You Can Do Without That Kind of Excitement

The church was full for the main service on Sunday for a baptism, which is an infrequent event as most of ours happen separately. But this was the baby daughter of Allie our Treasurer, a birth from within the congregation and thus a great delight. Lots of children came with their families and with all dad Danny's friends from the Swanvale Halt Rugby Club.

So that was exciting. Forest Church should have been a complete contrast, quiet and contemplative. Usually Allie, her mother and sister, would have been among the attenders, but obviously they had other things to do and so we were seven human souls and one dog making our way into the woods where we'd begun our Forest Church explorations in the summer of last year. I was relieved to discover that it wasn't quite as boggy as when I'd done my usual recce on Saturday afternoon. We had read from Geoffrey Grigson's Englishman's Flora about the folklore and properties of the willow tree (did you know that aspirin was developed from a chemical isolated from willow bark?) as well as the Bible, and sung a slightly eccentric hymn, and were just getting into a time of prayer when Derek, an elderly gent who lives not far away from the woods, keeled over and fell on the ground. That rather put an end to contemplation. It seemed like a transitory faint, and guided by a paramedic over the phone we got Derek out, and into the only car close at hand belonging to Jean the sacristan. Another congregation member accompanied them, and stayed at the hospital until Derek's son arrived. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but unsurprisingly the doctors kept him in overnight much to his chagrin. 

As we'd made our way along the path through the woods, I'd glanced aloft at the sunlight glinting through the canopy of trees. When we stopped and took in our surroundings I encouraged us to look up as well. I've an uncomfortable feeling that Derek looked up a bit too long.

Tech Milestone

There was a baptism at Swanvale Halt church on Sunday, the younger daughter of a family whose older child was baptised a few years ago. She is already 3 and a bit, and missed out her original baptism date because of the pandemic. She took it all very seriously.

One of her godmothers gave a reading, as families occasionally do. 'Remind me what it is', I said to the little girl's parents before we started: 'ChatGPT wrote it', they told me. This is the first time this has happened here, at any rate. It was wordy and repetitious, though no worse than anything else a family might look up online and then adopt for their own use. Had it been me I would have cut it down a bit. What surprised me was that, in contrast to the absolutely vapid stuff I've read in various places that's very clearly AI-generated, it did have some content, talking about the 'limitless possibilities' ahead of little Amelia. Was that the brief they gave the system, or did it lift that from somewhere else? I can see that this might be very helpful for people who are not used to articulating their own thoughts and writing them down (and that means most of us) but ultimately it might be better if they did. 

Talking to the Rector

It was a large and somewhat chaotic baptism, for the younger sister of a boy who I baptised five years ago: about a third of the congregation was under 16 by my estimation. I knew a lot of them have been there for multiple baptisms, and it's reached the point on such occasions that I acknowledge that many people will have heard my spiel before but I'm going to say pretty much the same just in case they've forgotten. There were eleven godparents, several of whose names I recognised, a number being young fellows whose awkwardness in their unaccustomed suits was rivalled by their awkwardness in being in church at all. So far as young fellows are concerned, this discomfort often manifests itself in mild mucking about. There was one who fell under this temptation more than the others: when we were almost right at the end and I thanked everyone for being there to celebrate and acknowledging that they would be going 'to celebrate in a different way and a different place' he said very audibly 'right, off to the bar then, ho ho ho'. I was on the brink of saying something to him after it was all over, but restrained myself. The baby, in contrast, behaved impeccably.

The congregation bundled out of the church as quickly as they could manage without positively trampling one another, leaving about enough in the collection plate for a return bus ticket to Guildford (and we didn't notice anyone using the card reader). It was as I was tidying up that the joker in the pack of godparents came up to me. 'That was great, thank you', he said. 'You won't remember, but you baptised my daughter in 2010. Look, this is her now,' he went on, showing me a snap of a disgruntled looking fourteen-year-old on his phone. We had a very pleasing talk about what had happened to him since, and the passage of time more generally. There you are, do not rush to action, I thought to myself.

Earlier, our lay reader Gizel overheard me quoting Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes to the ladies serving coffee, which they'd clearly never heard of. My 'sermon' that morning had been an examination of the spiritual relationship between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, with various audiovisual aids including a scary video of the Russian Military Cathedral built in 2020. 'You're a virtually inexhaustible source of nonsense', Gizel told me, which I think she meant kindly. Being German it's sometimes difficult to tell. I suppose it's positive that I cultivate such a warm and approachable working environment that she feels she can say something like that. 

A Sunday of Contrasts

Our baptisms are moderately conservative affairs. I keep the old language about 'sin, the world, and the devil' and I even do the little gesture called the Ephphatha, making the sign of the Cross over the child's ears and lips, symbolising the newly-baptised soul's ears being opened to hear the Word and their mouth to speak it, which comes from the old Roman rite and which I so liked I adopted it. I've even been asked, occasionally, as I was today, to baptise a child who's wearing a traditional christening gown, but that's quite rare as most families now find their beloved baby doesn't fit the gown by the time they get around to organising the ceremony. But I've never been asked additionally to wrap the child in a white shawl before. The christening gown itself derives from the white robe in which a baptismal candidate was wrapped in the ancient rite after the baptism itself, signifying their clothing with Christ, and after the custom of baptising children naked fell into disapproval in the Western Church they would arrive at the ceremony already wearing it. I see that the old Roman Rite includes clothing with a shawl or somesuch, but also allows this to be commuted, as it were, to a white cloth placed on the child's head. The sense of this arrangement was revealed today when none of us could work out easily how to hold little Isabella so the shawl could be applied. 

Later in the afternoon it was our Spring Forest Church. I didn't know quite where we were going, so Julie the Sacristan led the small procession (including two dogs) to a local SSSI where we were surrounded by meadows and birdsong yet with the 21st century very audible in the form of the main road not far away. This is of course much less formal liturgy, but as yet hasn't attracted a single soul who is not already a member of some church community! Will more publicity make a difference?

Keeping Safe

Something as simple as a jammed lock was the source of today's excitement in sweltering Swanvale Halt. I came down to begin setting up for the baptism (unusual to have one on a Saturday) and found Rick the verger apologetic: he couldn't get the safe open. Neither could I, nor the spare keys in the office. This wasn't too serious as far as the baptism was concerned: the only thing we needed from the safe was the old baptismal shell, a lovely thing of silver and mother-of-pearl, but not necessary. I used my hand to douse the children, a three-year-old whose baptism was originally scheduled for Spring 2020 and his baby sister, and apologised it was less pretty than the usual option. That was all right, but communion tomorrow would be harder work. Would we be able to borrow some silverware from Tophill or Hornington, or use glass - not the easiest option?

I thought I'd better warn Gordon the head server and Jean the sacristan. Jean's husband turned up as the baptism was drawing to a close with her keys, and they turned in the lock with no trouble. As soon as he was gone, musing that with this magical ability he had better head to a bank somewhere and see what he could manage there, it jammed again. This time after much fiddling I could hear the mechanism clank and the door opened, and an application of the panacea of WD40 seems to have allowed the key to turn happily. Can it really be that simple?

Our safe is old, and so are some of the keys. As is the manner with old locks, sometimes the original keys, worn and smoothed in the same way as the lock, work better than their sharp and shiny modern copies. But it's disconcerting to realise how inconvenient it would be to have our kit shut away and inaccessible. Should we have a backup set somewhere? This suddenly seems more likely than it did this morning.

UPDATE: 'Never put WD40 in locks!' says Sally our Office Manager. 'We've got some graphite spray for that!' - apparently bought by former curate Marion some years ago. Why has nobody told me this until now? Not that Sally can find it.

At the Hazard of Life and Limb

Now that Il Rettore and Mrs Rettore have retired and moved to Hornington to be next to their daughter and her family, Swanvale Halt has become their church of choice. Of course it has, where else is there to go? Yesterday we baptised their grandchildren. One godparent uncle stood proxy for another who is in the United States, just like the Royals. Unlike them, said absent uncle watched the proceedings via a phone.

All was well until, in fact, the service was over. Then suddenly, as I was still standing next to the font and talking to one of the party a small girl pushed the Paschal Candle stand a bit too forcefully and propelled a spurt of molten wax off the top: I caught it just before it tipped more than a few degrees off the upright. She seemed pretty unaffected, to be fair, until her parents began trying to get it out of her hair and that was the cue for some very vocal objection on her part. The parents were fine about it, possibly being more used than I am to the mishaps small children can experience, but (as we discussed a few days ago) crying infants are never a good look.

The towering Paschal Candle does have to be there, doing its job of symbolising the light of Christ within the church, and ready to light the small candles given to the newly-baptised members of the Body of Christ; a fortnight ago I was baptising four cousins at once, so you can write for yourself the joke I told about the number of candles we needed. But ours could perhaps do with a more stable stand than the one provided for it by Reg (whose traumatic death long-term readers may remember). I always try to push it right against the font making it much harder to topple but Rick the verger hadn't done that. We could put it at the back of the church, and I could make a point of warning parents about the potential hazard. None of these expedients is foolproof, though, or childproof!

Making an Exception

Some years ago I occasionally used to see Justin around Swanvale Halt. Little did I suspect, when a woman with a heavy foreign accent (Russian, as it turned out) left a message on the church answerphone enquiring about a christening for her son, that I would discover when I went to see the family that Justin was her husband. She did most of the talking, and what a lot of talking it was! I could see quickly that this was not going to work out in the way the Church of England tends to assume. No, the Church (in a Reformation mood) assumes that people should be attentive and take things on board intellectually, but Justin and Sara failed to pick up on anything that I said and it felt as though I was having to plunge through conceptual fog to find out what I needed to know. They couldn’t come up with godparents – Canon Law says there must be ‘at least three, saving that when three cannot conveniently be had [what an Anglican phrase!] two only … may suffice’. Justin has family,  but nowhere nearby and it didn’t sound as though the relationships were of the sort that would produce godparents in the way that people normally rope in their siblings or in-laws. He and Sara didn’t know their neighbours that well, and they couldn’t think of any close friends.

I remembered my beloved accidental god-daughter Karina who I acquired at Lamford when she was baptised at the age of 9 and no godparents could be had, and she is a great delight to me. Could I stand as godfather to little Owen, or could I find a generous soul in the congregation to do so? The trouble is that being a godparent should be a genuine and ongoing relationship, a commitment to the future. I’ve kept in touch with Karina (she’s just left Oxford and gone to Italy to teach English for a year), but she and her mother sang in the Lamford church choir so I already knew them and that they were not crackers: I didn’t really know that about Justin and Sara, and in fact knew next to nothing about them. I didn’t feel I could take them on as a pseudo-family, nor ask anyone else to.

Donald, the retired hospital chaplain who is an occasional worshipper with us, understood this instantly and in fact mentioned it before I did. Although it was irregular, he suggested, perhaps the whole church should be treated as Owen’s godparent. ‘The question is’, Donald said, ‘would sticking to the rules and saying no to this family encourage them in whatever kind of faith they have more than breaking the rules and saying yes?’ and of course you hardly need ask that to answer it.

Sara was very keen that a group of the congregation could attend the baptism as witnesses. Over the last few weeks the family has been coming to the Toddler Group so most of the people who joined in the very small baptism service were helpers at the Group. Those who weren’t were Paul with some of his amazing collection of icons and Lillian the ex-lay reader, who used to work at the British Embassy in Moscow and speaks Russian. It was a quiet, gentle, and thanks to their presence, a very devout gathering. I will defend it, should the bishop ever want to tell me off. 

Baptismal Regeneration

‘What do we normally do?’ I and Rick the verger ran around the church after the mid-morning service getting ready for our first baptism since March 2020. I thought there might be time to set up the card reader for donations but when I opened the box found a note saying ‘App needs updating’ so I abandoned that and made a joke about it instead. The family asked if I could read ‘Footprints’, and I realised I’d left it at home. In between looking it up on my phone and then accidentally shutting the phone down I ran out of data so had to rush into the church office, turn on the computer and the printer (which had run out of toner, and only still working because I had cheated it into believing it still has some), and get another copy. I knew the family pretty well and there were a number of familiar faces among the congregation young and old, but I was struggling to remember what I normally say at baptisms – not the liturgy, which is all written down, but the various routines I have worked out over fifteen years to explain it and to make unaccustomed churchgoers feel as much at ease as possible – and Baby Tom was moderately vocal throughout the proceedings. At one point he made a horrendous noise not very different from the one generated by our misbehaving sound system earlier in the morning. It is of course lovely to have celebrated a baptism service again, and it was possibly even more lovely to get home and lie down.

Regeneration Assured

Any services involving large numbers of people who aren't very used to being in churches are hard to predict; even more so when children take a prominent role in them. 

It may be an awkward truth, but as a rule the baptisms of children from middle-class families are normally quiet and biddable. Even if people feel uncomfortable in a church environment they are keen to do as they are supposed to do, and do their best to appear to take an interest. They don't fiddle with their phones, or smirk and chatter mockery - a particular temptation for young working-class chaps to cover up the fact that they don't know quite what to do in church. And why should they?

But the children may have other ideas. This Sunday I was baptising two brothers, one aged not quite 5, the other a little under 3. Frankie the elder sat on the side of the font and having realised he wasn't going to go bodily into it all was well. But Jake - Jake saw what had happened to his brother and wanted none of it. Even while in his mother's arms he was wailing 'Put me down! Put me down!' Mum held him over the threatening waters and in amidst his thrashing and screaming I feel fairly sure I managed to get water somewhere on his head three times, which is what is required. Had he kept still less of it would have gone down the back of his collar, poor little chap. He did calm down after that and within a minute or two the pair of boys were racing round the church in hard hats raided from the dressing-up box playing Bob the Builder, such that they had to be retrieved when required for a later part of the liturgy. 'Jake hates having his hair washed,' mum and dad grimaced apologetically, 'Bath time is just a trauma.'

Toe in the Water

A day of snow wasn't the time I would choose to venture back to church again after my enforced absence, but when I got up this morning that was what I found - not quite what was expected, but not a very severe fall, and already going slushy on the roads. I didn't have to head out early, as a visiting priest was managing the 8am.

In fact I was in church yesterday, but acting in a supervisory capacity as the preparations were made for the beginning of Passiontide - veiling the images, and putting up the Stations of the Cross. I also had a couple of baptism bookings to make.

We were going to have a baptism this morning, too, but the godparents couldn't make it from far-flung parts along the snowy roads. The young baptizand's family still turned up - they're fairly regular attenders and only live around the corner - bearing his cake which they shared around after the service was over. It was an odd morning. I expected to preach and in fact Lillian the lay reader was down to do it, and then when she started the Gospel reading it turned out to be the wrong one. The best bit was Junior Church making 'prayer pretzels'. I didn't get one. 

I get the impression that the older members of the congregation (that is, the majority) have rather enjoyed me being poorly, in the nicest possible way. They get a chance to comiserate with me rather than me with them, and they now know that I have a better idea what they're talking about, given that so many pastoral or parochial conversations revolve, one way or another, around operations. 

He Knows All The Secrets

People in a moment of crisis often find their way into the church, have a tear and a conversation if I (or a colleague) happen to be there, but very often - as I may have said before - that conversation may be affected and indeed prompted by alcohol and also tends to mark the end of the Church's interaction with that person as well as the start. It's far rarer for anyone to want to share important things outside those stressful moments and I always have a sense that most of my dealings with people are marked by a frustrating degree of superficiality.

So it was a great surprise to visit someone who is due to be baptised as they are acting as godparent to a young relative. We talked about the service, what it involves and what it means, and the business of being both a godparent and taking those promises on board for yourself at the same time. My interlocutor then took the opportunity to describe all the problems affecting the family, over about half an hour. Depression, money worries, tension, disability, medical negligence, all laid out in a sober and straightforward way: 'I'm sort of in the middle of all this, but you just have to get on with it, don't you?' We even prayed about it all as it seemed appropriate to do so, not something I always introduce into the conversation.

This knowledge will lend the christening service a distinctive quality, to be sure. I go to visit families and really have very little idea of what's going on as quite naturally people put on their best face when the 'vicar', or I suppose any other professional, calls. Suddenly I remember the christening I did some years ago after which one of the godparents went home and murdered his partner.

Thanks For Letting Me Know

... is the mild response I find myself sometimes making when what I would prefer to say is anything but mild. A little while ago I had a message thus:

Hello, I'd like to enquire about having my son christened at the church. We live in the village and it's such a beautiful church, I wouldn't want to have the ceremony anywhere else!!

So we arranged to meet and discuss it. There's no long process of preparation for prospective baptism parents to go through at Swanvale Halt, nothing to put people off. Then some days after the fulsome endorsement quoted above I received:

Hi, after careful consideration we've decided to go to a church in Hornington for the christening. Thank you for your help.

I know, or suspect I know, exactly why this is, and I suspect I know it because other people have mentioned it in similar circumstances. It's because car parking is easier in town than it is here. Short of having the sheltered housing next to the church demolished and a car park put in its place, there is little I can do about this; but what grates, and if I'm honest grates quite hard, is the lack of frankness. I wouldn't mind so much if people felt they could be open about the reasons for their choices in these matters; we all know baptism parents with little connection to the Church treat churches as couples looking to get married do, as 'venues' with competing facilities, advantages, and considerations. There's something deeply corrosive about the way people feel they need to pretend. 

My own irritation, as such, is of course due to Clergy Insecurity Syndrome and that's an entirely separate matter!

Never Apologise, Never Explain

A few weeks ago we had a (double) baptism as part of the main Sunday service and something about the crowd of visitors there struck me that it might be worth trying to get some impression of what they thought about their experience. It's all too easy to assume you know what people are thinking when in fact you have no idea at all. I sent the parents a set of questions and asked whether they might mind forwarding them to their friends and then sending the replies to me. They were kind enough to do so and the responses have just arrived. There aren't many but the impressions that come across most strongly are:

1. People felt welcome and comfortable
2. They came out of a desire to support the family
3. They view the Church of England as staid but open-minded

The one remotely critical response was this one:

Q: What (if anything) made you feel uncomfortable about being there?  
A: One (somewhat harsh) interpretation of the sermon could be that the children were joining a club, and that those outside of the club were somehow lesser.  For instance, there was an insinuation that you could only love, understand and show compassion in a truly profound and meaningful sense if you did this through Christianity.  Apart from objecting to this idea, I also feel this verged on compelling people to join the Church.  I feel it would be better and as a consequence more appealing to present Christianity as one of the means of gaining this connection with humankind, though not the only means. 

Now, one of the problems I faced that morning was how to beat the sermon - one of my year-long series based around the Anglican Catechism, on that occasion framed around the question 'What is my duty to my neighbour?' - into a form even basically appreciable by a baptism congregation. Looking back at my notes this was the line I was apparently taking, though not using these words exactly:

You could easily argue ‘People don’t need religion to be good’ and that’s true. None of the duties in the Catechism require Christian faith in order to carry out: they make sense even from a completely secular point of view. But by insisting that we owe others these duties regardless of how they behave towards us the Catechism points beyond that idea of mutuality and towards something more distinctly Christian, based on the uniqueness of every human being and their identity in God.

The ‘duties to our neighbour’ are only the beginning, in Christian terms. The trust and mutuality they engender are what makes real love and community possible.

I discussed this with Ms Formerly Aldgate. 'Having heard a few of your sermons, you do often seem to be reminding people why they should be Christians, which makes me feel a bit left out' she said.

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that a Christian priest would want people to be Christians: certainly if I felt Christianity was only one of a series of indifferent moral options I wouldn't want to bother with doing what I do. And I further suppose one shouldn't ask people's opinions if one is going to get huffy about what they say. Yet I have a curious discomfort about making people feel uncomfortable even if I believe in what I've said (although the visitor cited above did conclude their remarks with 'I enjoyed the service. Keep up the good work'!).

Marion the curate gave me a copy of Premier Christianity magazine a few days ago which contains an 'Open Letter to the Churches of the UK' by US-born former pastor of Westminster Chapel, RT Kendall, arguing for the Church to focus on 'the earliest message of the New Testament', 'flee from the wrath to come'. Reading this I find myself reflecting that the heart of the Gospel in Jesus's words 'repent for the Kingdom of God is near' is a positive appeal for people to ready themselves to take part in something wonderful, not a warning to avoid something bad. But perhaps I formulate it like that because, at heart, I really don't like making people upset and have to be absolutely certain I'm right before doing so (on the occasions when I'm not just careless, which are more frequent). I doubt RT Kendall bothers about upsetting people. These fundamentally different sorts of human beings shape their theology, I suspect, around those basic attitudes rather than absolute principle.  

Resistance Is Useless

It was a busy day yesterday: as well as the usual services, two baptisms, with a total of four children and sixteen godparents. I didn't even attempt to remember all the names - keeping track of the children's was enough to cope with.

The children concerned were a six-year-old, a two-year-old, a moderately small baby of about 6 months, and a tiny one of six weeks. The two-year-old posed the most difficulties.

Me: Saffron, Christ claims you for his own. Receive -
Saffron: No! No!
Me: Right, Saffron, are you ready?
Saffron: Yes.
Me: Saffron, I baptise you in the name of -
Saffron: No! NO!
Me: Saffron, receive the sign and seal of G-
Saffron: NO! NO!!!

At no point has the practice of infant baptism in which small children are assumed to be 'covered' by the faith of their parents ever seemed so ambiguous. The only saving grace (perhaps literally) is that Saffron almost certainly was not raising theological objections to the sacrament of holy baptism, only personal animosity to me. She seemed quite interested in the candle given to her parents at the end, possibly indicating a future pyromaniacal career.

And Relax

I was terribly excited a few days ago. I went to visit a couple who'd enquired about baptising their son - not regular churchgoers but from a family, on one side anyway, with longstanding links to the church. When the child in question is a first one, I always give the couple the option (and the order of service) of the Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child as well as baptism, so that, if they decide they can't in conscience make the dramatic promises which are part of the baptism rite, they have another form of saying thank you to God for the fact that the child is here, and introducing him or her to the world. You may remember this coming up recently in my spiritual director's experiences.

Anyway, to my astonishment this couple told me the Thanksgiving service was what they wanted, and so we talked that through, discussing how we might personalise the service and make it special. Nobody in my experience has ever picked the Thanksgiving service, no matter how hazy their grasp of Christianity or distance from the Church: I was not merely surprised, but delighted that someone should deliberately decide they didn't want to parrot things they didn't believe, and cycled home to put the kettle on in some elation, mentally composing what I would say when we actually held the service.

Then the phone rang. 'We made a mistake,' said Young Mum, 'It's the christening service we want, with proper godparents. I just thought the other one was a shorter version ...'

Out with the Devil

I am not accustomed to posting photographs of myself on these pages, but here I am a couple of months ago with little Jocelyn at the font, an image kindly sent me by her parents. I now have a little archive of these baptism snaps, which form not only a record of my clerical career to date, but also the effects of time on the quantity of my hair.

The Church of which I have the honour to be an ordained minister is considering a range of experimental alternative texts for the baptism service, which arose out of a request by the General Synod a couple of years ago to come up with material in 'more culturally appropriate and accessible language' than the existing one contains. In particular, specific references to sin and the Devil disappear to be replaced by generic statements about evil. Of course our beloved conservative newspapers have delighted in fulminating about it and you can read a modest example of that here, or indeed, should you feel so disposed, check the actual texts and come to your own conclusion.

The lines of disagreement are fairly predictable. For my part I prefer to trust something that has a connection with the whole history of the Western Church rather than what a group of early-twenty-first-century middle-class clergy think speaks to their own momentary epoch, about which I suspect they know less than they imagine they do, and so if I'm allowed to carry on using the traditional texts, I will.

The mind-boggling thing is that anyone imagines that minor tinkering with liturgical language actually makes a difference to the evangelical mission of the Church: it's the kind of thing clergy do in order to avoid any real work, and I know because I'm continually tempted to do the same. One form of service may be marginally preferable to another, but it won't change the world; it just isn't the issue. The great majority of people who have little or no connection with the Church don't care what words it uses, and barely-churched families who want their kids 'done' are prepared to do and say virtually anything they can to allow that to happen. When I do baptism preparation I always ask whether the couple are happy with the language we use and whether they have any questions or things they'd like me to clear up, and they hardly ever do. I often find myself struggling to help them put into words why they want their children christened, and wonder whether there's something they're not telling me.

In baptism, like all the sacraments, words and symbols and actions only achieve what they are supposed to achieve - only become effective channels of grace, in traditional terms - if you are to a certain extent primed by a certain amount of prior practice and expectation. That's the context in which the traditional baptismal texts are intended to function. So you could argue that providing a more 'culturally appropriate' form of service for people who aren't steeped in the sacramental life is exactly what the Church should be doing. Except that expecting that people will turn up at a church service and be converted to faith by this or that form of words is to lay an unrealistic weight on your own efforts. Even the more modest aim of trying to guarantee that they're not actually turned off by what you do is a pretty hazardous exercise: I remember a conversation with a work colleague whose point of disgust with the baptism service was the priest carrying out the traditional gesture of turning a double-sided stole from penitential purple to celebratory gold after the dunking. It would make far more sense simply to insist that baptism families have to be regular church attenders, which is exactly what I would do were it not for reflecting that the sacraments belong to God and not the Church. As so often, I suspect the Church has got the wrong end of the wrong stick.

Going Under

Just before I went on holiday last week I attended an ecumenical event. Young Morgan plays the trumpet with our occasional church band, and does so very effectively, but formally he ‘belongs’ to our local King’s Church. I’m keen to build links with them, especially as they are outside our local ecumenical structures at the moment, and along with our curate and a couple of other folk from the Swanvale Halt congregation I went to his, and another young chap’s, baptism. Boldly it was to take place in the river at the back of the library. I gather that the chief cause for concern was not the temperature of the water, which is moderate at this time of year, but the mud and slime underfoot: it’s not a very big river, not very fast and not very clean.

How it worked was like this: A couple of worship songs were sung and the officiating gentleman, clad in a wetsuit, explained what baptism is about. The young fellows were then taken severally into the river with their godparents (one each) and asked whether they believed in Jesus and repented of their sins. The dousing (I was pleased to note, properly done in the name of the Trinity) over, members of the congregation present were invited to contribute ‘words’ according to how the Spirit moved them. That was the only point at which we edged into territory I found problematic. Most of the contributions were fairly bland although one older chap did comment that when Morgan went under he saw a fish in the water, ‘Which I think is God saying you’ll be a fisher of men’. I pondered what meanings I could have drawn from the dragonfly I saw at the same moment, dragons being a longstanding symbol of chaos and threat, or the ill-omened magpie I also spotted.

That apart, the rest of it is all structurally pretty similar to a Catholic baptism. It’s not the real thing, of course: to my thinking and feeling it’s ‘thin’ and bare compared to the richness and depth of a more ritualised service. But then, they would say the same thing about what I do with babies at our stone font. What it does is throw the emphasis on the feelings and intentions of individuals, rather than those of a worshipping community; the two models are essentially the same, but the form they take is controlled by different fears and experiences. Realising that gives proponents of those two approaches something concrete to talk about.

And as I said to our curate because we were there it was definitely Valid. I carried my biretta, but I didn’t wear it. 

Doesn't Bode Well

I had a call from what sounded like a very young mum enquiring about having her baby baptised. She was based in Guildford. 'That's unusual,' I said, 'Most people have their children christened in their local church. Have you got any connection with Swanvale Halt?' 'Not really', she answered, 'I couldn't find a church here.' That was odd, but I thought we'd better have a conversation about it so it was arranged for Saturday.

She didn't turn up. A quarter of an hour after our meeting time, I called her mobile number: no response. I called the landline number. 'Hello?' asked an older male voice. Rather embarrassed I explained who I was and asked to speak to Young Mum. She wasn't in. 'Might she be on her way here?' I asked. 'No idea,' said the man, 'She hasn't been in since last night'.

Where was the baby, I wonder? As someone said to me, 'In a basket outside the church, if you're unlucky.'

Thunder God

I had the most astounding phone call the other day. Last Sunday I baptised a baby boy for a young couple from the parish who are very marginally in contact with the Church. Their ideas about God are as vague and unformed as you could imagine. I went round to visit and explained the service and what it was about as I always do, at least when first children are involved. They were obviously slightly nervous and uncertain but doing their best to be agreeable, and the baptism service was a good occasion. It was, however, the Sunday when the weather turned dull and oppressive, and it was thundery, hot and overcast as I went home and left them to mill around outside the church taking photographs.

In the middle of the week I got a phone call from the baby's mum. She was stood outside the church, crying. 'I just wanted to have my baby christened,' she said, 'And we came out of the church and there was thunder. I know one of the godparents isn't religious. I need to know if Jack's going to be all right.' She couldn't say much more because she was so tearful, so we talked a little, in as understandable a way as I could make it, about her ideas about what God is like, about the fact that there would have been loads of christenings that day and thunder is a natural thing, and that God knows she wants the best for her son and will accept that and take it seriously. I said she should light a candle for him in the church, pray for him and encourage him to pray when he's old enough. I said these are the kind of thoughts that go around the heads of many people, but we don't all talk about them.

I felt both amazed that she was so upset by these superstitious thoughts and not able to brush them away like most of us do, and quite pleased that she felt the priest was the right person to talk to about them. At least she must have thought I wasn't likely to tell her off. And she loves her son.

Gratifying

We had a derisory turnout at 8am this morning, so it was nice to have a relatively full church at 10. Then we had even more for a baptism at 12, of the great-granddaughter of a member of the congregation. Present among them were her sons (and therefore the baby's great-uncles) who run the cycle shop where I get my bike seen to, the ladies from the bakery in the village where I get my iced buns and bread for our ex-nun sacristan who is confined to barracks at present with knee trouble, and the couple getting married in church next month who turned out to be former neighbours of the baby's dad. Isn't that lovely?