When Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, wrote The Shape of Baptism (it was published in 1978), the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults was still extremely novel and not well-comprehended, even among liturgists. Bewildered by specific texts and rubrics, many pastors set it aside as impractical. Except among a few visionaries, there was hardly any deep appreciation of the powerful roots of Christian initiation, or what the renewal of initiation might call us to as church.
Out of this situation, Kavanagh’s book emerged to become a classic. By this I mean several things. It was widely influential in shaping the imagination of an entire generation of scholars, pastors, priests, religious and lay leaders in the US. Not everybody read it first hand, but it was instantly widely quoted, and continues to be quoted to this day. (Everyone stole from Kavanagh!) It’s also a classic in that it continues to produce. One can read this book today and still find insights that challenge. He asked fertile questions, and delved deeply into fundamental issues that are still with us.
I recently went back to the book (looking for one of those unattributed quotations!), and came across a passage I thought might be interesting to discuss here. It follows a passage on sacraments in their ecclesial context. Here it is (my emphasis in bold):
Finally, lest all this seem like much ado about what might still remain liturgically very little, the symbolic elements involved in the sacraments of initiation will have to regain much of the robustness that has always been intrinsically theirs. Water and oil on the skin, the aroma of chrism, the taste of bread and wine (and perhaps even Hippolytus’ milk mixed with honey), the sounds of songs and ovations, the sight of the assembly rejoicing, the touch of another’s hands, a kiss of peace and welcome–all these elements should work in harmony. They give both the baptized and the Church baptizing its multidimensional, catholic, paschal, and therefore irreducible orientation in Christ. In a culture trained largely by words and visual “messages” that try to develop intellectual conceptualization, it is even more crucial than it ever has been to give Christians more than concepts alone, as important as these are. Christians individually and corporately also need access to a radical experience and sense of rightness; of standing at an axial spot from which everything radiates out and to which everything falls home; of dwelling splendidly at the center of things. This experience and sense form the basic orientation that must undergird the whole of ecclesial life, going far beyond the audio-visual aids of the classroom or the devotional aids purveyed by ecclesiastic goods companies.
Basic orientation mobilizes one’s whole sense of where one stands toward one’s need to survive in the present and the future. It raises the organism to a peak of physical and psychic coordination where it “knows” to a degree otherwise unobtainable. The dog “points” its game; the wrestler prepares to attack; the blind touch and thus “see”; the mystic moves from mere meditation into true contemplation; lovers exclude all else in their mutual gaze. The Church baptizes. The senses of touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste lose their separateness to fuse into one state of perception. The eye penetrates the icon; smell ingests the environment and the body occupies it, tasting it on the tongue as the ears devour its sound. Perception fuses in space with time, and a thing is not just known but possessed with such indelible an intensity that it will never be forgotten. But it can never be put into words alone.
The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christian Initiation (NY; Pueblo Publishing Company, 1978), p. 178-179
I was especially intrigued by the part about “standing on an axial spot from which everything radiates out.” My impression is that we haven’t gotten there yet, at least in most cases, and we don’t by and large even consider it as a possibility. The sacraments are something we do to people, or give to people, or celebrate with people. A moment. A gift. An event. Establishing an orientation “from which everything radiates out” is simply not on our agenda, because we don’t think in those terms. At least I never hear it talked about in those terms. Yet it may indeed be the missing piece.
Our task is complicated by the fact that in our postmodern world there are no right places. Everything is relative. We are incredibly protean. Every point is equally good as any other, and any suggestion to the contrary is suspected at once of being intolerant and narrow.
But I think that having a place to stand, in the sense that Kavanagh evokes it here — fusing the senses into a radical sense of rightness, on the center which is Christ — is actually a strong basis from which a healthy openness to the experience of others may genuinely flow.
The robust engagement of the senses is an idea that has been on the agenda of the liturgical renewal, but I wonder if it has borne the fruit it should. I wonder this, not because we still use little dabs or oil or baptize in punch bowls — although minimalism remains a problem — but because even when we use bigger symbols we don’t “get it” about “dwelling splendidly at the center of things.”
What do you think?
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