(RCIA classes are forming. For those of us who take our faith for granted, catechumens in our communities remind us of the holy hunger to which we are each called. I will always remember the 15 young catechumens whose baptisms I witnessed at an Easter vigil some years ago. Nine daughters. Six sons. The joy of that night stays with me. "Blessed be God, oh, blessed be God, Who calls you by name; holy and chosen one.")
In September, it’s hard to imagine Easter. The air, though still warm, carries the smell of morning frost. Here, at the feet of the mountains, we look up in September and see the peaks covered with golden aspens. In a few weeks, the trees will be bare and the mountaintops covered with snow. The land prepares for sleep.
These are the days when the RCIA team begins placing notices in the parish bulletin: “Interested in learning more about the Catholic faith?” followed by the meeting time and place. They prepare to welcome the seekers. They prepare for the questions from Protestant husbands married to Catholic wives and, more frequently now, for the questions from men and women not raised in any faith tradition. These are people for whom the Good News is indeed just that, news.
No one in our parish was prepared for the young families who came forward. A young couple, with four biological children, had decided, as faithful Catholics, to welcome another child through adoption. The girl they came to know and love had sisters, four of them, each by a different father. All five of the children were in foster care. By some miracle of charity and hospitality as wondrous to me as any blind man given sight or any deaf woman hearing, they decided to adopt all five girls.
The next young couple had two biological sons when they set out to adopt four more sons; two sets of twins, each set half brothers of the other.
Nine daughters. Six sons.
The children could not be baptized until their birth parents and the state had relinquished custody of them. It would be months before the adoptive parents and their waiting sons and daughters even knew if all the adults tangled together by blood and bureaucracy could agree, and thus make a way for the children to be raised in their new families. In hope, these parents brought their children to be prepared for baptism. One of the teachers, whose task it is to lead the way to the font, spoke for all of us when he said, “I’m afraid I have nothing to teach you. But you have everything to teach me.”
Autumn turned to winter. The children would leave Mass with their sponsors and go down to the basement for doughnuts and catechism, or doughnuts as catechism, the relationship between the two inextricably twined in the minds of my own children. As winter turned to spring, the talk turned most often to WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FONT. There was giggling, as they imagined being allowed — no, encouraged — to get wet in church.
The night of the vigil was windy and cold, sleet hissing as it dropped into the Easter fire. Inside the church was filled with light and the warmth of many bodies pressed together around the font. The elect were dressed in blue robes, their skinny arms and bare legs and feet sticking out from the folds. The deacons were carrying stacks of towels, like fathers at a swimming pool, ready to enfold the wet children in terrycloth.
The children were fidgeting and giggling quietly, and the baptisms were delayed for a bit as the deacons and the mothers searched for one stray. Then the procession into the water began. Each child sank into the font and came up, scattering drops like puppies shaking dry from a swim, as he or she rose, smiling. The deacons begin wedging towels around the edges of the font and then, in a wider and wider arc, out into the aisle. Water was flowing, really flowing, and with each immersion we sang:
Blessed be God, oh, blessed be God,
Who calls you by name; holy and chosen one.
As the water flew, blessing us all with its spray, we sang louder. However these children came into the world, they were coming into the church with shouts of joy and cries of glad hosannas.
I had never seen so much water poured and spilled at a baptism. It was as if the font could not hold it — all this water, all this life — and so the church itself became a river.
When the children walked back into church, dry, their hair combed, wearing the new suits and dresses of their new lives, they brought their baptismal candles with them. Light had been entrusted to them, and to their parents and godparents. The children had been charged to walk always as children of the light, keeping the flame of faith alive in their hearts. They spread out among us, sharing their light and rekindling our own.
In September, it is hard to imagine Easter. But I keep the memory of that night against the cold, against the dark. I remember that night, when our bishop addressed us saying, “Dearly beloved, these children have been reborn in baptism. They are now called the children of God, for so indeed they are.”
For so, indeed, they are.
Comments