On a brisk winter afternoon in 1980, my family, including my grandma, my parents, and two family friends, gathered around the font of a small neo-gothic Catholic church for a brief private baptism. The family friends would become my godparents, but I have no memory of them having any role in my life. I’m not even sure if my parents knew them well, or if they were acquaintances who were part of the parish and therefore met the requirements to put their name on my certificate. Looking back, so many parts of my Roman Catholic upbringing felt like a list of checkboxes to be crossed off, and this was the first:
If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll know I struggled with my faith, largely due to what I felt were inconsistencies between my childhood church’s teachings and Jesus’s call to love each other. I won’t rehash all of that here, but to sum it up, I’m pretty sure it was my ancestral Protestant heritage breaking through. In the case of baptism, the Lutheran practice feels more authentic to me because, rather than checking off boxes, baptism is a two-way commitment between us (or our families speaking for us) and the community in which we are baptized. It is the beginning of a faith journey in which we choose to learn and grow, and the community who stood with us at our baptism chooses to be part of that formation of our faith.
Now that I’m older, I’m able to appreciate some of the finer details of being part of a community that is willing to walk this path with each other. Volunteers spend countless hours leading programs that form our learning, outreach, and worship. Their individual commitments range from every week to once in a while, and that is the beauty of being part of a faith community. You don’t have to do the work of figuring out what it means to live into our baptismal covenant alone.
You might be thinking, “but sometimes kids are baptized here and then go somewhere else. And they almost always grow up and leave us. If this is supposed to be a life-long commitment, how are we supposed to be responsible for them?” Here is how I think about it:
I am blessed to work with a lot of adult musicians who learned and grew from other music teachers and music directors at other churches. I also teach young musicians who I am devastated to lose as soon as they leave for college. When my students leave, I know that someone else is picking up their music education journey, just like I’ve taken over at least part of the music formation of the adults I work with from wherever they started their music journey.
We do the same thing with our baptismal covenant to walk with each other in faith. Our commitment isn’t just to the individual being baptized. Every time we repeat those vows (and we’ve been saying them a lot lately), we renew our commitment to support each other - all of us - wherever we are on our paths.
Who are some of the people who have walked along your faith formation journey with you?
What opportunities do you have to help others along their path of faith?
On the journey with you,
John