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.