The evening of Holy Saturday my wife and I walked in procession with our children toward Christ Chapel. The Sanctuary was hazy with incense and dark like the Holy Saturday Tomb, like the face of the deep at the beginning of the world.
We waited there with Noah, with Abraham and Isaac, with Moses and Miriam, and with Isaiah and Ezekiel. We chanted the psalms together at the tomb of the Messiah and the tomb of the world. We asked for deliverance and reminded God of all those promises, knowing God’s faithfulness, but trying to forget for a little while so as to remember again.
Then, right in the middle of the chapel, in the middle of the people of God, we brought our children to the baptismal font, the headwaters of the cosmos, and Cynthia immersed them in the paschal mystery.
And they rose in forgiveness, in hope, in Christ.
The last few weeks they’ve been baptizing each other in the bathtub. Silas (age 3) dunks his green plastic
tugboat into the bathwater and holds it up to Caison (age 8) and Jaren’s (age 5) heads. While the water runs off the tiny boat deck he quietly and joyfully repeats the baptismal formula, “I now baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
This is how their baptism is working itself out in their lives right now. They only have a small sense that their whole life is there in that imitation: the water, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the priestly vocation of all the baptized.
I have no idea how God will work their baptism out in the details of each of their lives. Watching them reminds me I don’t know exactly how God is working it out in my own life either, but quiet and joyful imitation of Christ is a great place to start.
Arlen Farley is a first year student in the Master of Arts in Religion program. He and his wife, Andrea, have three children (Caison, Jaren, and Silas) and most recently served as church planters in Northern California.