Baby as Sacrament

Tired after Monday’s bad golf I checked the answer phone, ‘Sir I want my baby christened next Sunday.’  Well, you can imagine how I felt! After all I’m the parish priest! She doesn’t even know my name.  And why did she not read in the bulletin that we need three months’ notice?  She obviously does not go to mass.  And what about the pre- baptismal talks? I fumed like this for a while before ringing back. ‘ Look,’ I said, ‘it’s not as easy as you think. Can you come round next week so I can fill you in on a few matters?’  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘you’d better come round here.’

Well, I did. I came to her house with my shield and spear at the ready. I was in indignant mode. After all, rules are rules; there are diocesan regulations to be honoured; we cannot just go around, as we used to, baptising everything that moved. It is due to such mistakes in the past that so few Catholics practise now!

The young mother’s face was very discoloured. She told me that she was just out of hospital after a bad beating by her boyfriend. There was a sadness in her voice. Looking into the small cot with great love, and a sudden smile, she said, ‘I do not want what happened to me ever to happen to my baby. I feel she will be safe with your people.’

Another priest told me a similar story. When he, slightly affronted by a brusque phone call, went round to the house, the mother explained to him that she had fought tooth and nail to bring her child to full term, in spite of the pressures and threats of her boyfriend and even her own Catholic family to have an abortion.,

We both compared notes about how suddenly our approaches changed. How ashamed we felt at our self-righteous and ego hurt. How far we had drifted from the compassion of Jesus! Such experiences in my life have led me to a whole other way of looking at our role as pastoral carers, as non-judgmental servants of God’s precious people.

Are we still placing burdens on people’s shoulders? Are we still expecting them to dance to our tune, to jump through all kinds of ecclesiastical hoops before they can be worthy of belonging to God’s people? How easy is it to forget that they are already full of God- carefully and lovingly fashioned, down to the last detail, by our Tremendous Lover. ‘Here comes God again!’ the mystics would exclaim at the arrival of every new baby.

Towards the end of the celebration of baptism one of the prayers has a phrase, ‘Now you are a child of God.’  Every Sunday I explain to the adults what this does and does not mean. From the very first moment of its life, the baby is made in God’s image. Maybe there is never another time in its life when it is closer to its Creator. And maybe the whole point of baptism is to keep it that way, to protect the little one not just from its own potential for sinning, but also from ‘the sin of the world’ that is waiting to destroy its lovely soul.

I reflected much on that young mother’s remark the day I called to talk about a baptism for her precious baby. There was a pleading in her eyes as she said, ‘I feel she would be safe with your people.’

Maybe she had got it right and this is the true theology of baptism. Maybe the baby is in reasonably good shape on arrival but then the people of Jesus gather round it, like a human shield of love, to keep it safe from the unfriendly fire of a world that can no longer distinguish enemy from friend.