Life Again!

What a wonderful person! That’s what I thought on Wednesday morning as I read about Earl Madary while I was eating breakfast. A professor at Viterbo University, he seemed to embody the qualities he taught, walking the world with wonder and awe. How sad, I thought, to be getting acquainted with him through a story about his death. That story began, “Earl Madary loved the water,” so I shouldn’t have been surprised about what I was reading three days later. 

La Crosse Tribune writer Joe Orso did the follow-up piece too on the funeral Mass at San Damiano Chapel on the Viterbo campus. Below the program’s cover of St. Francis of Assisi spinning in dance were these words after Madary’s name:

Born to life: May 1, 1965

Born to eternal life: December 16, 2007

Joe Orso’s comment was that “I hadn’t seen ‘death’ written as ‘life’ before. When I read the words, my heart felt like it bloomed.” 

Ah, yes, I thought, that’s exactly the right response. Joe went on to say other wonderful things, but I want to add: Here is baptismal spirituality at its center. Here is what God is doing all the time and it comes to its fullest and final expression in the movement from death to eternal life. 

Notice I said “its fullest expression.” God is always bringing life out of death, beginnings out of our human endings. I am sure God used Earl Madary in the classroom to stir faith where it hardly existed. It happened when, as a longtime friend and colleague of his put it, Earl “would turn ordinary events into extraordinary encounters.” This man saw and practiced the wisdom of being generous and full of grace rather than hard-edged or critical. And in all this, God was doing what God did in Earl’s baptism – moving from death to life. 

Oh, death is hard. We ache for Earl Madary’s family and friends. Their loss is so great. But they have known great love and faith, and that helps them. Christian baptismal spirituality means that the last word is life. We go from this life to eternal life. We even go from death to life. The certainty was set long ago, the day of our baptism, when we died with Christ and rose with him. Life is the last word.  

How appropriate and beautiful, I thought, that the Tribune provided a link to listen to Madary performing his song, “I Go to the Water to Remember You.” Even that sounds baptismal.

A New Holy Water?

The Belief Watch article in the December 17 Newsweek, “Bless This Bottled Water,” gives a new twist on “holy water.” 

Ambitious entrepreneurs are bottling under labels like “Holy Drinking Water” and “Spiritual Water.” Labels of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, for example, adorn some bottles, along the Hail Mary, making this water help you “stay focused, believe in yourself, and believe in God.” Other water even claims to have good vibrations promoting a positive outlook. Interesting! 

The Franciscan Sisters in northern Minnesota have launched a letter-writing campaign against large producers of bottled water. “Water is life.” Sister Mary Zirbes adds, “It really should not be a commodity to be bought” – presumably under any label, secular or religious. 

A baptismal spirituality resonates with the line, “Water is life.” God, who created water, uses it again in baptism for a new creation. In the process water blesses us twice, creation and re-creation. If you’re baptized, it’s harder and harder not to appreciate the wonder, the beauty, and the life-power of water. And water links us with the whole world, connecting us to people everywhere by its free-flowing movements and wind-blown rain clouds. If Christian baptism creates separation by making us part of a new community of faith, the church, we still need to remember that the baptismal water forever links us to the people of every place and race. Water is baptismal spirituality’s truth of interdependence: our lives are always intertwined with others on earth. 

Sister Mary sounds the truth: “Water is life.” Water doesn’t belong to any one of us, any more than the air we breathe. (Like ranchers of the old west, our world may increasingly be drawn into fights about our “water rights.”) How we can increasingly love and care for the water of our interdependence is one of the great issues of our time. Could it be if we do a better job on this that we will be treating water as more holy than buying it bottled with a picture of Jesus?