THE MIGHTY CURRENTS OF GOD'S GRACE

October 16, 2009

There is a remarkable short story entitled "The River", by Flannery O'Connor, the young woman writer from Georgia who died in 1968. It tells about a serious little boy named Harry whose young parents are drunkards. One day a baby sitter takes him to a revival meeting down by the river, where he hears about Jesus and baptism for the first time. "What's that?" he asks. "If I baptize you," the preacher says, "you'll be able to go to the kingdom of Christ. You'll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you'll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?"

Harry does want that. He won't ever have to go back to the apartment, he thinks, where his parents sometimes don't sleep off an evening of heavy drinking until mid‑afternoon the next day.

Harry comes home baptized, and his mother asks him what that ignorant preacher has been saying to him. Harry responds: "He said I'm not the same now. I count."

The next day he goes back to the river and wades in, waist deep. This time he's going to baptize himself and keep on going until he finds the kingdom of Christ in the river. He starts under, gets a mouthful of muddy water, and spits it out, angry and sick. Someone has fooled him again, he thinks. Then he loses his footing and gets pulled forward and down by a current that grasps him like a hand. At that, after an initial surprise, according to the description of Flannery O'Connor, "all his fury and fear left him... since he was moving quickly and knew he was getting somewhere".

We could say that in God's eyes, everyone counts, but what Baptism does is make people realize they count and, like Harry, really feel like they're somebody. But baptism doesn't just produce a good feeling. It has real power. A Christian is washed, in the preacher's words, in "the River of Blood, the River of Pain". The passion of Christ is the event that gives sacramental power to the water of baptism. When Jesus talked about the bath of pain in which he was going to be plunged, he spoke of it as his baptism. Just as he was then lowered into the tomb and raised up on the third day, so also in baptism a person becomes dead to sin, is buried with Christ, and on rising up out of the waters, has risen to new life in Christ and is an entirely new creature.

So it is that baptism is the foundation of the whole of Christian life.

The bishops of the Second Vatican Council (1962‑65) spoke of the waters of baptism as "a stream of divine grace which flows from the paschal mystery, that is, the mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, the fount from which all sacraments draw their power."

Every time someone is baptized, the Church is born. And just as individuals can have a truly human life only by living in community with others, so also the Christian can have a truly Christian life only by active participation in the life of a local community of faith. In fact, baptism breaks down all human barriers to community and all other standards of division to join us all in a new way, namely, in Jesus Christ.

St. Paul says: "It was in one Spirit that all of us, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, were baptized into one body. All of us have been given to drink of the one Spirit" (1 Cor 12:13). In Ephesians 4:1‑6, he says, "Live a life worthy of the calling you have received, with perfect humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another lovingly. Make every effort to preserve the unity which has the Spirit as its origin and peace as its binding force. There is but one body and one Spirit, just as there is but one hope given all of you by your call. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all, and works through all, and is in all".
 
The importance of baptism is made more obviously clear from the fact that Jesus commissioned his disciples, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 28:19).

If we recall young Harry from Flannery O'Connor's story, we can appreciate that Baptism should not be viewed legalistically as a passport to the kingdom of God. No, it is a sacrament which Jesus wants to mark our lives. In commanding the Church to baptize all peoples, Jesus was saying in effect, "I want Harry and everyone to understand that with me, YOU COUNT!"

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 09-Jun-2010 10:44 sitemap