the waters of baptism
(Fr. Cyprian)
There are two texts about the Baptism of the Lord that I love to quote. The first one is this:
The voice of God the Father made itself
heard over Christ at the moment of his Baptism so as to reach humanity
on earth by means of him and in him: “This is my Beloved!” [This is the
line I really like:] Jesus did not receive this title for himself, but
to give its glory to us.
Now if I had read that out of context I might have made some kind of
joke about it being a bunch of New Age hooey––“Oh sure, it’s all about
me! It’s all about us. Perfect for the ‘Me Generation’ and our navel
gazing culture!”––except for the fact that it’s from St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, and it wasn’t a
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| Pryor Fr. Cyprion, OSB Cam |
slip of the tongue or the pen. It’s in the
Catechism, which follows it up by saying that
Everything that happened to [Jesus] lets
us know that, after the bath of water, the Holy Spirit swoops down upon
us from high heaven and that, adopted by the Father’s voice, we become
children of God.[1]
So it is all about us! Everything that happened to Jesus
happened so that we would know that we become children of God. Jesus
didn’t receive the title “Beloved” for himself; he received it to give
its glory to us, so that we could be come children of God.
Now, I often wonder why Christians, Catholics, preachers don’t talk
about all those things more. There’s a certain mystery and hidden secret
in Jesus’ message: that we are called to be participants in the divine
nature, that this is all about us, that the kingdom of heaven is among
us and within us. The prayer of the priest, for instance–– when pouring
water into the wine at the preparation of the gifts, By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share the divinity of Christ who came to share in our humanity––is
one of those prayers that used to be called the “secret” prayers. One
of my friends said to me, “Why don’t you guys shout that?!” In one sense
I think he was right: in some way that needs to be the starting point,
as it was for Jesus. If we are to trust the chronology of the Gospels,
in the synoptics this Baptism is followed by Jesus’ temptation in the
desert, and then his ministry, and then of course his passion and death.
It’s almost as if Jesus doesn’t go to the desert, Jesus doesn’t face
his life of self-giving in ministry, and certainly doesn’t face his
horrific death on the cross until hears this, the voice of his Father
telling him of his own dignity and beauty––You are my beloved! And so he stands on the solid ground of that.
When I do infant Baptisms I love to quote one of two things: one is
Marianne Williamsons’ famous little writing that Nelson Mandela used in
his inaugural address:
We ask ourselves: ‘Who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to
be? You are a child of God! [This is the line I really like:] Your playing small does not serve the world!
And the other is this lyric of Joan Baez that says simply,
You are amazing grace. / You are a
precious jewel. / You––special miraculous / unrepeatable, fragile
/ fearful, tender, lost / sparkling ruby emerald / jewel rainbow
splendor person.
I know, it’s Big Sur hippie stuff, but still… I have copies of that
made and keep it in my Baptism ritual book to give out to parents, and I
tell them this is the kind of thing that every child should hear every
day of her or his life, taped up over the crib, stuck into their lunch
box and tucked in with the high school diploma. And that that is what
church and community should be first and foremost, not a scolding school
marm standing at the door going tch, tch, tch, but a place where
we hold a mirror up to people and tell them who they are as they walk
in; and as the walk out tell them what my Dad used to tell me as I was
on my way out the door as a kid for a raucous Saturday night with my
friends, “Remember who you are!” “I love you, you are beautiful,
remember who you are…”
Even our moral theology, I don’t think we can start out with focusing
on the material act of sins; we can’t start out telling someone that
they are intrinsically morally disordered. We have to start out by
telling people that they are intrinsically beloved, intrinsically
beautiful, intrinsically precious, and give them something to stand on.
That’s Pope Francis’ approach, but before him it certainly seems to have
been Jesus’ approach.
That’s the Good News. Now here’s the bad news. The bad news is that
on the other hand, there’s also some validity to this being secret
knowledge too, because the wrong part of us can hear those things, the
unregenerate part of us, the part of us that doesn’t want to reform or
repent; and we might wind up divinizing our ego instead of our real self
hidden with Christ in God. And that’s where the real meaning of
Baptism comes in for those who are mature in the faith. Baptism is a
symbol of death before it is a symbol of new life. It’s a symbol of
drowning. In mythology water is always a symbol of both life and
death, like River Styx in Greek mythology that formed the boundary
between Earth and the underworld with its ferryman Charon, which became
part of the description of hell in the Christian West, in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Blake’s Paradise Lost.
Or the Red Sea: the Hebrews cross safely, but the Pharaoh’s charioteers
were drowned. That’s, of course, the event that gets remembered at
Easter and at our Baptism. I’m also thinking of Jesus walking across the
waters so many times in the Gospels, as if he were the new Charon and
the new Moses, walking across the waters of death and guiding others
safely across, too. But it’s almost as if he couldn’t do that or at
least doesn’t do that––walk across the waters––until he had immersed
himself in them first, allowed himself to drown. Maybe Jesus didn’t have to die to anything since his will was perfectly only to do his Father’s will; but for us to
live out our baptismal life, for us to access this precious divinity
within us, we have to die constantly. Somehow it’s only by drowning
gracefully that we can walk the roads of earth with ease and grace as
disciples of Jesus. It is only by something in us dying that we can
access all that is promised to us by the best of our tradition: being
divinized, participating in the divine nature, owning our real
inheritance, becoming who we are. As we heard this past week from our
friend Scott Sinclair in his excellent conferences on the “hard sayings”
of the gospel, this theme that comes up over and over again in the
Gospel of Mark: “You’re not going to understand this until you suffer…”
You’ve heard me talk so much about the sannyasa diksha of
India, the initiation into the monastic life of renunciation. The new
renunciate goes into the water in a baptismal ceremony and symbolically
dies and then comes out naked to be re-born. But there’s an almost
ghoulish little detail that I learned: when you give alms to a monk you
are supposed to offer it with your left hand, the impure hand, because
the monk is dead, and you don’t want to contaminate your right hand by
touching a dead body. What a powerful image! But it is not that
different from our Christian monastic tradition; when a monk makes
solemn vows he lies on the ground, with the capuche over his head (in
the old days even covered by a funeral pall) and dies. Saint Benedict
quotes Saint Paul: Even your body is not your own from now on.
And this is, by the way, the argument that our Saint Peter Damian uses
to explain why monks of all people should be involved in the apostolate
and church reform: because they are dead to the world, because they have
no agenda, no longing for riches or power or prestige.
There’s a beautiful saying of St. Clare of Assisi: Ne sono sicurissima il Regno dei cieli il Signore lo promette e lo dona solo ai poveri––“Of
this I am sure, that the Lord promises and grants the Reign of heaven
only to the poor.” A variation on that might be, the Lord promises and
grants divinization only to those who have died in some way. Died to
what? There is a piece of universal wisdom here, and I think that the
Christian tradition articulates this as beautifully if not more
beautifully than any other. Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy
points out that in all authentic traditions Ultimate Reality is only
clearly understood by those who are loving, pure in heart and poor in
spirit.[2]
“[It] is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly
experienced,” he says, “except by souls… who have fulfilled certain
conditions.” But he points mostly to the life of Jesus and to many
Christian saints, and he quotes the famous phrase of St. Augustine, Ama et fac quod vis––“Love
and do what you will.” But, he says, you can only do this “when you
have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving [3] That is the baptismal death we have to undergo and the baptismal pledge by which we live.
God with all your
mind and heart”; we can only love and do what we will when we have
learned that infinitely difficult art of loving our neighbor as
ourselves.
We can’t just coast on the salvation that is granted us; nor can we
rest back on our laurels and enjoy our exalted status. It doesn’t work
that way, at least not for us mere mortals. “Love and do what you will”;
but we can only do as we will when we have emptied ourselves completely
and made ourselves totally available to the Spirit of God.
Those others words don’t go away, the words that Jesus passed on to all humanity: You are my beloved.
They are the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. We should hear
them echo in the depths of our being. It is those words and that
knowledge that we are the beloved, it is the knowledge that we are
destined to inherit the reign of God, that should make us want to find
our real self, and be our real self, make us long to discover that self
that is in some way already in union with God, created in God’s image,
make us want to strip off everything that is not godly so that we can
know what it means to be a participant in the divine nature, and die to
everything else but that in the waters of Baptism.
So, in a sense, Jesus says, “Come on in! The water is fine––you may
drown, but you won’t die. Your real self, hidden in God, will arise, as a
participant in divine nature.”
This sermon reprinted from Hermitage Blog by permission.
Camaldolese monks: www.contemplation.com
[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 537.
[2] Perennial Philosophy, x.
[3] ibid, 71.
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