I had heard of ‘super-sized’ but never ‘super-charged’. The young man meant well, though he was making a serious request by means of some sort of slang. He had purchased a beautiful sterling silver baptismal cross and wanted to have it blessed. So he came into my study that day and asked, “Father, would you super-charge my cross for me?”

I knew what he wanted, but the request came out so strangely. Not wanting to shame him by a direct correction, I responded by saying, “I’ll be glad to bless your cross, Matthew.”

The Orthodox Christian tradition has a blessing for nearly everything good. Among the contents of a wonderful book entitled, “The Abridged Book of Needs”, one finds, for example, prayers for blessing all of the following: water, bees, apiaries, boats, fire engines, homes, wells, airplanes, meat and cheese, fragrant herbs, and fishnets. And the list goes on. Each blessing is typically a prayer, completed with the Trinitarian sprinkling of Holy Water on the object being blessed.

But what is blessing anyway? Why would we bless homes, boats, bees, and fishnets? Does blessing "supercharge"?

First, allow me to give the short answers to these important questions. Blessing is a liturgical and prayerful act by which we—as we say in the Orthodox Churches—“commend ourselves, each other, and all our life unto Christ our God.” And rather than supercharging shrimp trawlers (we have an annual blessing of the Shrimping Fleet in which I take part, here in Mt. Pleasant, SC), we are actually asking God to return them, by our synergy (working together with Him) to their actual use and purpose.

Allow me to explain. When God created the world and all that is in it, and crowned His creation with Man and Woman—calling this “very good”—everything was in order and communion with God. But when we, by our disobedience and self-interest, took matters into our own hands, (read ‘sinned’), the whole world ‘fell’. That is, every part of existence was tainted, touched, affected by the sins of Adam and Eve—and today, by ours. Eating, for example, which was created to be our form of nourishment and communion with God, becomes gluttony—eating for the sake of eating. Drinking, offered to us for hydration and sober merriment, becomes drunkenness, and drunkenness for its own purpose. A home in the fallen world, originally intended for shelter, comfort, hospitality, and the making of family, becomes a place where secret sins are hidden: illicit sexual relationships, abuse, rage, etc.

Realizing that we are now a part of the ‘fallen’ world, and not the world as it was created to be, we have the holy task of offering the fallen world back to God, asking Him to make it right and/or to help us to make it so. As one of the greatest and most famous Orthodox priests of the 20th century (Fr. Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory) described it, we have the task of transforming “the smallest, seemingly most insignificant detail of the routine drudgery of everyday existence in this fallen world into paradise.” This we do routinely at meals, ‘saying grace’ or ‘asking the blessing’. We certainly take part in this critical vocation each time we celebrate the marriage of a woman to a man.

In the Orthodox Churches, this we also do annually (during the season of the feast of the Theophany, our Lord’s baptism—January 6) by the blessing of the homes of our parishioners. For house-blessings we say, in short, “Lord, make this house a holy home”. For marriages, “Lord, make this couple king and queen of their Christian household, married forever”. At meals, “Nourish us with the gifts of thy bounty on this table, O Lord.”

In fact, this celebration of our Lord’s baptism, the Theophany—or “Appearance of God”, we believe to be the beginning of the restoration of the created world. Our Lord, the only sinless one, is baptized not for his sanctification—he is the Sanctifier! Rather, his descent into the waters of Jordan sanctifies the waters. And the sanctified waters touch the fish, which bless them, and the sand at the edge, and the trees on the bank, etc.

At our “Great Blessing of Waters”, we ask that God send his most Holy Spirit upon the waters, and to make them the Jordan—right here in Mt. Pleasant, SC, or anywhere where such water is blessed. This water, in turn, we take to sanctify all of our material possessions, offering them back to God, to be cleansed from the inside out for his good purposes.

And this is what we take part in at the Blessing of the Fleet in Mount Pleasant. We gather to ask God to grant safety and success to each Shrimper, and to assist each one to accomplish his or her vocation as a good steward of God’s creation. Ultimately, every boat, every net, every engine, every deck and flag, along with every breath we breathe, belongs to God and are ‘on loan’ to us—given to us as gifts as a trust is given into the hands of trustees.

Certainly a part of such a blessing is our intention to cooperate with God in its fulfillment. I’d damn myself by blessing a bottle of wine (intended for sober fellowship and enjoyment) and then drinking it all by myself in one sitting. And it would be to our condemnation and judgment to ask God’s blessing on a fleet of Shrimping vessels, whose captains intend only to wreak havoc on the local seas and the inhabitants thereof, and to scam the local community. We must remember that our aim is a return to Paradise.

Fr. John Parker is Priest-in-Charge of Holy Ascension Orthodox Church, a mission of the OCA. He earned his M.Div. at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA, and his M.Th. from St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, NY. He and his wife, Jeanette, and their two sons live in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. In this "free time" you can find Fr. John surfing his 9'4 Hobie noserider.

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