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You are > Home > To baptise or not to baptise?
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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
To baptise or not to baptise?
By Fr Brendan Hoban
A parishioner called recently and presented me with a stark question: In the present circumstances give me a reason for baptising my child?
You could see how his mind was working. Tumbling out of his television every evening was a deluge of bad news about the Catholic Church in Ireland, a tsunami that seemingly is never going to ebb. His question implicitly was: Why should I involve my child in all this? Why complicate his life? Why should I encourage him to join a losing team? And not just losing but 6-0 down and facing into the stiffest of stiff winds in the second-half.
You can see his point. The media consensus is that the Catholic Church is finished in Ireland, and the death of organised religion is only around the corner. The latest survey suggests that only 32 per cent of Irish Catholics trust the Church now. (People thought that before, of course, but perception seems more important now than truth.)
While we might take refuge in the dismal prospect of having some personal spirituality and profess a vague belief in some kind of God, the growing impression is that we are at the end of something, that doors are gradually closing on the religious enterprise. Now it almost seems that we’re arriving at a point when believing in nothing seems preferable to believing in anything.
An indication of how serious things are is that earlier question: why should I baptise my child? Once, baptising a newborn child was automatic and instinctive, part of the way things were. Then we moved on to a stage of baptising children to keep grandparents happy. Or, at least, pointing a child towards God. Now the climate allows people to question the tradition and the wisdom and to point their child in a different direction. Or, more usually, in no direction at all.
Some ask the question as a way of accepting that they have no interest in religion anymore, have no intention of practising in whatever denomination they were born into and want to give their child the same secular perspective. Others, with bad experiences and memories of religion or religion’s representatives, just want to give religion a wide berth.
Yet, at the same time, most couples want some kind of ritual, some naming ceremony to mark the birth, some occasion like a christening minus the religion bit. There are secular ceremonies now where parents can have a naming ritual they can devise themselves with some appropriate music and poetry, Rudyard Kipling’s If or a passage from the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Or some such like.
But how satisfying is a ceremony people structure for themselves in an effective vacuum, without any hinterland to give it substance, without the benefit of a living tradition, without the rites and rituals honed over centuries.
The reality is that the nature of ritual is that a rite becomes a ritual through usage and the reality too is that individual ritual tends to deteriorate into tree-hugging or some such specious nonsense without the support of a vibrant heritage to give it substance and to provide some continuity. Of their nature rites and rituals lose their impact if you just make them up on the hoof. They may mean something to you but what do they mean to anyone else?
It is one of the sad ironies of our present situation that progressively people feel inclined to jettison the whole religious enterprise on the grounds that it’s problematic or even that it diminishes and debilitates when, in effect, the scaffolding of religion provides a backdrop for a ritual that sustains and supports people as they struggle to make their way in the world. And parents who decide not to baptise their children often have little sense of how much they are depriving their children of that living stream of ritual and tradition that will help them cope with life.
Of course, couples decide to baptise their children for different reasons: they believe in God and want their child to believe in God; the grandparents factor; the sense that there’s no point in closing off possibilities of belief; the belief that it entitles them to the best school; or maybe they just need a handy naming and gathering ceremony as a prelude to a party to celebrate the birth of their child. Or sometimes a combination of all four.
After a few years, as a priest, you can pick up the different vibes from couples at the baptism of their child. For some baptism is a special moment as they point their child in the direction of a religious faith and the rich tradition of Christian ritual that sustains it. For others it’s somewhere along the spectrum between a nod in the direction of that religious perspective and being there because no one has any better idea what else to do.
As a priest I find faith-less baptisms lifeless, uninspiring and the most difficult of all ceremonies to do. Even if a couple getting married seem to have little enough faith there’s usually enough love between them to give the moment a religious significance. Or even at faithless funerals there’s enough faith present in the congregation to place life and death in a faith context. But in a baptism that’s no more than an introduction to a party, I find myself just waiting for it to end, getting through the ritual rather than savouring its meaning. I console myself with the belief that even if the parents have no interest in religion, the child may one day choose to be part of a living stream of Christian ritual and worship that will enrich his or her life into the future.
And even that seems better than standing in the middle of a garden at the back of a house mouthing mumbo-jumbo. Of course what a priest does can also be dismissed as mumbo-jumbo too but at least it has lasted for 20 centuries and has a rich tradition to sustain it. How long will the tree-hugging last?
And what does it mean?
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