A Rite of Passage
August 10, 2009
Aidan Kavanaugh was professor of liturgy at the Divinity School of Yale University. He told the following story within a lecture delivered in August 1997 at the Theology Institute held at Holy Cross Abbey in Canon City, Colorado. It was printed in Liturgy 70 with Father Aidan’s kind permission, and was read to me last week by Craig Satterlee.  I thought it might be an interesting read for Transmissioners while we continue exploring our relationship with sacraments.
I have always rather liked the gruff robustness of the first rubric for baptism found in a late fourth-century church order which directs that the bishop enter the vestibule of the baptistry and say to the catechumens without commentary or apology only four words: “Take off your clothes.” There is no evidence that the assistants fainted or the catechumens asked what he meant. Catechesis and much prayer and fasting had led them to understand that the language of their passage this night in Christ from death to life would be the language of the bathhouse and the tomb – not that of the forum and the drawing room.
So they stripped and stood there, probably, faint from fasting , shivering from the cold of early Easter morning and with awe at what was about to be consummated; years of having their motives and lives scrutinized; years of hearing the word of God read and expounded at worship; years of being dismissed with prayer before the Faithful went on to celebrate the eucharist; years of having the doors to the assembly hall closed to them; years of seeing the tomb-like baptistry building only from without; years of hearing the old folks of the community tell hair-raising tales of what being a Christian had cost their own grandparents when the emperors were still pagan; years of running into a reticent and reverent vagueness concerning what was actually done by the Faithful at the breaking of bread and in that closed baptistry . . . . tonight all this was about to end as they stood here naked on a cold floor in the gloom of this eerie room.