I was once invited by a religious education group to present a talk on “Finding Meaning in Everyday Life.” I thought that topic would be a piece of cake—that is, until I started working on what I’d say. To begin with, so much comes to mind when we begin thinking of our every days—getting up on time, making breakfast, getting children off to school, or yourself off to work. That’s the schedule we think of as routine. But then every day life is also about the unexpected, the car breaking down, the alarming phone call, tripping on a rug and taking a bad fall, finding out a good friend has had a stroke, and so on.
So the question in my mind became, how do we find meaning in these daily events, not just the mundane ones, but the life shattering ones? In truth, life has taught me there’s only one way to find meaning in everything we do and experience. We have to find God in all of it. As for how we get to see God in all the minutes of our life, there’s only one way for that to happen, too. We have to have faith, a trust that can be accepted even though it brings no answers for why life goes the way it does.
We have always been taught that faith is a gift, and yet I’ve long had trouble with that. I had struggled with faith and concluded this was not a gift as we ordinarily define it. Rather, it is a relationship with Christ/God. Being a relationship, it has an energy of its own sometimes positive, sometimes negative. But it became clear to me that there truly is a gift. It’s baptism, a wonderful gift, because it brings us to the community—to the place where Christ’s existence comes alive for us. Baptism and faith, then, I saw to be two sides of the same coin.
My heritage is Italian-American. My grandmother often told me that in her home town in Southern Italy, birthdays were not very important, but baptismal days were celebrated each year. For this marked the real birth of a person. I think the Italian celebration of baptism made me understand the complexity of the sacrament. It isn’t something that is done once and then is finished. For it doesn’t end with initiation—the entry of a person into the inner circle of a community, in this case, the Church. Baptism is also immersion, symbolized by the water essential to the sacrament, where a person, or in the case of an infant, the godparents, makes a decision to plunge into the life of Christ, wear his skin, share his work, bear his cross, die with him—so that Christ’s mission of making all people kin will be continued.
Receiving the initial sacrament is no guarantee that a person will choose to accept the continual baptism, the immersion in all the situations to come which demand one’s fidelity to Christ. Baptism, to remain valid has to be lived in all we do—everyday—and that’s where it becomes linked to faith. Keeping faith is a tough call. It requires that we “put on Christ” and live everyday according to Christ’s blueprint, found in every page of the Gospels. If we do, then everyday life, from the mundane to the spectacular to the cross, has meaning.
Antoinette Bosco
