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For a long time the theological and spiritual interest in baptism was virtually disconnected from its cosmic significance, from the totality of man’s relation to the world.
From an act of the whole Church, involving the whole cosmos, it became a private ceremony, performed in a corner of the church by “private appointment,” and in which the Church was reduced to the “minister of sacraments” and the cosmos to the three symbolic drops of water, considered as “necessary and sufficient” for the “validity” of the sacrament.
There has been a rediscovery of the meaning of baptism as entrance and integration into the Church, of its “ecclesiological” significance. But ecclesiology, unless it is given its true cosmic perspective (“for the life of the world”), unless it is understood as the Christian form of “cosmology,” is always ecclesiolatry,
it is rather in and through baptism that we find the first and fundamental meaning of the Church.
Baptism, by its very form and elements—the water of the baptismal font, the oil of christmation—refers us inescapably to “matter,” to the world, to the cosmos.
baptism was understood as having a direct meaning for the “new time,” of which Easter is the celebration and the manifestation.
Baptism in particular has suffered an almost disastrous loss of meaning. And we must, therefore—in order to recover it—return to the “leitourgia” of the Church.
first, that the whole life of the Church is, in a way, the explication and the manifestation of baptism, and second, that baptism forms the real content, the “existential” root of what we now call “religious education.”
That is, in other words, the experience of evil which we call demonic is not that of a mere absence of good, or, for that matter, of all sorts of existential alienations and anxieties. It is indeed the presence of dark and irrational power.
The world from which the human being has received his life, and which will determine this life, is a prison. The Church did not have to wait for Kafka or Sartre to know it.
another Power has entered the world and claimed it for its true Owner. And that claim is not on souls alone, but on the totality of life, on the whole world.
The exorcisms announce the forthcoming baptism as an act of victory.
No one can be Christ’s until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight
“Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ?” says the priest, when he has turned—has converted—the catechumen to the east.
The beginning of the Christian life—of the life in the Church—is humility, obedience, and discipline.
Or rather, one must realize that water is the “matter” of sacrament, because it stands for the whole of matter, which is, in baptism, the sign and presence of the world itself.
It is the natural symbol of life, for there is no life without water, but it is also the symbol of destruction and death, and finally, it is the symbol of purification, for there is no cleanliness without it.
The blessing of water signifies the return or redemption of matter to this initial and essential meaning.
We bless and sanctify things when we offer them to God in a eucharistic movement of our whole being.
This water is manifested to us as “the grace of redemption,” the remission of sins, the remedy of infirmities.
In faith the whole world becomes the sacrament of His presence, the means of life in Him. And water, the image and presence of the world, is truly the image and presence of Christ.
the Christian is precisely the one who knows that the true reality of the world —of this world, of this life of ours—not of some mysterious “other” world—is in Christ; the Christian knows, rather, that Christ is this reality.
Baptism is thus the death of our selfishness and self-sufficiency, and it is the “likeness of Christ’s death” because Christ’s death is this unconditional self-surrender.
our dying with him unite us with the new “life in God.”
The world is again his life, and not his death, for he knows what to do with it. He is restored to the joy and power of true human nature.
The Holy Spirit confirms the whole life of the Church because He is that life, the manifestation of the Church as the “world to come,” as the joy and peace of the Kingdom.
it is not his “soul” alone—his “spiritual” or “religious” life—that is thus confirmed, but the totality of his human being.
The whole man is now made the temple of God, and his whole life is from now on a liturgy.
Nothing is “neutral.” For the Holy Spirit, as a ray of light, as a smile of joy, has “touched” all things, all time—revealing all of them as precious stones of a precious temple.
Confirmation is the opening of man to the wholeness of divine creation, to the true catholicity of life.
