Sunday/Baptism

 

                                                        Sunday/Baptism

Today is the Baptism of Christ, where Christ joins human ritual and symbolism and is baptized by John. There is a tolerant, understanding quality about his joining; one can see a smiling condescending Christ among us as he agrees to the event. But it is more, a peculiar, complex scene where Christ--a mosaic himself--is caught in a moment as part of a larger mosaic, where Christ is both complete and part of something larger, a scene to drive Arians mad.

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the façade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
(Seamus Heaney)