Blessing of
Vehicles An experiment in neighborhood outreach
Photograph: © Adobe Stock
by Rev. THEODORE GREGORY
jacob's well
8
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fter my wife and I finished our time at St. Tikhon’s in 2016, we were dispatched to Rahway, New Jersey, a small city across the river from Staten Island. I had come to the priesthood late in life, after our four kids were grown, and after I’d worked for years as an architect (a profession I still practice). We’d been assigned to lead Rahway’s Holy Trinity parish, which was planted in 1967. During our early months in Rahway, we were surprised to realize that the parish was barely known in the community, even though it’s located in the heart of the city, only a mile from Main Street. For our first summer, I came up with a way to begin strengthening our relations with the town. That July, on the day we commemorated the Prophet Elijah, I invited Rahway’s emergency first responders to come for a vehicle blessing. It’s traditional to bless vehicles on this day, in honor of Elijah’s departure from the earth in a fiery chariot. I borrowed the idea from my seminary classmate Father Gabe Bilas, who did it at his parish in Michigan. I saw three
