RBWords

     The "sign of the cross" has to be the most familiar physical gesture of Catholic identity!  We Catholics make this gesture thousands of times in our lives. Sometimes we say the words, sometimes we don't!  Those words are important because they are a profession of faith in the Most Holy Trinity!  At parish missions, on the first night, I ask the congregation what is the first thing a person does on entering a Catholic church.  The right hand seems to seek the holy water font to touch the holy water and make the sign of the cross.  I then ask how many remember to say the words that go with the gesture?  The response is a bit more hesitant.  The ritual is meant to remind us of our baptism, and those words are the words with which we are baptized while the water is being poured!    By virtue of our baptism we are identified with a profound mystery!  St. Paul, in Romans 6:3-4, emphasizes that our baptism identifies us with the life, death and resurrection of Christ, but we cannot divide Christ from his union with the Father and Spirit.

     The Christian community took awhile before the implications of Jesus' full identity began to take hold.  We see a little bit of it in Matthew 28 where Jesus gives the "great commission" to go forth and baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...."  But this reflects only the very beginnings of a consciousness of the mystery of a "Triune God" who is "one-in-three."  Since then, many long and erudite works have been written - notably St. Augustine's De Trinitate - on the Trinity!  The ordinary pew person will encounter this reality most often in the Sign of the Cross and on Sunday in the Nicene Creed.  That may be the best we can do, but it is a reassurance of the solid love of God for us from all eternity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and, as St. Augustine puts it:  "It's not a lie but a mystery!"  AMEN