It is only in recent days that my grandmother’s habit of sprinkling holy water over me has begun to make sense.
I couldn’t leave the house without my mother’s mother chasing me with a handful of holy water. Dowsing this precious liquid over me. And when I say chasing, I mean chasing. ‘The child, the child, where is she going?’ I remember her exclaiming as I left the house. I was twenty, years of age, every bit an adult as far as I was concerned. She would come fly after me leaning out of the doorway as I passed down the drive, throwing holy water over me.
My grandmother collected Holy Water from different sacred places. Fatima in Portugal and Lourdes in France. I remember her receiving gifts of holy water from friends who had sourced some from a holy well in the country.
This reverence and custom skipped a generation, as my mother scoffed at the irrationality of water blessing, but my grandmother’s deep-felt intentions left more than a splash of damp on me. They impacted me deeply. I could feel her love, her spiritual depth and now I know the holy water had a significance past that which I understood at the time.
Today, I feel blessed, literally, to have been honoured with this sacred ancient ritual. Passed from one of my ancestors to another, without a break.
A remnant of a rich and profound understanding of water that the Irish once had.
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