By Maria Sermersheim
Meditatione Ignis
My roommates and I recently hosted a house blessing party, something of a typical event among South Bend young adults, where we invite a priest to bless the new house (with many friends in attendance) and host a party immediately following. My roommates and I invited our neighbors on the street with paper invitations, and we were thrilled to meet five neighbors for the first time because they attended our party. Comically (to me), they arrived with very little time for small talk before the blessing, so during the long and thorough Byzantine Catholic house blessing, I wondered if Margie and Barbara and the rest thought we were crazy … we had no idea what our neighbors believe or who they are, we had just met them!
I still don’t know what they believe, but I do know that they believe in the power of blessings. After the blessing, Margie and Barbara each approached me individually to allude to the tragic history of our house — something I had never heard about before — but they both concluded that they were glad that we did the blessing, because they think we really turned it around for the history of the house.
I was glad that our neighbors only alluded to the tragic incidents after the house was blessed because my mind ran wild with all the possibilities; what happened in this house? Would it be better for me to search and to know exactly what happened, or would it be better to wait for time to quell my imagination? But in the end, what vexed me most was merely my evident distrust of the house blessing. Why was I even concerned? Did I not believe the power of God to be effective through a blessing?
In the sacramental economy, God dispensed his power and grace through the prayers of our priest-friend and everyone there. Because our priest-friend whom we invited is a Byzantine Catholic priest, he blessed the house according to his rite, which includes processing through the house into every room to bless it with holy water, incense and many beautiful prayers, so it was a visibly thorough blessing. When we read the story of Zacchaeus from the Gospel of Luke, we heard Jesus’s words addressed to us: “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).
After the party, I found several big bugs, and I jokingly told myself that even the bugs know the house is blessed, they’re climbing out of the walls! Then, my roommate shared a story about her friend who came over after the blessing and was unaware of it, but when she went to the basement to grab something quickly with my roommate, she commented that she was surprised to be very at peace in our old basement, even in the dark. It wasn’t creepy, it was comfortable.
I do believe in the power of God to work great things in all contexts, great and small — though it is often the smallest contexts in which it is hardest to believe that God cares or would bother. And yet he does. I can rest peacefully in my home, assured of the fact that whatever cloud of sorrow hung over it previously, it no longer remains — instead, as Father Andrij prayed, “angels of (God’s) light dwell within its walls; and … they protect it and all who live in it.” God can do all things, and if he can save me from the power of death, he can certainly redeem my house from being a space of tragedy and transform it into a space of joy.