The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition. Kenneth Stevenson

      1

      Conversation with History

      It is a sense of fracture or a sense of imprisonment that sends historians back to the archives, the memoirs, the tape-recorded voices. Yet this relation between loss and the imagination is full of irony. History has less authority than memory, less legitimacy than tradition. History can never speak with the one voice that our need for belonging requires.¹

      When were you baptized? I cannot remember my own baptism in the same way that I can remember where I was when I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated or that Mrs Thatcher had resigned. But I have done some digging into the family archives and have put together something of my personal history. I discovered that I was baptized on the afternoon of Saturday 17 December 1949 in St Peter’s Church, Musselburgh. The family used to attend that church and the Rector was one of my godparents. The service was taken by Canon John Ballard, who had just seen my father through to becoming a Reader in the diocese of Edinburgh. The church building, moreover, became a familiar sight in later years when we moved further away, because it stands on what was then the main road into Edinburgh. I am told that my baptism was only attended by family and close friends. There was a virtual repeat performance for my sister in the spring of 1954, and according to one piece of family folklore I fell asleep towards the end of the reception afterwards because I went around emptying everyone’s sherry glasses.

      Then in the summer of 1958 it was arranged that my brother and I should be confirmed along with the rest of the group of young people in the congregation at St Anne’s, Dunbar. To save my brother and me a journey on a weekday evening over a period of weeks, the Rector kindly came and prepared us both for confirmation. I remember his kindness and his carefulness in explaining all manner of things to do with Christian faith and worship. He was always ready to answer questions. And he patiently put up with our interruptions.

      All this led to the confirmation service on Saturday, 20 December 1958 in St Anne’s by Kenneth Warner, Bishop of Edinburgh. I remember the service well, particularly because it was postponed a week at a day’s notice; one of the border clergy had died and the Bishop had to go and take the funeral. My brother and I were given our confirmation presents – a watch each – a week in advance, to make up for the disappointment. The service left quite an impression on me. We all sat in the front pews on the north side of the central aisle, and our families and friends huddled around us and sang the hymns lustily. I recall noting how odd it was that the Bishop sat in his chair, even for the hymns. He wore a red and gold cope and my father acted as his Chaplain. As we came up one by one the Rector, Edmund Ivens, called out our names. I remember the touch of the Bishop’s hands. I remember too being told to wait after the service for the Bishop to come and give us our confirmation card. The wait seemed like an age. But he eventually appeared, wearing just a cassock, and told us that the card was ‘a record of our confirmation’. We duly went up and had a less formal contact with him, and then we went home, with our families.

      But there was one rather strange event that day. We gathered in the church in the morning for a rehearsal, and suddenly there was a baptism. One of the candidates had not been baptized, and now he was to be baptized surrounded by his fellow confirmation candidates! We were the congregation as no family or friends seemed to want to be there. I was asked to be one of the servers in order to assist the Rector through the service, even though I did not have much of a clue as to what was happening. But the other Reader in the parish who presented this young lad for baptism took care to find the service for each one of us in the Prayer Book. I remember him distinctly saying to himself in each case ‘the baptism of those of riper years’ – and adding humorously, ‘nothing to do with orange and apples’. At the service, the candidate stood against the font, and the Rector poured water over his head with a mother-of-pearl shell. It all seemed like a routine that was being gone through in as dignified a way as possible. But it left an impression. Finally, on the next morning, we all took communion at the early Eucharist, a quiet service in the traditional style, and from that time onwards our Christian lives progressed and regressed with the passage of years.

      It is indeed a ‘sense of fracture’ as well as a mild ‘sense of imprisonment’ (to borrow from Ignatieff ) that sends me back to the family memoirs as I reconstruct those events from remembered conversations with those who took part. There is for me an inevitable sense of loss, for it is the past, a past that has changed almost beyond recognition, not least over matters of liturgy. Liturgical practice over baptism and confirmation does still vary a great deal but I would hazard a guess that the scenario described above would be different now. The child of practising Anglican parents today would be baptized during a Sunday morning Eucharist in St Peter’s, Musselburgh. The Bishop of Edinburgh would have come to St Anne’s, Dunbar on a Sunday morning to celebrate what is often regarded as the richest form of Eucharist, one in which baptism and confirmation take their full place. There would be one service, not three. And the young lad would be baptized by the Bishop – for all to see. I expect, too, that the candidates for confirmation would nowadays be prepared not only by the local Rector but by lay people as well.

      But to borrow again from Ignatieff, ‘History can never speak with the one voice that our need for belonging requires’, and that is very much the theme of the pages that follow. Christian belonging is about many things. It is about the welcome at the back of church. It is about the encouragement of family and friends. It is about the capacity to ask God the difficult questions that are at the time unanswerable when tragedy strikes, rather than giving up on him altogether. Christian belonging has a special and primal place at the font, in the rough and tumble of a community getting to grips with the Christian faith through its young, in the confirmation preparation, and in the regular celebration of the Eucharist. The fragmented picture of my own passage through these various rites may be somewhat out of date in contemporary terms but it has nonetheless been the way in which Christians have been nurtured for many centuries. Indeed, the fragmented nature of Christian experience is very much a given aspect of our lives. We can never arrange things so neatly that God is gift-wrapped, cut-priced, and easily available.

      This is what makes sacraments so fascinating, particularly the two main sacraments, baptism and Eucharist. In water and in bread and wine the Church is given the equipment to wash in rebirth and to feed her members. So often in history the Church has had to walk something of a tightrope between saying (on the one hand) that sacraments are important, vital, gifts of God, actions of the Church, in which certain important things happen, and (on the other hand) saying that they are part of a wider whole, the means for the journey of faith, patterns of divine life in which we can live and grow, events to focus on but not to confine God within them.