Today was a relative rarity at All Saints parish: we had two baptisms. Baptisms themselves are not rare here. We've had (including today's) six baptisms in six months. But to have two at once . . . well, the last time that happened here was three years ago. (By the way, Orthodox evangelism methods would be enormously popular among evangelicals, if only they accepted infant baptism. But I digress.)
The baptismal rite begins with a threefold exorcism. Among the prayers, the priest prays, "Expel from him every evil and impure spirit which hideth and maketh its lair in his heart."
What? we may say. How can an infant merely weeks old be a hiding place of the devil? Quite simply: through hearing. Infant children, in ways we cannot fully understand, are shaped and molded by all that goes on around them. Before they can reason in even the most rudimentary ways, language has shaped and molded who they will know themselves to be and all the world around them which they will experience. The profanity, obscenity and blasphemy one encounters on an el train will fill their minds whether we will or no. Their encounter with television will reinforce their understanding that the world exists to please them. If they are not raised in Christian homes, and in some cases, even if they are, the encroachment which the demonic may make within their new-formed souls is breathtakingly swift and wide.
No wonder the Church baptized infants from the time of the New Testament.
Shortly after the exorcism, we all, by proxy in the godparents, breathe and spit on the devil. I'm telling you, if nothing else will attract you to Orthodoxy, getting to "hawk a loogey" at the devil surely must.
Then comes the Creed. This is not like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It's not a secret handshake that gets you into the club. This isn't verbal permutations we must calculate so that we can both authentically recite the words yet keep our own autonomy. This is the living embodiment of the Faith. By reciting the words we do two things: we guard the deposit of the sacred Faith that has been handed to us and voluntarily submit our mind and will to the Church, in whom dwells the fullness of Christ. The recitation of the Creed is the regular public affirmation of discipleship.
Given that we have just expelled all the influence and machinations of the devil which had begun to germinate in the infant's heart, we cannot sweep the place clean but leave it empty. We must fill it, lest the end state of the baby's soul be worse than before. With what do we fill it? With the concentrated and distilled Faith which was first handed down to the Apostles by Christ, and from them to the first churches. And from them down all the storied centuries to us. This is no mere pleasant wine cooler. This is fiery stuff, 200 proof. One cannot sip it, testing it's character and wondering whether one will like it or not. There is only one thing to do: open mouth and toss it back. We take the Faith whole or we do not take it at all.
However, in our Christian world today, we are used to the Gospel by sips. In our individualistic (and therefore, quite literally, impersonal) U. S. society we are infected with a blindness we fail to understand. We think we get to determine Truth. Our evaluation of whether or not something "works" for us, or "has cash value," or "sits well with us" is all inescapably myopic and narcissistic. We think we are the arbiters of Truth.
But when one is hiding in the catacombs, or the concentration camps, or the gulag, one is hardly interested in the cold, scholastic, dispassionate evaluation of competing views. When one is looking at the lifeless body of one's spouse or child, wondering whether this is all there is to life, one isn't interested in the empty narcotic of bland syncretistic religion. When one is looking at the emptiness, the loneliness and disillusion of a ruthlessly competitive consumerist economy, quite aware one is merely creating some meaningless gagdet or shifting around the nullifying digits of the obscenely wealthy, one could really care less for political slogans masquerading as Gospel. One wants clear-eyed, back-stiffening, blood-thickening Faith. One wants the two hundred proof fire of the Nicene Creed.
Still, comfortable in our paradisical illusions, fed intravenously by the twaddle of sitcoms and "real life" dramas, we think we prefer Kool-Aid spiked with a drop or two of Macallan. See, we tell ourselves, there's real Gospel here, and in a form that's relevant to me.
But for an infant that cannot articulate anything more abstract than the need for food and love, relevance means less than nothing. An infant could care less whether his refined, modern sensibilities are offended. What she needs is exoricism. What he needs is 200 proof Gospel. What she needs is immersion in the name of the Trinitarian God, and the seal of the Holy Spirit on forehead, eyes, ears, chest, back, hands and feet. An infant needs parents, godparents, the Church to say to him, though he will not comprehend it till later: "I am NOT making this up. I pass on to you that which was handed down to me, that on the night our Saviour was betrayed . . ."
For my part, I'm not making anything up. Like Paul, I want to pass on that which I've received. My child will soon invade our world. No girly-man blended malt for my kid. Our progeny gets the good stuff.
Posted by Clifton at July 27, 2003 05:19 PM | TrackBack