I'm currently grading student essays, in which my students were to provide critical analyses of Richard Dawkins'
The God Delusion. What is most interesting to me is the almost universal agreement among my students regarding Dawkins' argument regarding 'indoctrinating' children. Almost all of my students were baptized as infants, yet many of them appear to be deeply troubled by this fact, expressing the idea that their parents should have waited until they were old enough to make their own decision. They felt indoctrinated.
 |
Obviously, this is not a picture of us. |
Kim and I have brought all three of our children forward for baptism as infants in the Anglican church (although I'm Catholic, I became Catholic later in life. Kim remains Anglican, and part of the 'deal' Kim and I made when I became Catholic was that we would baptize our children in the Anglican church). At two of their baptisms, I was given the honour of delivering the homily . I last preached at my youngest son's baptism at the Easter Vigil in 2011. I wrote the homily as an open letter to my son, wanting to explain why we chose to have him and his brothers baptized (hint: it has nothing to do with indoctrination, and
everything to do with divine beauty). Here it is:
Shortly
after this homily is completed, the priest will pour water over your head three
times while invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in obedience to
Christ’s command, after which you will then be anointed with oil. You will almost surely not remember this your
baptism, yet it is something that will remain one of the most significant events
in your entire life. For on this holy
night [Easter Vigil], you are to be baptized a Christian, a child of God, remade and
regenerated through the transforming love of the Father through the Son in the
Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus Christ said,
“Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the
kingdom of God” (Luke 18.15-17), so the body of Christ, the Church, fully
welcomes infants such as yourself into the community of faith, and the Church
has done so from very early on in its history
 |
El Greco - The Baptism of Jesus |
But at some
point in your life you might ask us why we brought you to
the parish this night to have a priest pour water on your head? What is the point of it all? Put simply, on this night, you are
transformed to become a child of God.
Scripture and tradition teach that, by baptism, you are actually
adopted to be a child of God through the gift of the Holy Spirit who comes upon
the waters of baptism just as it came upon the waters at the creation of the
world. You will receive the Holy Spirit
just as Jesus Christ himself, God made man, received the Spirit at his baptism,
receiving it as a human for our sake. I
want to be clear about what this means for you. A little over two months ago you came into
the world. Your mother and I became
parents for the third time that day, and we were and always will be proud to
call you our son. Tonight, however, you
become a child of God. By bringing you
to your baptism, your mother and I are taking the step of recognizing
that, although you are our son and always will be our son, you belong first and
foremost to God who has given you to us.
Your identity is wrapped up in God, and tonight you are to be born of
water and the Spirit, and through this birth you gain new life as a child of
God. As such, your mom and I are
pledging today to raise you as one who is a child of God, as one who has been
adopted by God to serve him for the rest of your life. You do not, and will never, cease being the
son of Kim and Greg. But this identity,
after your baptism, is no longer the most important. You are, first and foremost, from this moment
on, by the grace of God in the Holy Spirit, a member of the Church and a son of
God.
This comes with
responsibilities for your mother and I, and also, one day, for you. You see, just as your birth two months ago
was the beginning of your life here on earth, so the new birth that comes
through baptism today is the beginning of your life as a Christian. By bringing you here for baptism, your mom
and I are committing to our family and friends, to this congregation, and through them to both the worldwide church and
to the saints who make up the church above, that we will raise you as a
Christian, that we will take primary responsibility for your religious
education, that we will do everything within our power, by the grace of God, to
be examples to you of what the Christian life means. We are to be examples for you
Christ-likeness, of humility and of selfless love, in the hopes that you will
learn what it is to be a follower of Christ from us. I’m not going to lie to you, and tell
you that this is an easy thing to do. It
isn’t. You will, unfortunately, learn
that your mother and I are not perfect, and indeed, you’ll learn, if you
haven’t already, that there are some things about your old man that are
downright ugly. At times we are going to
fail you in being examples to you. But
St Paul tells us that God works through our weaknesses, and this your mom and I
both cling to in the hopes that you will be able to see past and through the
faults of your parents in order rather to see the transforming love of God
working in us.
For there
will come a time in which you will be asked to confirm the faith which you have
received here today. At this time,
should you so choose, you will, of your own volition and power and by the grace
of God, grab hold of everything that you have been taught, by word and example,
by your mom and I, and by the Church; you will grab hold of the gift of grace
that God has joyously given to you through Jesus Christ in the Holy
Spirit. Confirmation, as the sacrament
is known today, is inseparable from baptism for this reason. Of course, you are a free person, and you may
decide not to take the faith of your parents.
That is your prerogative. We
cannot force you to be a Christian, and indeed, we do not want to force you to
do so. Your mom and I are going to raise
you as a Christian, not because we want to shove the faith down your
throat. Rather, both your mother and I
have come to recognize in Christianity truth, goodness, and last, but certainly
not least – not least by any stretch of the imagination – beauty.
 |
Modern Orthodox icon of Christ's Baptism |
The beauty of
Christianity is made so very clear in the act of baptism itself. You will be baptized in the name of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
This is very significant! We as
Christians believe that God exists as Trinity, and this understanding of God as
three and yet one is extremely important.
There is no easy explanation of the Trinity, but the best I can do is
simply to say that Christians have, through revelation and experience, come to
an understanding that God exists as community, that God exists, most
significantly, as an eternal embrace of selfless love where each person of the
Trinity gives the totality of themselves to one another in a dance of love so
profound, so complete, so giving, so unifying, that threeness comes to equal
oneness. This is what it means to believe,
as 1 John 4.8 reads, that “God is love.”
Love – self-giving, totally gratuitous, all-consuming love – is at the
very heart of God’s essence. This
Trinitarian love, this notion that God exists eternally and completely as love,
is at the heart of the beauty that is essential to the Christian faith. It is the idea that God is love that makes
sense of why the created order ever came into existence. It is the idea that God is love that explains
the gift of God’s very self to us in the Incarnation, when God became
human. And Jesus Christ’s example of
selfless love, love that led him to the cross, reveals to us that God is love,
that God exists as love. It is through
the Resurrection that we learn that love triumphs over evil, that love conquers
death, that love is the way of God in the face of oppression and injustice
God’s love is
made abundantly clear in the sacrament of baptism. For baptized in the name of the Trinity that
is and exists as love, you receive God’s very own Spirit who lovingly and
selflessly descends upon you and lifts you up to become part of the dance of
love that is the life of God. Through
the gift of God’s very self to you in baptism, you are drawn into communion and
intimacy with God. Through God’s Spirit,
God ceases to be merely your creator.
God now becomes, through God’s Spirit, your Father and Mother. Through the Spirit of Christ, Jesus becomes
more than your Lord and Saviour. He
becomes your brother and your friend.
And, dare I say it, he becomes your lover.
Such divine love
is, to my mind, at the heart of the Christian message, and this message is
profoundly beautiful. Moreover, it is
this love that is to shape all of us who have been baptized into the
Trinity. God’s Church, the body of
Christ, is to imitate the community of selfless love that God is. We are to exist as communities of love. Unfortunately, God’s Church frequently falls
short in this regard. The beauty that is
God is frequently marred by the ugliness that was and is done in the name of
God and by the disunity that now characterizes what was to be the one Body of
Christ. You need to be prepared for
that. But none of this compromises the
fact that at the heart of our faith is an understanding of God, of humanity, of
the Church that is, frankly, remarkably beautiful and profound, and nothing we
do can compromise the love that God is.
It is this love
that you will experience this night.
It is this love that your mother and I will, through God’s grace,
manifest to you in our marriage and as parents.
This faith in the God who is love is the faith into which you are being
baptized; this is the life to which you are being called. And just as Jesus welcomed with open arms the
children who were brought to him 2000 years ago, so he opens his arms to you,
pouring forth his grace and his Spirit to you to draw you to him. Your mother and I, this community, the
Blessed Virgin and all the saints, pray that you will find rest, comfort, and
love in his embrace. Amen.
This is beautiful. Thanks for writing it. I'm going to ask parents to read this.
ReplyDelete