The world we come into at birth is not a perfect world. We may be unlucky enough to have a dysfunctual famiy. We may have our options limited by poverty. These and many others are the sins of the past that we inherit and that can limit our spiritual growth. They are not however removed at Baptism. By accepting ourselves as we are and in the relationship we have with others we may find the strength to overcome the limitations of our environment and our own physical and mental limitations. What has happened in the past has deep roots and leaves a long trail and in this way we are born into sin – not the sin of Adam and Eve but a world that still suffers from previous generations who failed to express the love Jesus called on us to make the centre point of our lives.
The story of Adam and Eve tells us that in accepting the self awareness that is the essential part of what separates us from the animals we take on the task of discovering for ourselves who we are, where we come from and how we relate to the rest of creation. This is fraught with danger as well as opening up the wonderful discoveries of science that are still transforming the world we live in. This is what we inherited from them – danger yes but above all opportunity to learn to really LOVE – ourselves each other, our God, and the whole of creation.

Years ago I gave some thought to this phrase. i finally decided that we probably had it upside down. If we do not forgive someone then within our hearts and in our consequent actions we keep alive the effects of an action. Let go and let God.. We do the binding.

When we give freedom to someone to work out for themselves an understanding of life that satisfies them at least at this stage in their lives, we open up the possibility that they will come to a deeper and truer understanding of what is. Demanding belief keeps minds and hearts closed (bound).

With my own children I tried to show that you can never prove a point by force and with their agreement gave them a gentle chinese burn till they agreed that 2+2 =5. It did not take them long to realise that at some point they would agree wholeheartedly while still KNOWING that two and two make four. New Testament teaching calls us to be authentic in what we accept.

No one is saying that a baby could be personally responsible for any wrongdoing. ‘Sins’, in context, refers to wrongdoing before Baptism (irrelevant in the case of a baby) together with the effects of Original Sin. My apologies to Terry for mentioning this latter Catholic belief which he finds so odious.

Can God be limited? I guess so, if He chooses to be. Catholics place a lot of emphasis on the biblical passages referring to ‘binding on Earth hence binding in Heaven’, etc.

St Augustine. Isn’t it fascinating that he is a power-hungry, misogynist liar (paraphrasing Terry) when you don’t agree with him, but a reliable Doctor of the Church if his authority happens to be convenient on another point. He would have thought of Baptism of Desire as a desire to enter the Catholic church through Baptism, thwarted by events beyond your control. However, If your ‘desire’ was to have a nice, feel-good, Terry-style naming ceremony, well … that’s very likely what you got.

All of this talk about “validity” of sacraments makes a couple of assumptions.
The first is that God cannot act unless we get it right . . . or to put a fine a point on it . . . God is limited by the way in which things are done. Question: can God be limited?

One has to ask who is that baptises, celebrates the Eucharist, or ordains to holy orders? It is said to be Christ himself and the Holy Spirit, acting through a human agent, usually a male, ordained person. Although it is said that anyone can be an agent for baptism . . . even a Jewish doctor.

Do we have to ask questions like . . . were the correct words spoken, in the correct order, and were the correct manual acts (blessings etc) performed? Now it is one thing to set out a normal usage for this as the Church does. It is God (note: God, not a bishop or priest or other human being) who does baptising, presiding, or ordaining). If this imbroglio is correct, then we then finish up by saying that God, the creator of the universe, is limited by whether we do something correctly or incorrectly. What we are saying is that God cannot be generous because a mistake is made (and the question of whether a mistake is a mistake can be debated. This really gets down to claiming that God can only act within OUR rules. Excuse me . . . who set the whole thing up first . . . I think we have the whole thing in reverse!

The second assumption is that in certain situations such as the disputed baptisms which are the subjects of the articles above, the troglodytes from the church are saying that God is actually choosing not to act. What those who maintain the baptisms referred to above are invalid are really saying is that God has made a deliberate choice here. God has decided that this child/person will not be baptised because somebody spoke some incorrect words, or performed a manual act in a less than perfect way. To those who maintain this, I would ask, “Just how petty is your God?” This seems to be a little power game played by human beings . . . not much different from the kindergarten games some of us played at school to exclude others such as . . . “you can’t come to my place to play because you don’t wear the right coloured socks, or because you don’t wave the right way, or whatever, so nur!”

The consequences of this kind of thinking is in fact, a redefinition of God. If the creator is, as we were all taught, omnipotent, omniscient, and all good, then it is not possible for God to be petty and unloving. And the legalistic being who rejects people on technical grounds, is not the God whom Jesus redefined from the jealous, tribal God we read about in the old Testament.

One final point: St Augustine of Hippo made the point that it is possible for somebody who was not able to have the sacrament of baptism physically administered to their body, to receive what he called “Baptism by desire” . . . unless St Augustine has been discredited in recent times, and is no longer regarded as one of the fathers of the Church, (and even if the dreadful scenario painted by the Church of children not belonging applies, and I don’t for one minute think it does), why would not St Augustine’s definition of baptism by desire not apply here?

Or perhaps it’s just another little power game?