Last week, our church was able to hold an infant dedication ceremony for the first time in over a year, something like infant (paedo) baptism but without the water, presumably as a kind of nod toward the position that God initiates relationship with people, especially in community, before they may even become aware of it, and that communities matter in the formation of Christian children, without going full infant baptism and maintaining a commitment to adult (credo) or believer’s baptism. We had our one-year-old son, Theo, dedicated, and some family and friends showed up in support. The infant-vs-adult baptism debate isn’t especially important to me; that’s not really how I spend my theological time these days. But it was one more reminder of the importance of the beginning of life, and whether or not a baby has a community that is dedicated to helping raise and form her according to shared values and beliefs.
Over the past few weeks, as things have opened up more and more, especially in a city like Nashville, I’ve sensed a building energy as people continue to emerge from their forced year-long hibernation. People are out, and about, and happy to be mingling and bumping into friends and even strangers. Live music performances, restaurants, bars, parks, events-there’s a buzz in the air. And at more than one moment over the past month or so, when I’ve felt this energy and pulse, I’ve turned to a friend or family member and said “Man, there’s gonna be a lot of babies born next year.”
You may have felt this same thing; some people have predicted that we are entering the next “Roaring 20s” post-COVID, that this might be some kind of “summer of love” all over again, that people are going to throw caution to the wind and live it up, because of what we all just went through and the fact that now we know it might happen again some day, though we hope it never does. It just seems like the near future, full of energy and life and eros and creative explosions, is now upon us. There is a hopefulness to it, almost a sense of adventure. It’s not universal, and we’re not fully out of the darkness of the season we’re trying to escape, but it’s out there.
In May of 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a season of darkness, in a prison cell in Berlin, in the midst of a beautiful spring and also intense bombing raids, not knowing what the future would hold for him. He was able to, on occasion, see people that he loved, and to write to them most days, particularly his best friend Eberhard Bethge and members of the Bonhoeffer family, including Eberhard’s wife, Dietrich’s niece, Renate. Renate and Eberhard had been married a year when Eberhard was able to come back home to Berlin from the front in Italy to see his wife and family, and to meet and baptize his son, Dietrich. Two of Dietrich’s letters from that time speak to the importance of babies, of baptizing them and welcoming them into communities, even in the midst of a world war, and of the importance of the kind of love that results in those babies coming into the world.