Baptism

Looking at a newborn or very small child with open eyes, we immediately feel that this tiny being has its origin in a different world. For many parents, this feeling, whether consciously or unconsciously sensed, leads them to request baptism for their child. What actually happens in the Baptism of The Christian Community?

The Connection with Heaven and the Connection with Earth

We come from a heavenly world and dwell for a limited lifespan in a body on earth. This natural process, through which the heavenly binds itself to the earthly, takes place with every human being through conception, birth, and growth.

It can happen, however, that one becomes so firmly connected with the earth that one no longer manages to find access to the divine world. Or one may fail to establish a proper connection with the earth and become aloof and unworldly. Neither, however, represents a Christian ideal.

Baptism establishes a healthy relationship in both directions: toward heaven and at the same time toward the earth. This double connection is essentially a relationship with Christ, who came from heaven and of his own free will connected himself to the earth.

Natural Community and Christ Community

With birth, we form an immediate, involuntary connection with many communities: with our family, with our nationality, later with our school class, and still later with colleagues.

These communities exist because of certain conditions such as blood relations. In that sense, they are not freely chosen. Even friendships that we choose in later life are not always free from these conditions; they may arise because of some soul-affinity, which has to do with our past.

Through baptism, the soul of the child is embedded in a spiritually open human community. All of the above-mentioned reasons for a community do not apply here. Not even liking is necessary to connect with this community. But what is the commonality, the connection?

Here people gather in the mood, ‘I want to seek Christ. I set out on the path to connect with Him.’ The Christian Community does not exist because of a condition in the past, nor ‘because’ something already exists. It arises anew in every moment, toward a common goal: in order to seek Christ. This common basis creates a high degree of freedom.

Children’s Baptism – Not Yet Membership

In the first centuries of Christianity, only adults were baptized, and baptism was evidence of their voluntary decision to enter into the Christian community.

Soon, however, the need arose to baptize small children, so that they would not die as ‘heathens.’ Thus, infant Baptism arose – and with it, automatic membership in the church, which originally only an adult who had come of age could decide for themselves – and so Baptism for children has remained in many denominations.

In The Christian Community, adults are baptized only under exceptional circumstances. For adults, the bonding with the community takes place through the Communion service with bread and wine, the Act of Consecration of Man*.

The Baptism ritual of The Christian Community was from the beginning intended as a ceremony for children. However, the child does not thereby become a member of The Christian Community; rather, it is welcomed by the community, embedded, and carried by it. The question of whether later the child will choose to connect themselves with The Christian Community as a member is not a question posed at the Baptism. The free decision, which the child is not yet able to make, is not taken away.

From its inception, all sacraments of The Christian Community were intended to protect the freedom of the individual.

Baptism and the Sunday Service for Children

The ritual of Baptism is like a seed; if I decide to sow it, I am also making the decision to nurture and care for the plant so that it will grow and thrive.

When parents decide to baptize their children in The Christian Community, then they are also deciding to begin a path. Every teacher guides children along a path that helps them later to find their own path in life. Baptism, too, is designed to continue as a religious path. It begins with the celebration of the Christian festivals (Christmas, Easter, etc.). It can permeate daily life with grace before meals or at bedtime, and with school age leads again to the altar in the Sunday Service for Children (follow this link for more information)

With the Baptismal act, a process is begun that can only unfold in the child through daily religious practice and participation in community prayer in the Sunday service.

Water, Salt, and Ash

Until puberty, the child is still on a journey from heaven to earth. In the Baptism of The Christian Community, the child is not immersed in water. Instead, it is touched with three consecrated substances: water, salt, and ash. In their qualities, these three represent fundamental forces of the heavenly world: spiritual mobility; clarity and constancy of soul; and the creative power to bring about something entirely new. In Baptism, these three forces are brought into connection with the child:

The forehead is baptized with consecrated water; the power to penetrate the world in an inwardly living way is laid in the thinking.
The chin is baptized with consecrated salt; the capacity to give deeds direction and meaning is laid in the will.
The chest is baptized with consecrated ash; the capacity to continually enliven one’s feelings and perception, to grow beyond one’s own orientation, is laid in the heart.

Through contact with the three consecrated substances, the natural process of connecting to the earth is permeated with the power of Christ, who brings the heavenly forces into the earth.

Why Godparents?

In early Christendom, the adult to be baptized had to renounce their old beliefs. After Baptism, they spoke the Christian creed as a statement of their new faith. With the introduction of children’s Baptism, the godparents, themselves baptized Christians, took over this function. Later, it was added that the godparents would adopt the child should the parents die.

In The Christian Community, the function of godparents has changed. After Baptism, godparents have the task of inwardly accompanying their godchild on life’s journey, watching over their destiny with loving awareness, as ‘sentinels.’

In addition to the biological parents, these two people step forward of their free will to take on responsibility for this child. This does not mean that they intervene in the parents’ daily raising of the child. Rather, as godparents, they accompany the growing child like guardian angels with their good thoughts and prayers. They care for the child’s connection to Christ and to the child’s own divine origin; and at the same time, they care for the child’s connection to their own inner star, which shines before them on their path through life.

Whoever nurtures their own relationship to Christ, and thus can walk before the child on this path, can become a godparent.

Original text by Claudio Holland. Translated and adapted by Tom Ravetz