A reflection on holy water.

A reflection on holy water. 

It has taken me 65 years to figure out original sin. All these years, I have been in opposition to the idea that we come into this world as sinners and therefore we have to be baptized as quickly as possible. It was finally the Franciscan monk Richard Rohr who solved my puzzle in his book  “Adam’s Return”. His explanation that the sins of the “Fathers” (read parents) are passed along to the newborn in the DNA makes perfect sense. That makes the act of baptism a beautiful ritual as an initiation for a new life. To dedicate the newborn to the love of Christ and the numinous is an act of love. Baptism is also much more than the ritual of cleansing the newborn from a sinful inheritance. It is also an initiation process as C.G.Jung writes it in his notes from a seminar (1934-39 Vol.1, 22 May 1935 p. 502). You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process. In other words, the newborn passes a threshold of redemption to become a new being, just as Jesus had to be baptized by John the Baptist to start his work as the Messiah. 

Where does that ritual of transformation through water come from? We know that in Judaism the cleansing ritual happens in the Mikvah, a deep basin preferably filled with clean rain water or from a natural spring. The Jewish people were known to use immersion into such pools already at the time of Moses. During the second tempke period the Greek noun baptmos was used to refer to ritual washing in Hellenistic Judaism. I have personally been baptized many times. The first time was as a newborn in the Lutheran church, the second time, I was doused with water when I converted to Catholicism and the third time occurred on what I would call a side step into a fundamentalist Christian church .  Then I was fully immersed into a heated pool. 

Since then, there have been numerous occasions in the Catholic church when the priest bestowed blessed water unto the congregation, all in good understanding of purification and grace from above. Whenever I enter a church, I make the sign of the cross after dipping my finger in the tiny container with holy water by the threshold, that could be called a mini baptism. It is to cleanse oneself as we move from “the world” and into a sacred space. We use water as a purification and a baptism in many religions. From the bathing in the river of Ganges in India or gathering at holy springs back in pre-Christian times in Europe to the Muslim cleansing rituals before their daily prayers, water has served as the conduit between this world and the holy. That is the meaning of the ritual cleansing, it serves both as a preparation and an initiation into the world of the numinous.