Mark 1: 1-11
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“Behold, I send My messenger ahead of You,
Who will prepare Your way;
The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight.’”
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism for a change of heart and mind, and for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea was going out to him, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist, and his diet was hard fruits and wild honey. And he was preaching, and saying, “After me is coming One who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to bend down and untie the thong of His sandals. I baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Immediately coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens opening, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him; and a voice came out of the heavens: “You are My beloved Son, in You I am revealed.”
Dear Community of Christians,
Today we celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist and ever a brand new festival month in the evolution of Christianity which bears his name. May John the Baptist inspire us to become more truly human. To become more truly human means to orient ourselves to God as free individuals living firmly on the earth.
And how shall we do this?
To prepare the way of the Lord, John spoke the word of annunciation, calling people out to the flowing waters. Going the ought the desert was of great help to him; for it awakened the clarity of the soul’s longing for new flowing life. In the desolation of our selfhood, we too experience this modern day desert, the dryness that awakens us to our own deepest thirst for more and truer life!
He called humanity to the waters to be baptized. We too are called to be baptized—and in the case of today’s humanity—to baptize ourselves.
Baptizing of old required a certain purification… a coming to zero, a reset, and an opening for something new. When John baptized, people were held under the waters until they reached a point of no return, a threshold experience (what we might also call a near death experience) which allowed them to reset and take hold of their lives anew. Today, we are having these threshold experiences all the time within our personal destinies. We go through individual experiences and also collective ones. Things have been intensifying and accelerating so that we do not have to seek out a temple for initiation, it will find us! Be it your marriage/partnership, raising or educating children, your work life, illnesses, or the intensified karma coming at us from the world…
But how we respond to it, is up to us, as never before. Freedom is the beginning place of the modern spiritual path of development.
Baptism for adults in our movement for religious renewal does not require a preparatory step of purification to take anything away, given from outside. Rather, it is a ritual of addition; to the life we are living, we add the step of baptizing ourselves so that we can choose over and over again to orient and align ourselves with the highest divinity, with the highest source of life and renewal. We use our own hand and bringing three fingers together, we lift our will to devoted action. Baptizing ourselves in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
When we baptize children, we do so at these three places on the body which represent the three archetypal soul forces: thinking, willing, feeling. As children are taking on their bodily existence and entering in, taking hold of this magnificent instrument which they will use to bring their heavenly gifts into the world, they receive a strengthening blessing through their baptism by receiving powerful archetypal earthly substances onto their bodies. It is at these places on forehead, chin and over the heart that as mature human beings we continue to baptize ourselves:
On the head, the place of thinking, the life giving water is brought in the form of the divine Trinity, the triangle pointing upwards, and we say: the Father God be in us;
On the chin, the place of the will, the all maintaining salt is brought in the symbol for the earth, the square, and we say: the Son God create in us;
Over the heart, the place of the feeling life, of love as a verb, the all renewing ash is brought in the form of a cross, and we say: the Spirit God enlighten us.
We baptize ourselves to depend our commitment to ourselves ever and again that in God we have our truest human being.
Yes, so be it!