Christening [kris–uh-ning]

Instead of mapping out a schedule of predetermined words and dates for A Word to the Wise, I usually wait, in the spirit of lectio divina, until a word seems to be waving to get my attention like a pedestrian hailing a cab. This morning the word I pulled over to pick up is christening. Perhaps this is because lately it feels as though the word “Christian” has been reduced by Presidential candidates in this election year to little more than self-serving product placement.

As it happens, Christening is a Lenten word, not exclusively, but one that is at the heart of this season for those who identify themselves as a Christian or who are curious about the person of Jesus. This term is at the heart of Lent because Lent is a season in which we fully, consciously, and actively prepare to participate in the “passionate breakthrough” of God in Christ.[1] This season moves us toward and culminates in our three high Holy Days called Triduum where we see condensed and accentuated the paschal mystery of loving, dying, and rising.

More than a nostalgic recounting of historical events, these prayerful days illuminate the Christic-pattern of human existence to which Christians are invited to recommit and realign themselves. Indeed, when those being baptized at the Easter Vigil are immersed and then come up out of the font, this is the pattern of life that they are knowingly, willingly, and joyfully signing on for just as they will later be signed with the chrism that is intended to strengthen them to do so.

Because christening is most-often used as a synonym for baptism, it is important to unearth its deeper implications and fuller meaning as the ongoing, graced drama and life-long practice of becoming Christ-like. The life trajectory of the conscientious Christian is always toward the embodiment of the affirmation as stated in St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”[2]

From the human side, Lent involves deliberately setting aside a demarcated period of time to prepare our hearts and to set our intention to engage fully in the sorrowful, joyful, and glorious mysteries that all true transformations contain, that Jesus embodies, and which we ritually participate in during Triduum.[3] Lent invites our conscious participation in the “radical restructuring of the center of our being” to which the word Christening refers.[4] From the Christian perspective, transformation is not something we can make happen or accomplish on our own. It is a graced experience not a personal achievement. But because it is not a once-in-time event but rather the divine and innate summons we are called to live into more deeply each day, it also requires our free and full consent and intentional involvement.

In her little book The Spiritual Life Evelyn Underhill makes clear that at the core of the Christ-life is not only communion with God (“Without Thee I cannot live”) but also cooperation with God. Referring to the familiar words from the Lord’s Prayer, she writes:

To say day by day “Thy Kingdom Come” . . . does not mean “I quite hope that some day the Kingdom of God will be established, and peace and goodwill prevail”. . . . On the contrary, it means, or should mean, “Here Am I! Send me!”—active, costly collaboration with the Spirit in whom we believe.[5]

As a result, the elect should be told, “Wade in the water” at your own risk. This collaboration is graced but costly. But, let’s be honest, how many of us fully initiated Christians, whether baptized as infants or as adults, understand and accept the full implication of what we’ve been signed on for? How daring are we? In the form of an imagined though brief conversation, Lent is a season in which the operative and self-implicating invitation goes something like this: “Who’s up for transformation? Who’s up for a radical restructuring of the center of your being?” And the response is some combination of Isaiah’s “Here I am, Lord. Send me” and De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?”

Although transformations often begin without asking our permission, the sweep of history and the benefit of sacred narrative reveal the archetypal pattern of nearly all, if not all, genuine transformations giving us a heads up to what is involved and what will be required of us. Though we know the way— or are supposed to if we’ve been paying attention not just all these Lents and Easters but to life itself— the way is not a cakewalk and will require everything and then some from us or involve letting go of everything and then some within us. The end to which Lent points us is the liberation and new life of Easter, but last I checked no cabbie got there without going through the tunnel of love and loss along a road marked Via Dolorosa or Ars Moriendi.[6]  In her poem “The Impossible Darkness” poet Kim Rosen reveals what we’re preparing to participate in:

Do you know
how the caterpillar
turns?

Do you remember
what happens
inside the cocoon?
You liquefy.

There in the thick black
of your self-spun womb,
void as the moon before waxing,

you melt

(as Christ did
for three days
in the tomb)

conceiving
in impossible darkness
the sheer
inevitability
of wings.[7]

Although a symbol of good defeating evil, one of the most frightening images of my childhood was watching the green-faced, wicked witch of the west disintegrate as she screamed, “I’m melting, melting” in the classic film The Wizard of Oz. Playing off of today’s prevalent tendency to associate butterflies with saccharinity and triteness, Rosen not only alludes to the beauty and consummation of transformation but also accentuates the intensity and crucible which make it possible. Lent is a season of conscious cooperation with the enlivening, transforming, and liberating love of God. But it presumes the disintegration of all that is not Christ, the melting of all the prized possessions of the false and frightened ego which protects itself and resists change. As W. H. Auden writes:

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.[8]

Among other things, Lent is a time to confront how paltry and timorous is our desire for wings or justice or peace or Easter or the dream of God happening “on earth as it is in heaven” once we realize what is asked of us, what is needed and expected from us.

Another poet, this one a Christian from Kentucky, a contemporary American, a lover of the earth and her creatures, encourages us “Practice resurrection.”[9] But as Wendell Berry knows, as all genuine farmers know, and as Jesus knew, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.”[10]

Our destination invites pilgrimage and both reveal our vocation. Our gift becomes our work. The practice of resurrection first requires the practice of dying. The story of Lent giving way to Easter is a good news/bad news story. The good news of Easter is that it’s all gift, all grace. Life and Love get the final word. And the work of Lent is to wake up to that divine extravagance and to respond to it as fully as is humanly possible. The good news is that God was, is, and ever-shall be “making all things new.” The too-good-to-be-true good news is— that it includes us.

The bad news is— that it includes us. It’s not easy to be made new. It’s rather self-implicating. Christening can’t happen without us. We can’t yell, “Cut!” bring in the body-double and then yell, “Action!” We have to be there to experience transformation, to let our illusions die, to let go of our cherished securities, our secret ignominies, and our destructive complicities. However beneficent, life is inherently participatory and that includes the many diminishments, struggles, losses, duplicities exposed and deaths suffered that must be engaged in on the way to receiving and participating in the Life of Life. There is no spiritual bypass, no spring without winter, no diamond without pressure, no pearl of great price without friction. And there’s the rub. There is no transformation by way of a magic wand, and no cheap grace.

The cost of discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us, is not something that is required of us as a payment up front in order to win the approval or love or grace from a sadistic, punitive, miserly God. Rather, it’s the result of the dominant culture feeling threatened by those who allow Love to evoke love, by those who set out each day to incarnate the reign of God here on earth rather than to reduce it to some pie-in-the sky fantasy. It’s what’s involved in being made new. It’s neither all torture nor pure magic. It’s grace. And grace is intended to be a participative and collaborative venture between humans and the divine, between persons and the earth, between creation and the creator. It’s not an addendum to life. It’s how life happens. It’s what’s involved in the enlargement of soul, in becoming who we already are in God, in the blooming of love, in the work of helping to reveal the reign of God among us, and in joy finding it’s way to us and all the living beings of the earth.

To be continued . . .

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION:

Think for a moment what it means to be Christ-ened.

In light of your reflection, do one thing this week, however small, to participate in God’s dream for the earth and all who dwell here.♦

[1] This term is Rosemary Haughton’s from The Passionate God:

[2] Galatians 2:20.

[3] The Three days are known as Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter

[4] James Fenhagen, Invitation to Holiness, p. 9.

[5] Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life, 82-83.

[6] The Way of Suffering or The Art of Dying

[7] Kim Rosen, Saved by a Poem, p. 182-83.

[8] From The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

[9] Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” in Collected Poems 1957-1982.

[10] John 12:24.