As you know, I’m a wedding photographer so I know how much we (people in general) celebrate weddings, but baptisms we don’t celebrate as much. I think we should.
My first two daughter were baptized before I met Christ in the movement and He became everything for me. Effectively and actually their baptisms were just as important as Betty’s will be. But, now that I know Christ, Sunday was huge day for me. Betty’s baptized. Christ claimed her with His love. It is everything to me that my daughters will know Him.
The new birth, as His Eminence Cardinal Scola explained very well to us yesterday, happens in a moment, in Baptism. He told us, “In Baptism every man is conceived anew as a son in the Son and from here, for the baptized, a new conception of self has its origin. [Thus] man is conceived as a Christian in Baptism.” It’s from that point, from that instant that I can say, as the Pope said and Cardinal Scola reminded us, “I, but no longer I.” This is the formula of Christian existence founded in Baptism, and this happened once for all in Baptism, so much so that we say that it imposes a “character”: something happens in Baptism and nothing can erase it. Why can’t it be erased? Because it is a gesture of Christ, who takes all of me and tells me, making it come true, “You are Mine; you belong to Me. You have decided, in asking for Baptism, to stop belonging to you in order to belong to Me. I am your new awareness,” and this bond that Christ creates with me in that instant is forever. This is crucial for our certainty, because it does not depend on the fact that I am good or not so good. It does not depend on me, on my capacity; it is a gesture that is entirely Christ’s. This is why, even if I forget, or I go away, or I slip up in front of everybody (like during the persecutions when Christians who would deny Christ did not have to repeat Baptism), I am not capable of breaking the bond that Christ established with me, so powerful is it. Any father can understand this: what can a son do to him that would kill that bond? Nothing. It’s not hard to understand, and if we who are wretches can do this, let’s imagine what Christ can do!
So, this happens once for all in Baptism. And if Baptism was received as children, the Cardinal went on, as it was for most of us, it blossoms in a new conception of life when one’s own personal encounter with Jesus in the Church takes place. For this grace that we have received in Baptism to blossom and to reach all the areas of life, all the details of our existence, a journey is required. Father Giussani used a phrase that always struck me: “The encounter of Christ with our lives, by which He has begun to become a real event for us, the impact of Christ with our lives, starting from which He was moved toward us and began, as a vir pugnator, a battle for the ‘invasion’ of our existence, is called Baptism.”
This is why what happens in that instant has all of life as its scope.
Look at what a gap in awareness—not that it’s not true that I belong to Christ, thanks to grace, thanks to this bond that Christ establishes with me—but what an abyss there is between where we are and living with this awareness! If you want to realize how much we are invaded by distraction, suffice it to think when the last time was that a person, on becoming fully aware of this fact, was moved to the marrow. And how much work remains to be done so that this, which is true, will be assimilated by us as awareness, will become a judgment that fully carries my person along, my awareness, my sensitivity, my affection, everything!
This is why the encounter, as we recalled, due to the grace of the charism, makes the grace of Baptism persuasive and makes it more and more our own through a personal history. We have been gathered together with one another for this reason. There is no purpose for our being together other than for what happened in Baptism to become mine, become yours, become ours. This is the reason we belong to the Church, and this is why the Holy Spirit continues to inspire charisms, that is, operative modalities that make the grace of Christ more persuasive, so that the novelty that this grace introduced into our lives can invade us more and more.-Father Julian Carron http://www.clonline.us/readings/fe2010_text.pdf
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