Can we live in harmony with nature? (Is there any way to be saved without baptism?) 

We are at odds with our natural environment.  We breathe its air, we eat of its foods and flocks, we drink its water.  Yet in the last hundred and fifty years we have shamefully exploited it (whether we live in capitalist or socialist countries).  We pollute the air, we strip the land, we poison the water.  We are responsible for the environment because, unlike other creatures, we are not preprogrammed in its use.  We must exercise free choice in adjusting ourselves to the material world of which we are a part.  Since we have intelligence, it is not permitted to us merely to accept the environment as it is.  The material world can adapt a multitude of different forms, some much more conducive to a free human life than others.  Virtually no one will think that the elimination of cholera from our lake and river waters is a mistake, and only a few will argue that the prairies should not have been turned into the richest crop-producing land the world has ever known. (It is another question whether some prairie land should have been Preserved in its natural state.) 

But it is one thing to say that humans have the power alter and reshape the environment to make it more rational and benign, and it is quite another to assume that humankind is the lord of the world and can do with it whatever it wants.  Yet this is the way we have lived for several centuries.  We have used the world (and that is proper–the iron ore in the Mesabi range wasn't doing anyone any good under the ground), but we have not used it with respect or reverence.  Now the environment is fighting back with broken natural cycles turning destructive and threatening the humans who broke them. 

This misuse of the material world and its vengeance upon us is but one manifestation of the ambiguity humankind has felt about the world in which it finds itself.  For that world is both benign and destructive.  It provides us with our food, drink, clothing, housing; but it also destroys.  Floods, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, tornados, droughts, winter snow and ice, blight, disease, predatory animals, erosion–all have suggested to humankind that there is disorder in the world just as there is disorder in human personality.  The world is our friend, but it is also. our enemy. 

Worse still, the world seems to imprison us.  We aspire to be everywhere, to see everything, to do all that there is to do, to have all that there is to have; but we are still enmeshed in the threads of time and place.  The demands of our body are insistent; they slow us down, burden us, weary us : For a long time many humans felt that the body was a prison in which the human spirit was temporarily captured, and that the purpose of human life was to progressively break free of the chains and bars of such a prison.  In the West such a theory has not been explicitly propounded in recent times except by the increasingly numerous advocates of Eastern religious beliefs and practices.  We often live as though we have forgotten that we have bodies which tie us irrevocably to the natural process in which they (and hence we) are immersed.  Examples are the intellectual who thinks rational and scientific analysis is the only way to truth, and the self-described Christian who is convinced the body is dirty and so hangs on to the "spirituality" of the soul; both share a resentment toward the fact that we are animal, that we are, as one writer has said, a "spirit who must excrete." 

Water is the primal element. (We know now, of course, that it is not an element at all but is made up of two more basic elements.) It is the matrix in which all else exists.  The continents "float" on the oceans, our bodies are mostly water; it is essential for our life.  Yet it is terribly destructive, too, wiping out fields, flocks, towns, and people.  Water is the source of both life and death.  As the primal element of the world in which we live, water has all the ambiguities of the rest of the environment in a quintessential way.  It brings life, it causes destruction, it imprisons us because of our thirst for it and because of the immense barriers it creates to our freedom of movement. 

We know the fear of trying to drive a car at night in a blinding rainstorm or on a frozen and slippery road.  We know the sheer terror of being threatened by a combination of wind and water which whips waves to a frenzy; we have seen wreckage caused by flood, hurricane, tidal wave, and tornado; we have read how too much rain or not enough can reduce the summer's harvest, cause a world food shortage, and force up the price of food; we experience the frustration when bad weather ruins a holiday. 

Yet we know the pleasure of a cold drink when we are thirsty, the joy of diving into a lake or pool on a hot summer's day, the comfort of a warm bath or a brisk shower when we are tense and tired.  We know the relief of a rainstorm which ends a long hot spell, and the beauty of snowflakes gently covering the brown and barren earth.  As the primal element in our world, the primary matrix of our life, water participates in the fundamental ambiguity of life.  It brings both life and death.  Which part of its revelation is most essential?  Which is a better hint of an explanation of the meaning of our existence? 
As Jews, the early followers of  Jesus had no doubt that the environment was good.  Yahweh had made it and that was that.  Yet their law prohibited many material things, often for reasons that were socially functional when the laws were created–meat that was easily spoiled and poisoned, for example.  But many of the sects among them were obsessed with the fear that they might be rendered "impure" by the corruption of the world around them.  Hence these sectaries spent considerable amounts of time in ritual hand-washings and baths.  Furthermore, Jews were suspicious of the pagan tendency to worship the forces of nature superstitiously (despite the vestiges of nature rites in their own religion).  Finally, the Jewish intellectuals of their time–particularly outside of Palestine–could not help but be influenced by Platonic philosophy and its religious descendent, Gnosticism, both of which were strongly antimaterial and antibody. 

But in the Christ event at Easter the followers Of  Jesus learned that the material world was saved too.  God gave his supreme gift of himself, his ultimate revelation of himself, not in the form of a Gnostic angel but in the form of a man who eats, drinks, grows weary, and falls asleep like all other men.  God had entered the cosmos, not as pure spirit but as very much part of the material world.  Therefore, that world was holy.  The body of  Jesus shared in the resurrection, and that settled the matter once and for all.  The world was good.  It was both the object and the means of salvation.  It was the recipient of grace.  It revealed God's gift to us.  Indeed it was part of the gift.  The world is grace. 

In the first flush of their enthusiasm, the early Christians embraced the material world just as they embraced human culture.  Pagan rituals, which had been excluded from Judaism for fear they would corrupt the faith of the people, were quickly transformed, purified with a Christian interpretation, and made part of the life of the people. 

So water, the primal element, once again became sacred.  Ritual purifications had always been part of the Jewish religion.  The wandering preachers of the time, John the Baptist and  Jesus himself, apparently, had baptized their followers as a sign of their repentance (borrowing the practice, we think, from the Dead Sea sectaries–or perhaps both groups had borrowed from an older tradition about which we know very little).  So it was perfectly natural for the followers of  Jesus to begin to use baptism as a rite of initiating a person into the community of Christians.  But the assembly of the disciples of  Jesus had far more to proclaim than the need for personal transformation.  It viewed the basic Good News to be the Word that, in  Jesus, God had revealed himself as willing the triumph of life over death.  So, very early, baptism became a ceremony much richer, in its implications than a simple ritual of moral transformation.  It came to stand for an introduction into a community of life, a fellowship of grace. 

With that interpretation, baptism became one more of the mysteries which revealed the meaning of the Christ event.  All the rich water symbolism of the nature religions (based in turn, it would seem, on the very structure of the human unconscious, as it is revealed to us in dreams and fantasies) and of the Hebrew religion itself were now available to explain the meaning of baptism and what it told us about the Christ event.  We find St. Paul insisting very early on baptism as a symbol of life and death, a burial with  Jesus as a prelude and a cause of a resurrection with him. (And in the practice of baptism by immersion–the only one known in the early Church–one was quite literally buried in water.) Just as the wandering Hebrews were reconciled into a people and liberated from the slavery of Egypt in the Exodus event of passing through the waters of the Red Sea, so Christians are created a unified and reconciled people by passing, under the leadership of  Jesus, the new Moses, through the life-giving waters of baptism.  The sacred waters of the old pagan religions became now the gracious (grace-giving) waters of Christianity, bringing death to the old man and life to the new in Christ  Jesus. 

Baptism, then, like the Eucharist, became the means by which the Christ event would be reenacted, by which the Easter experience would be continued in time and space.  It was an initiation rite, of course, but it was one which showed that by joining the assembly one experienced a death and resurrection event, one was dying with  Jesus so that one might rise with him to a fresh new life. 

The ambiguity of water was no more denied than was the ambiguity of the physical world and the ambiguity of human life.  But in the light of the Christ event, water was seen as grace, as a revelation.  Life and death were combined in water, but life was stronger, and even the death dimension of water was a prelude to and a cause of life.  The joys and the pleasures of water were the hints of an explanation, not only about the meaning of water but about the meaning of life. 

The link between baptism and the Easter experience was emphasized by the fact that for many centuries baptism (normally at least) took place only as part of the Easter vigil service.  The new Christians would die with Christ at the same time he died and they would rise with him very early in the morning on the first day of the week.  We continue even today the custom of blessing the baptismal waters and renewing our baptismal commitments at Eastertime. 

The early Christians also saw water as the great bond that linked humans together.  The baptismal waters united humans and God the way the marriage act united man and wife.  The rich sexual symbolism of water was obvious to those Roman Christians who appropriated the pagan spring fertility rite of the lighted candle (the male organ) and the waters (womb), using it for the blessing of the baptismal waters.  In the Easter event, God is united with his people, Christ is united with his bride the Church, and the newly baptized Christian is the offspring of this union. 

Other human signs began to receive specially gracious meanings: oil (anointing and dedication to a work), human leadership, healing of sickness, reconciliation, marriage.  These were now thought of as sacraments, as special and efficacious signs of God's grace at work.  Through oil, fire, water, bread, and wine; through the friendship of others; and through the attractive body of a human of the opposite sex, God was at work in the world.  He was giving himself to us as a continuation of the gift in  Jesus.  Indeed, these quite ordinary and mundane things were now seen as a continuation of the Christ event.  In the sacraments, and indeed in the sacramental signs themselves, the Easter experience became present to us once again. 

But these various signs are able to be sacraments, are able to convey grace to us, precisely because all material elements are gracious.  All things reveal God's goodness to us if we know how to took for it.  The whole world is a sacrament, a revelation of graciousness.  In the Christian view of things the natural powers–water, fire, air, fertility–are not sacred in themselves but rather in what they reveal.  The Christian might more appropriately speak of them as gracious instead of sacred.. They reveal goodness because they participate in goodness, or, to become metaphysical for a moment, they reveal being because they share in Being. 

Grace, then, lurks everywhere–in brickyards and back alleys, in the snow and the wind, in the sun and the stars, in the waters and the fire, in the tiny flower, and in the volcano.  It is in the branches of trees, in weeds, in the chirping of birds, as well as in the roar of an elevated train, and in the desirable body of another.  The environment is a sacrament, and to ruthlessly exploit it is a sacrilege.  The world is a chalice of grace, and to treat it with disrespect is blasphemy.  The world is grace, and not to appreciate it is ungratitude. 

But the world is not a passive sacrament; the environment does not stand idly by waiting for us to perceive its graciousness.  The Holy Spirit, who, after the Christ event, began to take over as the Lord of the world, is actively pursuing us with a world that commands our attention with its splendors and invites our admiration with its beauty. 

And grace is not merely lurking around the comer waiting for us; it is chasing us madly down the street.

This page will be updated whenever I become aware of errors. Please, send me any "scannos" or typos you find.