The River Remembers
The Great Blessing of the Waters and the Eighth Day's Power Over Matter, Part 3.
This is the third article in the Eighth Day series. If you are just joining us, the first two articles:
Lay the theological foundations for everything discussed here. You can find them in the archive.
Somewhere outside Moscow, on the sixth of January, a priest in gold vestments is walking across a frozen river.
He is followed by a procession of the faithful. Some carry icons. Some carry candles, the flames stuttering in the wind. Babushka's who have done this many times, carry little lanterns to protect the candles from blowing out. A deacon swings a censer, and the smoke of frankincense hangs in the air at about shin level because the cold is so severe that it refuses to rise. The temperature is well below zero. The birch trees along the bank are black against a white sky. The only color for miles is the priest’s vestments and the red and gold of the icons, and these look almost violent against so much winter.
They have come to bless the river.
At the center of the ice, someone has cut a hole in the shape of a cross. The water beneath is black and slow, and the hole is already beginning to refreeze. The priest stands at the edge of this opening and begins to chant. The prayers are long and ancient. They invoke the creation of the world, the parting of the Red Sea, the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. They command every unclean and invisible spirit to withdraw from these waters. They ask that this water become, in the language of the rite, “a fountain of incorruption, a gift of sanctification, a loosing of sins, a healing of diseases, a destruction of demons.”
Then the priest takes a large brass cross and plunges it into the black water three times, singing each time the great hymn of the Feast: When You, O Lord, were baptized in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest.
And then people begin to jump in. Not all of them. Not everywhere. But in Russia, in Serbia, in Greece, in Alaska, even in Florida and communities scattered across the Orthodox world, men and women young and old strip down to their undergarments and lower themselves into the blessed, often freezing, water. Some go fully under. Some gasp and immediately scramble out. Some are serene. A grandmother crosses herself and sinks to her shoulders and stays there for a moment. It's a picture that seems to belong in a different era.
In Greece, a Priest throws the cross into the newly blessed waters of the Mediterranean. As soon as it leaves his hands, faithful young men and young women dive into the sea, competing to be the first person to recover it and with it blessing for the coming year.
It can be festive, but this isn't a contest to prove how tough you are. What they are doing has been done for centuries in Christianity. They are immersing their bodies in the Eighth Day.
If you have been following this series, you know what that means. The Eighth Day is the day beyond the seventh, the day that dawned when Christ rose from the dead, the era where humanity can finally achieve its original purpose and the material world is being pulled out of its bondage to death and decay, being renewed and regenerated, just like we are in baptism. In the first article, we laid the theological foundation. In the second, we saw how Orthodox Christians extend the Eighth Day into domestic space through the blessing of houses, animals, cars, and fields.
Now we go to the source.
Because the Great Blessing of the Waters at Theophany is not one blessing among many. It is, in the Orthodox understanding, the archetype of all blessing, the annual moment in the Liturgical year when the Church reaches into the most fundamental substance on earth and reclaims it for God. And the theology behind it begins not in the Jordan River two thousand years ago but at the very first moment of the world’s existence, when there was nothing but darkness and water and the breath of God.
