It is said that younger Catholics today are more likely than their immediate elders to take to traditional devotions. Many reasons are suggested for this. Some say that the younger generation grew up without being forced to attend devotions, and thus have no reactive feelings against them.

Freer to choose or reject, many are opting to choose. Others see in the movement further evidence of a conservative turn among the young. Others again see in the movement a reminder of a dimension of what Rosemary Haughton many years ago called “the Catholic Thing,” i.e., its tactile, sensory appreciation of the mysteries of faith.

Of course, the appeal of devotions was never lost among many older Catholics. First Fridays and Saturdays, family rosary, novenas (and special novena hymns), getting a Miraculous Medal or a scapular – all still function in varying ways as powerful links to the Catholicism of one’s youth, while in many ways nourishing one’s faith as an adult.

The Second Vatican Council reminded us that all devotions remain subordinate to the liturgy, which “by its very nature surpasses any of them,” but it also “warmly recommended” the “special dignity” of the devotional life (Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, No. 13).

I would like during this Lenten period to look at some traditional devotions, and ask: what do they still have to say to us? There are many to choose from (more than I imagined at the outset) and it’s hard to narrow choices to seven.

The ones I have chosen are: Signing with holy water, Novenas, Stations, First Fridays, Pilgrimages, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and Lectio Divina. If Lent lasted a year, many more could have been added: First Saturdays, the Angelus, the Rosary, the Sacred Heart, the Miraculous Medal, and so on.

Signing with holy water

Using water to bless, purify, and sanctify is a ritual as old as humankind itself. Peoples and cultures before Christianity may not have designated water as “holy,” but the reverence and ritual surrounding its special use indicates that the reality of sacredness, if not the word, was something obvious to them.

For Christians, water is not simply a rich symbol of baptismal grace; water is the substance of creation itself. As Tertullian wrote: The first thing, O man, which you have to venerate is the age of the waters, in that their substance is ancient; the second, their dignity, in that they were the seat of the Divine Spirit, more pleasing to Him, no doubt, than all the other then existing elements. For the darkness was total thus far, shapeless, without the ornament of stars; and the abyss gloomy; and the earth unfurnished; and the heaven unwrought: water alone -- always a perfect, gladsome, simple material substance, pure in itself -- supplied a worthy vehicle to God.

Tertullian is right, of course. Water is venerable in all cultures from the dawn of history. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has its own emphases, from the waters of baptism to the healing waters of Lourdes, T=to common or garden holy water. The meaning is always the same: life, healing, cleansing, blessing. Always available and accessible every time you enter a church, shrine, or chapel, it is there, in a seashell or a font.

Fonts of holy water, or “stoups”, as they are called, have existed from the earliest Christian times. Fonts of marble, glass, and terra cotta have been found in the catacombs. Historically, fonts have been either simple, sometimes nothing more than seashells; or more elaborate, actual fountains where you could wash hands and feet before entering the basilica.

A visitor to St Sophia in Constantinople in the sixth century remarked on the presence of a font from which water gushed “noisily into the air,” issuing from a bronze pipe “with a force that banishes all evils.”  In medieval times, fonts were also segregated – the nobles dipped their hands in one, and the plebs dipped theirs in another.

Signing oneself with water from a font on entering a church is a religious act of ancient lineage, the symbolic act that demarcates the boundary between secular and sacred space. It says that we have turned our backs on the realm of busyness to enter the realm of quiet; we have set aside the world of distraction to give ourselves over to attention; we have ceased from commerce to turn our hearts to celebration. We have, in short, entered another world, and we do so with this deliberate act.

It’s more than a matter of carelessness, then, when people dip their hands only to find the font dry, or when they retract their hands and see dust or green mould on their finger tips.
It means that we no longer care much about this preamble to worship. We enter, as the saying goes, any old how, with no symbolic assistance to prepare us for what we do next.

On other occasions of celebration, the priest douses the congregation in the ritual of Asperges. Some people are always missed, however, or get only a by-the-way drop. The blessing of rain water is more democratic. That’s why the Gospels speak of it as the best metaphor for God’s mercy. It falls equally on all alike, just and unjust, sinner and saint.

To sign oneself with holy water is a wordless prayer, a wish for sanctification that links the signer with supplicants before God everywhere, and the content of the wish is always the same: blessing, mercy, hope, forgiveness, faith. Signing is a prayerful act even before you actually start praying.