In a world where conservative right-wingers are hell-bent on reframing Christianity, acting selflessly with kindness, patience and compassion feels like a radical gesture
If you were to ask me why we wanted to baptise our children, especially considering I have a troubled relationship with the Catholic church, my answer is likely to be that for us Goan Catholics, faith is inter-generational. Representation Pic/istock
On Saturday evening, at the Easter vigil in Tramin, we had our second child baptised. Although many families continue to practise this initiation ritual, even if they are not necessarily devout, the preference is to have the baptism on any other Sunday so it can be more private. Three years ago, we’d been asked if we wanted to use the Easter vigil service as an opportunity to baptise our firstborn. We weighed the pros and cons and found that participating saved us the hassle of organising everything ourselves. There would be a priest, a choir, and even a congregation, all readily available without us having to lift a finger. Back then, we were still living in the shadow of the pandemic, so the advantages felt compelling.
Growing up in Kurla, as someone who sang in the choir, I had a love-hate relationship with the Easter vigil. I loved the aura around the lighting of the candle, for example, and witnessing the sharing of the flame… how we steadily went from darkness to light. I loved the incantations at the beginning, how ‘Christ our Light’ moved between three octaves, reaching the crescendo when all of us seemed luminescent. What I didn’t necessarily look forward to were the adult baptisms, because there were usually at least 10 candidates who would be administered not only the sacrament of baptism, but also confirmation and communion. It made a service that was already long longer.
It was actually my partner who suggested we repeat the Easter baptism for our infant. I couldn’t think of a reason not to. He volunteered to make the arrangements and initiated a conversation with the parish priest, who had to move a few mountains, because this year, the Easter vigil wasn’t scheduled to take place in Tramin but in the neighbouring town of Kurtatsch. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around this fact, but given the shortage of priests in Europe, the number of masses has shrunk significantly. The parish of Tramin is in fact a cluster of seven churches that take turns at celebrating even the Sunday mass. There are times when there is no mass but a liturgical service conducted by a lay person, which means there’s no communion. I felt immense culture shock when I first encountered this phenomenon, given that in our church in Kurla, on a regular Sunday, there are at least five to six masses spread across the day and in different languages, one exclusively for children. Because the parish priest had to conduct the Easter service in the neighbouring town, Fr Manoj from Hyderabad was assigned the Tramin mass. I thought it would be rather beautiful for our child to be baptised by an Indian priest, a testimony to what I call ‘reverse evangelism’—Europe’s Catholicism depending on priests from countries that had been colonised under the pretext of conversion.
If you were to ask me why we wanted to baptise our children, especially considering I have a troubled relationship with the Catholic church, my answer is likely to be that for us Goan Catholics, faith is inter-generational. I know little about the point in history when my ancestors must have converted. I have no idea if it was voluntary or if it was done to protect property or even to relinquish caste. But when my oldest brother—the only member of my family who was able to be present at the baptism—was saying goodbye to us, he was involuntarily blessing our infant, making signs of the cross on his forehead, multiple times, as if compensating for my parents’ absence. I will confess that when my body was being cut open to deliver our second child, I was praying a decade of the rosary. Is this faith?
I’m still navigating how to initiate our toddler into this religion in a context where there is no regular children’s mass. When we were kids, the church felt like a playground. Our parents sat in place while we ran up and down and played with other children. The acoustics at the church in Tramin are such that my toddler’s voice would get amplified, disturbing other worshippers. So, for the moment, I go alone, and mostly to pray for the children in Palestine. There is only one reason why I continue to ‘keep my faith’, so to speak, and why I even might nurture our children’s faith in Catholicism, because, at its core, it preaches the gospel of love, and given how the conservative right-wingers in the western world are hell-bent on reframing Christianity, to love and to serve from a space of love feel like radical gestures. Love is light, as Simone Weil, who intriguingly refused to convert to Christianity, said.
At the end of the service, the choir sang Handel’s Hallelujah, accompanied by the town band, which meant there were trumpets playing alongside the pipe organ. They sang in German and I hummed the English version. What a fitting recessional hymn, I thought, because this joyousness cannot be proclaimed by an individual. The nature of the Hallelujah is such that it must be sung communally. It can never be a solo. It is as relational as it comes—almost queer in its insistence on a multitude of voices across a range of tonalities.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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