Lovers… ulp! … in church

I’m going to let you in on a sneaky church secret: Just about every priest, bishop or deacon who celebrates the sacrament of baptism has his own shtick, his own set of favorite stories for the ceremony.

I’ve got one I’ve used on and off for more than a dozen years. It goes like this:

I’ll pick on one or two kids in the congregation and haul ’em up in front of everyone. Then I’ll ask them to tell me something they want to teach the baby they’re in church to watch get baptized. Over the years I’ve gotten the easy answers: Teach the kid to read or to play soccer. And I’ve gotten the wiseacres—usually 10-year-old male cousins—who’ve said they want to teach him where to hide when mom calls, or all the bad words to use. No joke.

If you’re thinking that these aren’t very proper things to talk about at a solemn rite of baptism, bear with me. I started this, quite inadvertently, when I was baptizing the daughter of one of the couples in our parish’s sacramental-preparation program.

Theirs was a classic Catholic family: this was baby No. 6. I thought it’d be cute to ask the assorted brothers and sisters what they were going to share with their newest sibling. It went fine—until I got to the oldest.

Mary Kate was 6—she’s in college now and I’m getting old—and she was mother’s little helper … with a BIG voice.

“What are you going to teach your baby sister?” I asked, innocently enough. With a booming voice, she announced: “I’m going to teach her to MAKE love!!!”

In church. On a Sunday. With a bunch of people expecting to hear about Jesus, about faith, about babies, about salvation, about the Bible … about anything except making love. For just a moment, I thought—“hoo, boy, they’re never gonna let me do this again. …”

But wait a minute. What’s wrong with talking about becoming lovers? Isn’t that supposed to part of our faith? Making love isn’t just about sex, you know. Sometimes, we miss that dimension. Being a lover has implications beyond the obvious and the emotional and the physical.

Ultimately, making love is about relationship. And the Gospel, after all, is a love story about relationships. It’s all there: Love God, love one another, love yourself, love your neighbor, even love your enemies.

Mary Kate—being the product of a large and obviously very, ahem, loving, family—knew better than most of us. Being a lover isn’t passive. It’s active … very active, even sweaty. Successful relationships almost always are.

Relationship are hard work, inconvenient, often not very logical and more giving than getting. They need courage. They require forgiveness. They demand trust, even at the risk of treachery. Because loving your enemies means being vulnerable and sometimes getting hurt. Indifference and hatred are so much easier. But we Christians are called not to indifference or hatred, but to relationship.

Making love—which is another dimension of making peace, whether to a person, to a culture or to a nation—is much harder and more courageous than making war. Just as it’s harder to challenge injustice and easier to perpetuate it. We’ve certainly seen that in recent days regarding the death penalty.

When we look at the state of the world and the relationships and the injustices around us—injustices that flow not from love but from hate and indifference and a lack of reconciliation; when we see the likelihood of war, the scandal of corporate greed, general disrespect for life, even clerical abuses and a whole lot more, I wonder if we really do understand what 6-year-old Mary Kate knew so very well.

Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager