Michael O’Brien: What I started to learn from ‘The Exorcist’ — the value of holy water

Have you ever heard the phrase “there must be something in the water”?

I probably first started to understand this notion 50 years ago, as a Catholic kid growing up during “The Exorcist” cultural phenomenon.

Warner Bros. released the classic horror film a half-century ago in December 1973. Author William Peter Blatty wrote the screenplay as well as the 1971 bestselling novel with the same name.

The book and the film, inspired by a real exorcism from the 1940s, are about Catholic priests trying to save a 12-year-old girl from the demons who soul-napped her. I was the same age as the possessed girl when the movie debuted.

Despite the wintry weather in 1973-74, folks queued up in long outdoor lines for a chance to watch it. By early 1974, Newsweek magazine wrote, “On Dec. 26, a movie called ‘The Exorcist’ opened in theaters across the country and since then all hell has broken loose.”

There were widespread news reports of audience members fleeing theaters, getting sick, or fainting while watching the movie. One viewer supposedly miscarried; another left a screening in an ambulance.

Yet, back then, it seemed like everyone was seeing it anyway.

Not me. I sure heard a lot about it, however, especially in the hallways of our small Catholic grade school on Ogden’s industrial west side in northern Utah.

Between classes, we discussed exactly what you would expect. Twisted heads. Levitation. Unconventional and X-rated uses for a crucifix. Pea soup fire hose vomit.

And holy water.

Holy water was one of the heroes (or so I heard, again and again) of the movie. The cinematic version of the sacred H2O helped control or repel the demonic beast within the poor young girl’s body.

Of course, there was good precedent for such heroism. A 16th-century church doctor, St. Teresa of Avila, who was known to levitate while deep in prayer, once wrote, “I know by frequent experience that there is nothing which puts the devils to flight like holy water.”

We 20th-century Catholic preteens certainly were relieved to have a readily available supply of this anti-Satan serum.

I was an altar boy at Ogden’s St. Joseph Catholic Church. The lovely old stone structure always had several finger fonts filled with holy water. They likely emptied out a bit faster in the early 1970s.

My fellow altar servers and I would cross ourselves with healthy doses of it. We then would take turns sprinkling a bit more on one another, just to be safe, or maybe even to see how we would react to it, ever watchful for the devil within the tent.

Our family friends at the now-closed Trappist monastery in nearby Huntsville helped, too. They gave my mother a little plastic bottle filled with holy water for prescriptive use at home as needed.

Mom would spray us lightly before trips, on special occasions, or if we got sick. We would never drink it. For some reason never explained to me, holy water was for external use only.

I even read a book back then about a teenage character who approached holy water with a purely transactional mindset. He had heard you could earn 10 indulgences each time you used it.

In traditional Catholic practice, an indulgence is a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins. Thus, the book character blessed himself rapid-fire style 10 times each time he entered a church, racking up and banking 100 Get-Out-of-Purgatory-Free Cards.

The search for deeper meanings

Our parish priest and school religion teacher — Father John LaBranche — watched all this hubbub with great interest. He was a faithful but practical man, one who could teach theology one minute and drive the school bus the next.

He understood that our youthful tendency to perceive things so literally was both our greatest strength and most glaring weakness. He also recognized a good teaching moment when he saw one.

One day in class he asked, “How do you make holy water anyway?” We were stumped but interested.

Father LaBranche smiled mischievously and told us, “Take a gallon of water, put it on the stovetop, and boil the hell out of it.” He then explained the real components — no magic, just regular water blessed by a priest, with salt added sometimes, and used for spiritual reasons.

I laughed at his joke, of course, but his clever juxtaposition of humor and explanation got me thinking. As I look back, so many years later, it was a memorable moment when I started looking below surfaces for deeper meanings.

In his 2001 book “The Catholic Imagination,” priest Andrew Greeley describes how “Catholics live in an enchanted world…of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures.”

Greeley says these are “mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility, which inclines Catholics to see the holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.”

Revelations of grace in daily and ordinary things. What could be more ordinary than water, which makes up some 60% of the human body and 70% of the Earth’s surface?

A few weeks after learning both the humorous and real formulas for holy water, I helped Father LaBranche with a funeral. At the end, I watched in somber silence as he sprinkled holy water on a casket right before it sank into a grave.

The holy water did not magically seep through the wooden box and bring the deceased back to life. And I was not surprised.

Perhaps I was remembering how, earlier in the funeral Mass, Father LaBranche had reminded us that Jesus was baptized in water, walked on water, calmed raging water, healed with water, and turned water into wine. Maybe I was starting to understand that the holy water sprinkled on a coffin was a simple and lovely act of ordinary grace and fellowship. Perhaps I started to see it as an utterly human prayer and wish and hope for our dearly departed, that, in whatever stage followed, they would be flooded with transforming love and perpetual light, rather than be drowned in the deep darkness we all fear death might be.

Maybe my faith, my theology, and I all were growing up.

From boy to man

A decade later — at the Huntsville Trappist monastery that was my boyhood home away from home — holy water helped reveal that physical and spiritual maturation.

Every night before the monks retired to bed, they chanted psalms and then their abbot (leader) blessed them with holy water. Visitors like me also could join the line for a blessing, which I often did.

My 2021 memoir, “Monastery Mornings,” recalls the most memorable of those blessings, right after I had finished college at the University of Notre Dame:

“Compline was also the last service I attended during my Holy Trinity retreat in the summer of 1983. At the end, I walked as usual to the front of the church and joined the line of monks waiting for a blessing. Father Manny had blessed me there many times during the past decade. This time, I stood before the new abbot, Father Malachy. He was a son of Kentucky farmers and Irish immigrants, and was one of the pioneer Utah monks. He was known for having planted many of the trees on the monastery grounds, including his own small forest to the southeast of the place, designed to dry out a small marsh on the abbey’s property. I bowed at the waist before Father Malachy, and he smiled and doused me with holy water, a welcome traditional Trappist monk’s blessing for the end of the day and for safety through the night.

A sprinkling of water is a form of baptism, which literally means bathing. I had been blessed this way often at the abbey, but now I was a college graduate and as tall, or taller, than most of the monks. I had a deep voice and facial hair — a red beard but no mustache, like Abraham Lincoln or a leprechaun. The blessing on this night seemed different and symbolically revealed what anyone already could see. The waters washed away the final traces of my boyhood and from them emerged a young man.”

Many years later, but just a few years ago, a gray-haired and slightly overweight version of that same young man drove Father Patrick Boyle — then one of the last living Utah Trappist monks — from his Salt Lake City retirement home back to the site of the Huntsville monastery.

Father Patrick had offered to continue the long-standing tradition of blessing the monastery fields in springtime. The kindhearted 90-year-old Trappist — a man I had first met during “The Exorcist” cultural phenomenon a half-century earlier — cradled a small plastic bottle of holy water to use for the ritual.

Just past the Snowbasin ski resort, as we crossed the Trappers Loop highway from Morgan County and began our descent into Weber County’s Ogden Valley, I asked Father Patrick, “Do you know how to make holy water?”

“How?” he inquired.

I said, “Take a gallon of water, put it on the stove, and boil the hell out of it.”

The diminutive old monk grinned and said, “My dear Michael, I have never tried that recipe before.”

I smiled and thought to myself, “Yes, there’s so much more to it than that.”

Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who often represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book of 2022.