From http://catholicexchange.com/21-things-cross
The Sign of the Cross is a simple gesture yet a profound expression of faith
for both Catholic and Orthodox Christians. As Catholics, it’s something
we do when we enter a church, after we receive Communion, before meals,
and every time we pray. But what exactly are we doing when we make the
Sign of the Cross? Here are 21 things:
1. Pray. We begin and end our prayers with the Sign of the
Cross, perhaps not realizing that the sign is itself a prayer. If
prayer, at its core, is “an uprising of the mind to God,” as
St. John Damascene put it,
then the Sign of the Cross assuredly qualifies. “No empty gesture, the
sign of the cross is a potent prayer that engages the Holy Spirit as the
divine advocate and agent of our successful Christian living,” writes
Bert Ghezzi.
2. Open ourselves to grace. As a sacramental, the Sign of the
Cross prepares us for receiving God’s blessing and disposes us to
cooperate with His grace, according to Ghezzi.
3. Sanctify the day. As an act repeated throughout the key
moments of each day, the Sign of the Cross sanctifies our day. “At every
forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on
our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we
light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily
life, we trace upon the forehead the sign,”
wrote Tertullian.
4. Commit the whole self to Christ. In moving our hands from
our foreheads to our hearts and then both shoulders, we are asking God’s
blessing for our mind, our passions and desires, our very bodies. In
other words, the Sign of the Cross commits us, body and soul, mind and
heart, to Christ. (I’m paraphrasing
this Russian Orthodox writer.)
“Let it take in your whole being—body, soul, mind, will, thoughts,
feelings, your doing and not-doing—and by signing it with the cross
strengthen and consecrate the whole in the strength of Christ, in the
name of the triune God,” said twentieth century theologian Romano
Guardini.
5. Recall the Incarnation. Our movement is downward, from our
foreheads to our chest “because Christ descended from the heavens to the
earth,” Pope Innocent III wrote in his instructions on making the Sign
of the Cross. Holding two fingers together—either the thumb with the
ring finger or with index finger—also represents the two natures of
Christ.
6. Remember the Passion of Our Lord. Fundamentally, in tracing
out the outlines of a cross on ourselves, we are remembering Christ’s
crucifixion. This remembrance is deepened if we keep our right hand
open, using all five fingers to make the sign—corresponding to the Five
Wounds of Christ.
7. Affirm the Trinity. In invoking the name of God the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we are affirming our belief in a triune
God. This is also reinforced by using three fingers to make the sign,
according to Pope Innocent III.
8. Focus our prayer on God. One of the temptations in prayer
is to address it to God as we conceive of Him—the man upstairs, our
buddy, a sort of cosmic genie, etc. When this happens, our prayer
becomes more about us than an encounter with the living God. The Sign of
the Cross immediately focuses us on the true God, according to Ghezzi:
“When we invoke the Trinity, we fix our attention on the God who made
us, not on the God we have made. We fling our images aside and address
our prayers to God as he has revealed himself to be: Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.”
9. Affirm the procession of Son and Spirit. In first lifting
our hand to our forehead we recall that the Father is the first person
the Trinity. In lowering our hand we “express that the Son proceeds from
the Father.” And, in ending with the Holy Spirit, we signify that the
Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, according to Francis
de Sales.
10. Confess our faith. In affirming our belief in the
Incarnation, the crucifixion, and the Trinity, we are making a sort of
mini-confession of faith in words and gestures, proclaiming the core
truths of the creed.
11. Invoke the power of God’s name. In Scripture, God’s name
carries power. In Philippians 2:10, St. Paul tells us that “at the name
of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and
under the earth.” And, in John 14:13-14, Jesus Himself said, “And
whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be
glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do
it.”
12. Crucify ourselves with Christ. Whoever wishes to follow
Christ “must deny himself” and “take up his cross” as Jesus told the
disciples in Matthew 16:24. “I have been crucified with Christ,” St.
Paul writes in Galatians 2:19. “Proclaiming the sign of the cross
proclaims our yes to this condition of discipleship,” Ghezzi writes.
13. Ask for support in our suffering. In crossing our shoulders we ask God “to support us—to shoulder us—in our suffering,” Ghezzi writes.
14. Reaffirm our baptism. In using the same words with which
we were baptized, the Sign of the Cross is a “summing up and
re-acceptance of our baptism,” according to then-Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger.
15. Reverse the curse. The Sign of the Cross recalls the
forgiveness of sins and the reversal of the Fall by passing “from the
left side of the curse to the right of blessing,” according to de Sales.
The movement from left to right also signifies our future passage from
present misery to future glory just as Christ “crossed over from death
to life and from Hades to Paradise,” Pope Innocent II wrote.
16. Remake ourselves in Christ’s image. In Colossians 3, St.
Paul uses the image of clothing to describe how our sinful natures are
transformed in Christ. We are to take off the old self and put on the
self “which is being renewed … in the image of its creator,” Paul tells
us. The Church Fathers saw a connection between this verse and the
stripping of Christ on the cross, “teaching that stripping off our old
nature in baptism and putting on a new one was a participation in
Christ’s stripping at his crucifixion,” Ghezzi writes. He concludes that
we can view the Sign of the Cross as “our way of participating in
Christ’s stripping at the Crucifixion and his being clothed in glory at
his resurrection.” Thus, in making the Sign of the Cross, we are
radically identifying ourselves with the entirety of the crucifixion
event—not just those parts of it we can accept or that our palatable to
our sensibilities.
17. Mark ourselves for Christ. In ancient Greek, the word for sign was
sphragis,
which was also a mark of ownership, according to Ghezzi. “For example, a
shepherd marked his sheep as his property with a brand that he called a
sphragis,” Ghezzi writes. In making the Sign of the Cross, we mark ourselves as belong to Christ, our true shepherd.
18. Soldier on for Christ. The
sphragis was also the
term for a general’s name that would be tattooed on his soldiers,
according to Ghezzi. This too is an apt metaphor for the Christian life:
while we can be compared to sheep in the sense of following Christ as
our shepherd we are not called to be sheepish. We instead are called to
be soldiers of Christ. As St. Paul wrote in Ephesians 6, “Put on the
armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics
of the devil. … take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the
Spirit, which is the word of God.”
19. Ward off the devil. The Sign of the Cross is one of the
very weapons we use in that battle with the devil. As one medieval
preacher named Aelfric declared, “A man may wave about wonderfully with
his hands without creating any blessing unless he make the sign of the
cross. But, if he do, the fiend will soon be frightened on account of
the victorious token.” In another statement, attributed to St. John
Chrysostom, demons are said to “fly away” at the Sign of the Cross
“dreading it as a staff that they are beaten with.” (Source:
Catholic Encyclopedia.)
20. Seal ourselves in the Spirit. In the New Testament, the word
sphragis, mentioned above, is also sometimes translated as
seal,
as in 2 Corinthians 1:22, where St. Paul writes that, “the one who
gives us security with you in Christ and who anointed us is God; he has
also put his seal upon us and given the Spirit in our hearts as a first
installment.” In making the Sign of the Cross, we are once again sealing
ourselves in the Spirit, invoking His powerful intervention in our
lives.
21. Witness to others. As a gesture often made in public, the
Sign of the Cross is a simple way to witness our faith to others. “Let
us not then be ashamed to confess the Crucified. Be the Cross our seal
made with boldness by our fingers on our brow, and on everything; over
the bread we eat, and the cups we drink; in our comings in, and goings
out; before our sleep, when we lie down and when we rise up; when we are
in the way, and when we are still,”
wrote St. Cyril of Jerusalem.
Sources include: The Sign of the Cross, by Bert Ghezzi, and
Signs of Life, by Scott Hahn
