Would Patricia Bless a Thermos?

“Mom, I don’t think you want to ask Patricia to bless a thermos,” Wolfie said shaking his head.

Although I do not think that Patricia would shy away from blessing a thermos, especially if it were filled with water to be used in a house blessing, I poured out the green metal thermos and started over. The first thing that caught my eye was actually perfect, a cobalt blue bottle in the dining room window, usually brilliant with afternoon sun. The bottle had a ‘sort of’ matching lid, a glass stopper with no rubber to keep liquid in. Ten minutes after I should have left for the early service, Ron and Wolfie were still wrapping band aide tape around and round the stopper so that it would hold water.

But that was good because when I walked in late, somewhere around the second psalm, my blue bottle wasn’t leaking.

The need for a house blessing all started a few months ago when my mother began her retirement migration to my great-grandmother’s house in Alford, Fla., population 464. Mom was a little unsettled about moving down to the Alabama-Florida state line to a house filled with years of family memories . . . and ghosts.

Given that I am generally accepted as the family spiritual seeker naturally Mom came to me to find out about exorcisms. I know a few things, none of which are about exorcism. So one morning at church before Sunday school, I mentioned my problem to Tim Black, our seminarian, that my mother’s new old house needed a little extra cleaning. And he pulled out the Anglican house blessing liturgy and made a copy for me.

As we were talking, Nancy Dillon walked by and gave her approval to the idea. She had had her house blessed and I got the impression that it had worked nicely.

“You can be the celebrant,” Tim told me enthusiastically. That was good because while I’d probably ask Patricia to bless a thermos, I would not ask her to drive six hours to bless a house unless it was the Taj Mahal. Anyway, the reason the project dragged on for so long is that Mom was secretly worried about my qualifications to be celebrant and she went back and forth a little on planning because of that. Maybe a house blessing didn’t work without an ordained priest, for instance.

Now I didn’t have to snag Patricia after the early service because she was naturally drawn to my blue bottle. “I need a couple of blessings,” I said. I told her I needed the water blessed to make it holy and that I needed a blessing, her blessing, as a celebrant to do the whole thing right.

Patricia simply beamed and proceeded to bless me and my family and the water and the house. And now, copies of the liturgy have been dispersed and read by all who will participate in the ceremony, which will take place at the end of my vacation a couple of Sundays from now. We shall see!