church blesses water she is not adding something alien to nature but restoring water to what it was created to be: a bearer of life and a meeting place with God. In that sense the agiasma in a kitchen cupboard preaches the whole doctrine of sanctification — grace reaching all the way down into ordinary things.