1963
In February of 1963, while serving as a young Lieutenant JG Naval Aviator with Patrol Squadron 23 (VP-23) at NAS Brunswick, ME, I received a call from my sister Pat asking if I would be willing to be the God Father for her new baby girl Laurie. I quickly agreed, and on a cold Sunday afternoon made the long four hour trek (in my Navy Blues) to Sacred Heart church in Waterbury, CT (which was also my birthplace). Upon arrival it was very dark and dreary, and when entering the church I could not help but reflect upon the years spent earlier at Sacred Heart High School immediately adjacent to the church itself.
Then, after gathering around the baptismal font, the young priest performing the baptism asked me to hold Laurie's tiny hand as he poured the baptismal water and recited the baptismal formula. Somehow, I thought this a strange request, but readily complied. Then as he began to pour the baptismal water over the Laurie's small infant head and to recite the baptismal formula: 'I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit' -a powerful charge of electricity entered into the child and traveled through my hand and up my left arm. I immediately knew I had just experienced a manifestation of God's power, but quietly sequestered this experience to the realm of mystery wondering what it all meant.
As I indicated earlier, I sequestered this experience away for many years, and only much later in life when I had a deeper understanding regarding the power and effect of the Sacrament of Baptism, did I share this experience with a young woman named Laurie now a mom in her fourties.
Ah, where does all of this lead? Well, this revelatory experience deeply positioned in my conscious awareness the unqualified conviction that infant baptism -rejected by many Christian traditions as unnecessary, is vital and essential to the spiritual well being of a new born child in ways we can neither perceive or know.
In the intervening years since this event I have on several ocassions attended in Protestant churches the dedication of an infant child wedded to the joyous celebration of the Christian community surrounding the event itself. Yet, at such times, I have also been saddened and troubled aware that the work of Christ on the Cross gained much more for the infant child -a restorative gift through the power of the Holy Spirit. For, in the pouring of the water and in the pronouncement of the words of the baptismal formula original sin and sin itself is remitted and the child is strengthened and opened to new life in God.
It has often been said that no one can take away your personal testimony of what God has done for you and what God has allowed you to experience and know. You know what you know. Yes, one can wait until adult maturity to receive the grace of baptism -but, this is not necessary. The better order of things is to offer to infants baptism and allow the child to be confirmed in the Christian faith of their own volition and at a mature age.
I want to end this narrative with another perspective as well. Given the transformative power of infant baptism, it is not a sacrament that should be offered to families of children unwilling to raise their children in the Christian faith. Too often, business as usual and what I term 'maintenance theology' leads pastors to baptize infants in cases where parents are not committed to Christian community and the rule of life Scripture demands. This can lead to scandal and weakens the church. So too, it this true regarding the Rite of Confirmation where the issuance of this sacrament is often akin to awarding a merit badge, but not a badge of honor and distinction.
PEACE
