This week’s review for Aleteia was Insidious: Chapter 2 which features the continuing adventures of the haunted Lambert family. If you like your horror movies on the silly side, you should get a kick out of this one. If not, well, that’s too bad because they’re already working on Chapter 3. What can I say, from the very beginning of motion pictures, people have liked movies about spooky old houses. Even Disney was quick to get in on the act.
Yeesh, ghosts, bats, and skeletons everywhere. Doesn’t anybody ever bother to get their house blessed anymore? They should, you know. There’s a bit more to it than just some priest slinging holy water all over everything. Ernest Graf, O.S.B. explains it this way:
“When the Church exercises her divinely given power of blessing persons and things, she bestows upon these persons or things a special consecration or holiness. The priestly blessing is akin, in its efficaciousness, to the virtue of the Sacraments in the sense that, just as in the Sacraments the carrying out of an external rite signifies and actually produces an inward grace, so the external rite or ceremony of blessing bestows upon the soul certain special, though passing, helps of grace. The priestly blessing does not directly cause an increase of sanctifying grace, for this is the effect of the Sacraments; it bestows what is called actual grace — that divine energy which the soul needs in the countless emergencies and difficulties of our daily struggle with the devil, sin, and our own fallen nature.”
In short, a house blessing (or any blessing for that matter) is like a spiritual booster shot. It’s no guarantee that evil won’t try to invade your home, but the blessing helps build up your soul’s immune system in case it tries. And the best thing is you don’t have to wait until things start to go bump (or shag or twist or Harlem shake) in the night either, you can have your happy home blessed anytime. Try it, you’ve got nothing to lose. Well, except for maybe a few stray dancing skeletons that is.
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