Water and Chalk: Curious Customs of Epiphany

Omnes de Saba venient aurum et thus deferentes, et laudem Domino annuntiantes.
V. Surge, et illuminare, Jerusalem: quia gloria Domini super te orta est. Alleluia, alleluia.
V. Vidimus stellam ejus in Oriente et venimus cum muneribus adorare Dominum. Alleluia.

—From the Graduale of the Mass for January 6, Tridentine Rite

Today, the first Sunday after the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, is kept the Epiphany of Our Lord. Formely, this date was the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, the Epiphany being celebrated instead on January 6 as a fixed feast, a double of the first class. The Holy Name of Jesus, after seeming to disappear for a time, has since been restored to the Kalendar on the date of January 3.

Liturgically, Epiphany is distinguished by the proclamation of the date of Easter and the year’s other movable feasts. According to the Caeremonium Episcopale, this is customarily enacted after the Gospel by a deacon vested in cope, though sometimes it has been placed after the final Collect. In other places, the custom has been utterly forgotten, though it seems among some of the Lutherans it has been preserved or revived.

Another rite associated with Epiphany is that of the blessing of water, particularly rivers, as the Christian Orient also took the opportunity to celebrate the Baptism of the Lord, or Theophany, on the same day. In Palestine, the river Jordan would be blessed and the faithful would customarily immerse themselves in it three times to gain special blessing. In Egypt, similar practices surrounded the blessing of the Nile, though often the people would also bring their livestock to be immersed as well. In Moscow, the Patriarch would bless the waters of the Moskva River after a hole had been cut in the ice and cast a chalice into the frigid river to be brought up by a particularly bold diver. Horses would drink from the blessed water, too.

The Byzantines, however, blessed water in churches for distribution, and the custom has been continued in the West on the vigil of the feast. The Latin Church on the whole did not practice this custom with as great an emphasis as the East, though it was to be found in the dioceses of lower Italy before its wholesale adoption and approval by Rome.

The ritual, as approved in 1890 by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, is a complex one, though it may have since been simplified since that time. First, the celebrant approaches the altar. He should be vested in a white cope. He is assisted by deacon and sub-deacon and proceeded by a crucifer and taper-bearers and other clerks and clergy. A vessel of water and a container of salt are waiting in the sanctuary.

The Litany of the Saints is intoned, including an insertion of two invocations asking for the water to be blessed and sanctified, accompanied by signs of the cross. The Our Father is then chanted, followed by Psalms xxviii, xlv and cxlvi. These are followed by a lengthy Exorcism and the singing of the Canticle of Zachary or the Magnificat. A collect is chanted, followed by further exorcisms of salt and of water according to the conventional manner of the rite for providing Holy Water. The salt is then poured into the water in the form of a cross, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and a concluding prayer is then said, after which the people are sprinkled with the new water and a Te Deum sung.

Other customary blessings for Epiphany include a blessing for Gold, Incense and Myrrh including a lengthy oration proceeding the actual benediction asking that “God’s creatures, gold, incense and myrrh…be freed from all deceit, evil, and cunning of the devil,” so that they might “become a saving remedy to mankind.” Chalk may also be blessed to be used for a distinctive benediction for homes on Epiphany. Included in the Rituale Romanum is also the full text of this solemn blessing for homes. It consisted of a brief entrance dialogue, followed by the singing of the Magnificat and the Our Father, followed by a collect and responsory and the blessing of the house proper.

Though the 1964 English text of the Rituale Romanum does not mention it, at some point during the blessing it was apparently customary to write in chalk upon either the principal door of the house or all the door-frames a complicated series of crosses, numbers and initials containing the year and the first letters of the names of the three Kings, Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior. It seems that this ritual may be carried out independently of a priest by the head of the household, though it looks to me that the clergy have been rather inconsistent in encouraging this pious and laudable custom among the laity.

It may seem peculiar, chalking up something on your front door so likely to puzzle the postman and the neighbors, but then, let us recall, it can’t be any stranger than it might have seemed to those three kings to find their Chosen One in the form of a little tiny baby in a dusty Palestinian town. Too late now, but perhaps next year? That’s the spirit.