“Hey,” I said to the couple sitting across from me in the rectory office, “you guys live in the building next to mine.”

They had arrived a few minutes earlier to schedule their newborn’s baptism, and I was going over their paperwork.

“Really?,” the husband said. “Well, would you be able to bless our apartment?” I looked up from the papers. I thought he was kidding. He looked back at me, blinking. “We’ve been meaning to do it for the last two years, but never got around to it. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just tell me when.” I thought he’d say “After Christmas.” But no.

“How about Tuesday?”

And so it was that I found myself on Tuesday night outside their apartment door, a paperback Book of Blessings in one hand and a silver sprinkler filled with holy water in the other.

I was about to do my first “house blessing.”

I rang the bell and the husband opened the door. He was wearing dark shorts and a white tee shirt. The air conditioners were humming. “Let me get my wife,” he said. I sat on the couch in the living room. The U.S. Open was on the widescreen TV. The wife came in, carrying their baby and said hello and we chatted for a few minutes about the neighborhood, real estate, and what it was like to live in a first floor apartment just a few feet from Queens Boulevard. “It’s okay,” the husband said. “It doesn’t bother us anymore.”

After a few more minutes of comparing notes on the neighborhood, I stood up, cleared my throat and said, “Okay. Let’s begin.” We made the sign of the cross and I launched into the prayers and readings. I asked the husband to read the intercessions.

Then, I extended one hand and read the beautiful prayer of blessing:

“Lord, be close to your servants who live in this home and ask for your blessing. Be their shelter when they are at home, their companion when they are away, and their welcome guest when they return. And at last receive them into the dwelling place you have prepared for them in your Father’s house, where you live for ever and ever. Amen.”

The husband led me through the apartment as I sprinkled holy water in all the rooms, around the kitchen, on his extravagant collection of CDs — and, finally, on the three members of this tiny family.

And before I realized it, it was over. They thanked me and said they were looking forward to their baby’s baptism next month. I told them I was, too, and that I’d be seeing them before then, for the instruction. The baby gurgled and spat and looked at me and grinned. And then, she bawled. With that, I said goodbye.

I walked down the hall and out the glass doors and into the balmy late summer night, marveling that I had just added one more “first” to my unfolding life as a deacon. I wondered about the family I had just left, with a seven week old infant gurgling away, and imagined all the “firsts” they would be recording, too.

And, like them, I couldn’t help but feel immeasurably grateful.

And immeasurably blessed.