A life in letters: Baptism 1

Christians are united in recognising the importance of baptism, but hold different views on who should be baptised, and the manner in which baptism should be carried out. Some churches baptise the infants of believing parents as a sign that they are in some sense already members of God’s family, in anticipation of the longed-for day when, prompted by the grace of God and nurtured by the community of believers they make their own, personal commitment to the faith in which they have been brought up. Roman Catholics, indeed, believe that it is the very act of baptising an infant which carries it into the church. 

Other Christians, however, noting that in the New Testament the candidates for baptism who are specifically mentioned are all adults, and that the outward symbol of baptism is seen as a sign of the inner transformation and cleansing which occurs when we come to faith, insist that baptism is part of the initiation process for those who are coming to personal faith after mature reflection. In addition, rather than baptising by sprinkling with a few drops of water, they totally immerse those being baptised in a tank of water, symbolising the spiritual death and resurrection of the new convert as the benefits of Christ’s dying and returning to life become a reality in their life. It was this second view of baptism which prevailed in the church my parents and I attended.

When I was 16, some time after telling the fateful lie claiming to have been converted, I completed the form applying for baptism and membership of Carluke Baptist Church simply because this was the next step expected of me. I sat at the typewriter, conscious of my hypocrisy. Prior to being baptised, you attended ‘baptism classes’ with the minister, conducted in the small church vestry. Had the pastor been just a little more sensitive as he talked me through the significance of what I was about to do, had he questioned me with a compassionate probing, had he been able to convey to me that it was safe to be real, he must surely have uncovered the confused mix of hypocrisy and yearning in my heart, for I think I would have welcomed the opportunity to come clean. As it was he made assumptions without questioning, and I continued to play my game.

The  date for the baptism of myself and a couple of others was fixed for Sunday 1^st September 1968 a year after my supposed conversion. All summer, I was filled with dread at the prospect. I was almost sure that God’s wrath at my falseness would be unleashed as I stepped down into the water, and subsequently as I took for the first time the bread and wine at communion, having been accepted into membership of the church. Didn’t the New Testament say ‘Whosoever eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself’?

There was to be a Sunday concert in the Royal Albert Hall Proms season on the appointed night - a concert performance conducted by Colin Davis of Berlioz’s opera The Trojans. I thought, fancifully, that this wonderful music would be in the airwaves all around me when I went down into the waters of God’s wrath, and in this there was a terrible poignancy.

The day arrived. Those of us who were to be baptised sat at the front of the church, the guys in short-sleeved shirts and casual trousers, the girls wearing long purple robes, weighted with lumps of lead so that they didn’t float up revealingly at the crucial moment. My father sat beside me. When the time came, I went forward, walked up on to the platform, and down the steps into warm water in the old, tile-lined cistern. I clasped my hands together in front of my chest, and the minister put his left hand over them. His right hand he placed on my shoulders. ‘On your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,’ said the minister and then, pushed me back, down into the water, before returning me to a standing position. Later he said it had been hard to get me under. It was, he said, as though I were resisting him.

Dripping copiously, I walked out of the water and through to the little room at the back where I dried myself and put on a change of clothes. My father passed me a towel, and I thought I saw tears in his eyes. ‘Little does he know,’ I said to myself sadly. Back in church the bread and wine was passed from person to person symbolising the death of Christ for his people, wine representing  his blood, bread for his body. For the first time I took one of the tiny, melt-on-your tongue cubes of white bread, and drank from the individual glass cup filled with a sweet cordial and I didn’t die. Not that Sunday.

But each week thereafter, as I morosely toyed with the bacon and egg my mother made for breakfast as a Sunday treat, I couldn’t forget that once again I would be eating bread and drinking wine unworthily. Would this be the week judgement was unleashed?