"Scholars trace the practice back as far as the year A.D. 110, by which time it was already established as a common gesture among Christians — most common, apparently, among those communities associated with St. Paul. 'Its format is a simple geometry,' said the late Congregation of Holy Cross theologian Rev. Jeffrey Sobosan. 'It traces out a cross in the sequence of four points touched: head to chest, shoulder to shoulder. The early Christians thought it was the way Jesus died, far more than the way He lived prior to His arrest, that constituted the saving act whereby He pleased God.' So those early Christian cults honored, in a simply physical gesture, the geometric shape on which Christ gave his life for us.

"It is a small miracle, perhaps, that this gesture has persisted unchanged throughout many nations and centuries — but miracles are not unusual, are they?

"Such a simple act, our hands cutting the air like the wings of birds, fingers alighting gently on our bodies in memory of the body broken for us:

" 'Father,' we say, touching our heads, the seats of our cerebrations, and we think of the Maker, that vast incomprehensible Coherence stitching everything together, and 'Son,' touching our hearts, and feeling the ache and exhaustion of the Father's Son, the God-made-man, the gaunt dusty tireless fellow who walked and talked endlessly through the hills of Judea, who knew what would happen to him, who accepted it with amazing grace, who died screaming so that we might live past death, and 'Holy,' touching the left shoulder, on which we carry hope, and 'Spirit,' touching the right shoulder, on which we carry love, and the gesture is done, hanging in the air like a memory, its line traced on our bodies as if printed there by the thousands of times our hands have marked it. I make it in the dark, over my sleeping children; I make it at dawn, staring at the incredible world waking; I make it smiling, cheered by the persistence of miracles; I make it sobbing over the corpse of a friend in a wooden coffin, returned now to the Carpenter who made him.

"Simple, powerful, poignant, the sign of the cross is a mnemonic device like the Mass, in which we sit down to a table with one another and remember the Last Supper, or like a baptism, where we remember John the Baptist's brawny arm pouring some of the Jordan River over Christ. So we remember the central miracle and paradox of the faith that binds us each to each: that we believe, against all evidence and sense, in life and love and light, in the victory of those things over death and evil and darkness.

"Such a ferocious and brave notion, to be hinted at by such a simple motion, and the gesture itself lasting perhaps all of four seconds, if you touch all the bases and don't rush. But simple as the sign of the cross is, it carries a brave weight: it names the Trinity, celebrates the Creator, and brings home all the power of faith to the brush of fingers on skin and bone and belly. So do we, sometimes well and sometimes ill, labor to bring home our belief in God's love to the stuff of our daily lives, the skin and bone of this world — and the sign of the cross helps us to remember that we have a Companion on the road."