Baptism Anniversary Quotes

Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn't.

And then it occurred to me the other day . . . almost like a light bulb going off above my head as I sat and pondered my singleness, and the answer became crystal clear. Why does singleness have this overwhelmingly negative connotation? Because we don’t celebrate our singles. Like, at all. We just don’t. I mean, yeah . . . we have birthdays, of course . . . but who over the age of about twenty-five really makes a big deal out of their birthday? And besides, everybody has a birthday, so that doesn’t count. We simply don’t celebrate our singles. We celebrate our couples for making the decision to get married. We celebrate them again once they actually get married. We celebrate their choice to start a family (and then celebrate them again and again and sometimes again and again and again when they decide to expand that family). We celebrate the anniversaries of their marriages and the christenings and baptisms of their babies and their kids’ birthdays and their buying of a new home or choosing to adopt. Sometimes we even celebrate when they decide to end their marriage. But we simply don’t celebrate our singles.

My own take on St. Valentine’s Day is influenced by the fact that it’s the anniversary of my baptism. Baptism is the beginning of a love affair with God that issues into eternal life. It is also the sacrament that makes participation in all the other sacraments, including marriage, possible.

each person who is baptized receives a baptismal candle to take home. They are encouraged to bring out the candle each year and to light it on their baptismal anniversary.

Over and over again in our music, liturgies, displayed artwork, and language and word choices, we have reinforced the idea that white is holy and black equals sin. These passive suggestions have created an entire subconscious theology of race. For example, most pastors wear a white alb or surplice while they lead worship—using whiteness to represent baptism, purity, and closeness to the creator. We’ve never stopped to ask why we equate the color white to goodness. Every day we sit in church, we are being subtly fed this narrative about whiteness—a narrative that is at work in all of us consciously or subconsciously. The person who administers the sacraments: clothed in white. The colors of resurrection and ultimate victory: white. The candle you light at the anniversary of your child’s baptism: white. The message is clear, whether we realize it or not. White equals pure. And the inverse is also true: the absence of white—darkness or blackness—equals bad or evil.

Is life only a recurring dream or nightmare dredged up from the strata and layers of your subconscious? A fable or fairy tale you absorbed sitting on the lap of your monkey uncle or your ancestral ant? All the lies we had to tell just to survive, and all those who died, Who has any humanity left? What reason do we have to go on like this, depending on the little holidays and celebrations, birthdays, weddings and graduations, anniversaries, communions, baptisms, deaths, assassinations, all these events to mark our passage through space, crawling over the face of this earth with such determination and purpose? Is it only our fear of death that's kept us going so long? You cease, and then what? Will things change so much? You disintergrate into that churning flurry, our siblings of the earth, beetles and larvae, microbes and bacteria, tilling the soil with their mandibles and pincers, their claws, jaws and specialized proboscises, infusing and secreting acids and enzymes and detergents, they'll have us tilled up in no time, turned into compost, humus, ready for the spring planting. And that age-old problem of the thing called I? No more. Subsumed by we, they, the writhing mass of existence. For lack of a better word call it God, call it eternity. Better still, call down to the deli, order us all a pizza. We'll need our strength for the struggle ahead. To the ramparts, boys and girls. Carpe diem.