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.