An Important Visitation

The children from Swanvale Halt Infants School regularly come to the church to look round as part of their RE syllabus. Yesterday was the turn of one of the Year 2 classes. They moved around in three small groups, asked all the usual questions they usually do and some new ones, and struggled to remember what I had told them at Assembly earlier in the day when the topic came up. 

They are often fascinated by the font, which we keep open with some water in it. During the visit we discovered that the water wasn't in a very good state - it had got dusty and when you dragged a finger through it a nasty buckle of scum built up behind. I thought it would be fun to empty and refill the font and bless the new water. 

The children gathered round as I sprinkled some salt in the font (I'm still working through the pot of Dorset Sea Salt I bought several years ago), said the prayer of blessing ('Lord, we thank you for the gift of water to sustain, refresh, and cleanse all life ...') and made the sign of the cross three times in the water. Even if they've been at baptism services themselves, they won't remember these words and won't even have understood a lot of them but that doesn't matter: instinctively they all came in with 'Amen' at the end in exactly the right place. They know that something holy happened. Probably.