Each chapter of my book Water for Your Soul ends with a haiku verse under the heading, “Reflections on the water.” For example, here’s the verse from chapter 11:
eyes sprung wide open
staring into space for sleep
and for God
If you are thinking, what in the world is that about, that’s okay! It’s what I intended – that you begin thinking about this. Of course, I trust it’ll make more sense when you’ve read the pages before it. Even then I want you my reader to think about baptism: how what happens here touches your life today, how you can be surprised by it, how you didn’t really leave it behind long ago. Let your heart and mind be opened!
Baptism is not closed event but an opening one. Sometimes we treat baptism as “done,” even “getting our child done.” We move on as if that’s over and now we can get to the rest of our lives, all the things we ourselves decide are important without divine interference. But baptismal spirituality sees baptism differently – as a real beginning and as our opening to God and God’s new world.
Perhaps we should think of our baptized life as a flower. We are blooms opened by God and called to be open to God’s working in us and around us. Instead of thinking we know all we need to know about the mystery of God, God calls us to see this baptismal water seeping into every corner of life and invites us to see and experience his hand at work where we had not. Baptism gives life. Baptism opens us to life with God.
Henry Van Dyke has the beautiful line in Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” that “hearts unfold like flow’rs before thee” [God]. Baptism is the unfolding and opening work of God who calls and invites us into becoming who we really are, children of God. What a promise, what an adventure! As we journey, John writes, “What we do know is this: when [Christ] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (I John 3:2b).
Never walk away from a baptism, your own or your child’s or another’s, with a closed heart. God has much more in mind for us.
Tags: Henry Van Dyke, Hymn to Joy, spirituality
