Making the Sign of the Cross
Illustration from Catholic children’s manual of devotion.
As a conservative evangelical growing up in a predominantly Catholic country, making the sign of the cross was weird business—weird and wrong, so we thought rather forcefully.
We wouldn’t have been caught dead signing ourselves. Such gestures, we believed, were ritualistic, superstitious, ceremonial trappings of the Dark Ages. We were a people of the invisible and interior domains of the soul, who prioritized a spiritual encounter with the immaterial essence of God.
It’s not, of course, that we didn’t do anything with our bodies. We clapped our hands here and there. We stood occasionally. We celebrated the Lord’s Supper monthly. It’s rather that we fundamentally distrusted the body and failed to reckon with the deeply good purposes of God for our bodies to form Christlikeness in us and that Holy Scripture commends to us repeatedly.
It wasn’t until my 20s, in seminary, that somebody actually bothered to explain to me why Christians—not just in Catholic contexts, but also in Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist and even charismatic ones—made the sign of the cross.
Once I heard the explanation, it made perfect sense. It made sense not just of the reason that Christians from the second century onwards made it a priority to cross themselves at all occasions, as we see, for instance, in the words of the north African theologian Tertullian, “In all our travels and movements, in all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupies us.”
It also made sense of the heart of the gospel, for such a gospel is always bodily in remembrance, always bodily in its transformation, and always bodily in the way that it seeks to emulate our embodied Lord in word and in deed.
And to make the sign of the cross on my forehead was a way to remind my frequently forgetful mind and my often-fickle heart that the Trinity is the true origin and end of my life. As with all such physical signs, the purpose of the Sign of the Cross, I’ve come to believe wholeheartedly, is not only to remind us of our true identity, but also to spur us to want to live more fully into our true Christlike identity.
I’ve come to cherish it as one of the most meaningful ways that I offer up my whole body to God, both in worship and in the whole course of my life, and in turn receive a grace from God to love others in and with my body.
I explain the reason for such embodied practices in my book, A Body of Praise, and I try inspire folks to try them on for size and to discover God’s goodness in them.
