St. Mary the Virgin

[This was originally written in the summer of 1998; I can't recall if it was for a parish newsletter or some other publication.  Anyway, it's a good day to get in the water.]

It arrives every summer.  It's a package that is usually mailed from a barrier island in southern New Jersey.  It's a heavy package.  I always forget that it's coming, although I'm not sure why, since it is an annual event.  In the package is a container (it's different every year; sometimes it's a used soda bottle, sometimes an inexpensive thermos) filled with seawater. 

It is, as anyone would agree, a strange gift to receive.  Certainly my wife felt that way the first summer of our marriage when she got to the mail before I did.  "Your mother sent us some...water, I think."  Seawater doesn't travel well in the summer heat.  It grows things during transit.  Maybe that's the point.

The reason that she sends it to me, and has done so for as long as I've lived away from home, is because of August 15^th.  Actually, that's the secular date.  On the church calendar, it’s the Feast of the Assumption of St. Mary the Virgin.  On this day, all of the seawater in the world is considered holy water.  It is an old European custom and, as my father jokingly reminds me, my mother is an old European.  Once a year, she travels to the ocean, steps into the water, fills containers for my sibling, my nieces, my nephew, and me.  We get them right before the beginning of the school year (as I’m from a family of educators, the new year begins in September) as a reminder of things known yet unknown.

This connection between water and holiness is ancient and complicated.  As water is the key element of our physical being, so God is the key element of our spiritual being.  As with water, God is necessary for life and present with us in a multiplicity of forms.  As with seawater, things grow in our relationship with God.

To this day, in seashore areas around the continent of Europe, some families make their pilgrimage to the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.  While others run into the water in recreation, Christians do so on the Feast of the Assumption as part of their spiritual re-creation.  They seek to be reminded of the ways in which we are borne by God; immersed in the great, deep, and liberating mystery.  They find themselves, as we all do, afloat on grace; ever present, ever abiding, and all surrounding.

The relationship between humans and the sea was captured by the author Joseph Conrad who, before he became one of the greatest writers in the English language, was a ship’s captain.  He once wrote "...the sea is a mystery, deep and impenetrable.  We are borne on it, knowing it as impassive yet passionate.  We can never completely know it as we cannot completely know the Almighty."

Last year it was a soda bottle sealed with duct tape.  It will be part of the holy water that I use in baptisms and at the Great Vigil of Easter.  I do this to honor the feast day and because there are occasions when I need to be reminded of the unfolding mystery that surrounds us and the grace that supports us.

It’s also because, as I am reminded every year at this time, things grow in it.