Home Blessing

Home Blessing

For home blessings and any spiritual needs, please do not hesitate to contact the Pastor at [email protected] or at 774-462-8041.

If you know someone who is sick at home or in the hospital and would like pastoral care and visitations, please call the church office. These visits can help to lift the spirit of the patient and offer support and guidance.

THE HOME BLESSING

The home is a sacred place where family members maintain and share many values. It is also a place where they are charged and empowered with these values to live a peaceful and God-pleasing life. It is under this roof that all collectively form oneness in spirit and assume an important responsibility in the life of the community. It is in this place where they break bread and share joys and sorrows. Here the presence of the Omnipotent is felt since every family is a miniature of a “Little Church—Ecclesia.” In this “Little Church” the inexhaustible love and the very generous blessing of God permeate.

According to the sacred traditions of the Armenian Church, God’s blessing is asked for homes on different occasions, like on the Nativity and the Resurrection of Christ, as well as on the joyous occasion of moving into a new home.

For Home Blessing the priest takes with him wafer (Nushkhar) and incense. He blesses the bread, the water and the salt. These three fundamental elements are essential life-giving gifts for human life. The priest asks from the Omnipotent God not to lessen these three gifts without which life becomes impossible or imperfect. Along with the bread, salt, and bread offered on a tray by the dwellers, the priest places also the wafer stamped with a crucifix and designs of grapes and wheat. The wafer is the presence of Christ in the home. The members of the family can either distribute the wafer among themselves or keep it in a jar along with flour, salt, or rice. During Home Blessing, it is customary to burn incense, which symbolizes the burning of our souls with our Lord’s love. In his supplication the Psalmist says, “Let my prayer be counted as incense before Thee.”

In the prayer of the Home Blessing the priest after asking for purity and abundance of the three gifts, he blesses the home and all its dwellers and asks God to keep them away from visible and invisible enemies and protect them under His powerful Right Hand granting them health of soul and body. Home Blessing is a meaningful religious service that brings the entire family together in oneness and holiness, and blesses them. Through this ceremony, everyone’s faith is replenished and strengthened and the Lord’s presence is felt.