We cross from right to left because it’s how you receive a blessing. When a priest blesses you, his hand moves from your right shoulder to your left. When you make the sign of the cross on yourself, you’re doing the same thing, blessing yourself in Christ’s name.
The right side matters in Scripture and tradition. Christ sits at the Father’s right hand. The sheep stand at his right in the parable of judgment. The right is the place of honor, vindication, salvation. Starting there isn’t arbitrary. It’s a small physical reminder that we’re marked by Christ’s victory and placed among the righteous by his mercy, not our merit.
Here’s the full motion: touch your forehead (the Father, heaven), then your chest (the Son’s incarnation, his descent to us), then your right shoulder, then your left. Those first two movements confess that God became man. The horizontal stroke completes the cross and seals the blessing. We do it with three fingers joined (the Trinity) and two folded into the palm (Christ’s two natures, divine and human). Every time you cross yourself, you’re making a compact statement of faith with your body.
Catholics cross left to right. That shift happened in the West sometime in the medieval period, historians point to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pope Innocent III mentioned the left-to-right practice as the Roman custom by his time. Why the change? Nobody’s entirely sure. One theory is that laypeople mirrored what they saw priests doing when blessing them, which reversed the direction. Another involves word order in Latin versus Greek. What matters for us is that the Eastern practice preserved the older pattern, the one tied to the logic of blessing and the honored right side.
You’ll notice this if you visit St. Michael’s. Everyone crosses right to left. It feels backward at first if you grew up Catholic or in a Protestant church that used the sign of the cross at all. Your hand wants to go the other way. Give it a few weeks. Your body learns.
Some folks worry they’re doing it wrong, especially new converts. You won’t get struck by lightning if you cross left to right out of habit. But the right-to-left motion isn’t just ethnic custom or Eastern stubbornness. It’s woven into how we bless, how our priests move their hands in the liturgy, how we understand the symbolism of right and left in the biblical imagination. Learning to cross yourself the Orthodox way is part of learning to pray with the Church’s body, not just your own preferences.
The sign of the cross isn’t magic. It’s not a good-luck charm before you drive out to the plant for your night shift or a superstitious gesture to ward off trouble during hurricane season. It’s a prayer. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” It’s a physical reminder that you belong to Christ, that you’re baptized into his death and resurrection, that the Trinity dwells in you by grace. We make it constantly, entering church, passing the altar, hearing the name of the Trinity, beginning and ending prayers, before meals, when we’re afraid, when we’re grateful, when we need to remember who we are.
If you want to go deeper into this, Fr. Thomas Hopko’s little book The Orthodox Faith has a section on the sign of the cross that’s characteristically clear and pastoral. And if you’re still getting used to the mechanics, just watch the person next to you at liturgy. We learn this stuff by doing it, week after week, until it’s as natural as breathing.
