For many of us, I suppose, baptism is a scene from a world apart. We watch the pastor or priest pour the “holy water” at a worship service. We remember our own baptism, or more likely, we recall that we were baptized. In “The Forum” of USA Today’s Monday, October 26 edition, Dean Nelson gives us the larger and livelier picture with his recollection of the movie, “The Shawshank Redemption:”
“…Tim Robbins’ character serves a life sentence for a crime he did not commit, but he eventually escapes through the prison’s sewer system, makes it through the outfall pipe and collapses in a river. He staggers to his feet, and in a deafening downpour, lightning flashing around him, he stumbles through the water from the earth and the sky, takes off his prison clothing and heads toward freedom. When I first saw that scene, all I could think of was one word – baptism. He had just crawled through some of the worst muck imaginable. He had just lived through the worst life imaginable. And now he’s in the water, shedding his old self.”
What a marvelous description! For a long time, The Shawshank Redemption has been at the top of my list of favorite movies, and now writer Dean Nelson has just articulated another reason it appeals so deeply to me. The spiritual dimension of life itself flows through the movie, even, as Nelson insists, the sacramental character of life. The more-than-mundane in the mundane. The holy in the ordinary.
I found myself considering the baptismal elements in the scene Nelson describes. Here are a few:
- Immersion in the water
- Being washed by the water
- Shedding old garments to receive new
- Leaving behind the old life
- Facing the new with all kinds of emotions: fear, joy, uncertainty, etc.
- Moving into freedom.
Nelson’s article includes the Celtic insight that there are “thin spaces” between this world and the greater unseen world. Ordinary activities have more going on within them than we take in with our senses. We often miss this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Nelson concludes, “Wearing the lens of the sacraments can show us that it has been there all along, hiding in plain sight.” The title to his recent book indicates the same, God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World.
Baptismal spirituality is part of that seeing, a way to know God when God often seems absent. And sacraments like baptism , I would add, help us name our experience as one of “the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” I look forward to reading Nelson’s book to nurture my own spiritual awareness.
