On Baptism – Conversation with Tibor Görföl

Last autumn I had a lengthy conversation with Dr Tibor Görföl from Communio on baptism. The text of our exchange is now being published in the various language editions of the journal. Below you can find it in English and French.

TG It seems that nowadays we can observe in a lot of countries a decrease in the number of infant baptism, and in some countries, like in France, an increase in the number of adult baptisms. It seems to have something to do with baptism as a free decision for a human person. How do you evaluate this situation that more and more adult people start to ask for baptism? And how is it in Scandinavia and in Norway?

Erik Varden Well, obviously it’s a very positive thing that adults of their own free choice seek baptism, conscious of the grace to be found in that great sacrament. As for the fact that infant baptisms are going down in number, in some ways it’s logical given the slumping rate of practice. Of course, that’s a sadness, because one is conscious of children growing up without that inward compass which baptism magnetises, without that source of grace and joy and freedom that baptism is. It is all the more important then to provide vibrant environments that make the faith credibly present in societies, and to assume fully our task and mission as witnesses. In terms of the situation in Norway, I think it mirrors Western Europe as a whole. There is everywhere a sharp decrease in infant baptisms. Yet here in Norway we also see a trickle of young and not so young adults coming to the faith, sometimes from a residual Christian background, having been baptized as children, sometimes from absolutely nothing.

I think the important thing to remember is that baptism, like all the sacraments, is an assured channel of grace, and we wouldn’t want to be deprived of that channel, but grace also works freely beyond any parameters. The great task in these times is to see where grace is at work and to collaborate with it, certainly not to stand in its way.

TG It’s very easy for a lot of adult persons to forget about their baptism. Baptism is a noble tradition and a symbolic event which might be interesting and important for people, but afterwards they forget about it, especially when they were baptized as children. Do you think, as a bishop and as a priest, that the conditions of baptism should become stricter in the Church, or should it be just generally unconditionally available?

Erik Varden Well, obviously, they’ve never been unconditionally available, because there is always a catechumenate which is presupposed and a formation and what the Fathers used to call a mystagogy, a gradual introduction into the mystery. It seems to me that people looking for baptism seek that formation, they’re hungry for it. So I would speak less in terms of putting up greater barriers, more in terms of a commitment to share the full extent of the riches that the sacrament contains and carries – in terms of education and catechism, and in terms of a real participation in the liturgical assembly and of integrating individuals into the charitable and social life of the Church. We should always be aware that that to become part of the Mystical Body is also to become part of a concrete body. 

TG In your latest book which is on chastity, talk about extensively about the drama of Christian life, also related to baptism, you talk about the change and transformation that people go through after they are baptized. In this context, rather surprisingly, you also refer to an ancient Syriac test, the Cave of the Treasures; there’s a long session in the book on that. How could you describe the transformation or the drama of Christian life that results from baptism in terms of experience and in terms of an inner transformation of the human person?

Erik Varden Well, obviously, a sacramental perspective is the opposite of a deterministic perspective. So, there is no set or standard trajectory. The Spirit blows where it wishes and how it wishes. It’s any pastor’s great privilege and joy to see the multiformity of manifestations of sacramental grace in individuals’ lives. So, I’d be wary of trying to outline, as it were, a standardized experience because I don’t think it exists. The wonderful thing about the sacraments is their blessed objectivity: the fact that we have the assurance that they do confer the grace for which they’re set up, whether we feel anything or not. So, if anything, in these times when we’re so fixated on what we feel and what we experience and how we experience it, it’s important catechetically and theologically to stress that transcendent aspect which doesn’t depend on feeling.

In my experience, in my pastoral and human experience, this comes in fact as a great liberation to many people, while at the same time it invites people to consent to the realization of the grace implanted in them as potential. You will also remember a Syriac baptismal text I quote in that same book, a text I think is simply fantastic. I think about it almost every day. It’s a liturgical text, a blessing over the newly baptized Christian just arising from the baptistry: 

O brother! Sing praise to the Son of the Lord of all, who has made for you a crown more desirable than that of any king. Brilliant is your garment, brother, like the sun: and your face shines like an angel’s. Like an angel you rose up, beloved, from the baptistry by the power of the Holy Spirit. Brother, you have been granted access to the wedding chamber. Today you have put on anew the glory of Adam. Your garments are lovely, your crown beautiful. By the ministry of his priest, the Firstborn has prepared them for you. The fruit Adam did not taste in Paradise has been placed, today, in your mouth. Go in peace, son of the baptistry. Adore the Cross! It will preserve you.

If only we had the slightest inkling of what has already been given to us, and if we simply let that seed of grace grow! It’s not for nothing that the Gospel is full of agricultural parables. What matters is to nurture the consciousness of what one has in fact received, whether one feels anything or not, next to strengthen and steel the resolve to let that potential be realized, then to open people up to a transformation of experience according to God’s providential plan for individuals, preparing them to be surprised.

TG In your more or less Protestant environment, the Scandinavian environment is not experience highlighted more emphatically? When you talk about this objectivity of grace and the objectivity of the sacraments, is it not difficult to make yourself understandable in this environment?

Erik Varden No, if anything, I find that people are looking for that, and they’re relieved to find it, and to encounter the mystery as something which is real in itself, and doesn’t depend on an emotional projection.

I find, to most people, whether they come from a non-religious background or from a residual, or even from a very fervent Protestant background, the fact of being able to rest in the church’s sacramental life, and of being freed of that felt need to subjectively perform, is something many embrace with great gratitude. 

TG You are also very often asked about your personal Protestant background and story.

Erik Varden Well, again, there wasn’t all that much of a story there. I was baptized as an infant, and I’m grateful for that, so that at a later stage in my life, grace had some sort of foothold by which to get access. I’m grateful to have received that, and I try to remember every now and again to pray for the pastor who baptized me. We must be careful to not exclude anyone from this source of grace.

TG In your book Entering the Twofold Mystery, you talk about the reality and the process of entering the body of Christ in relation to baptism. You have already referred to it – but what is the essence of this process of entering the Body of Christ, what does it really mean to become part of the Body of Christ? You don’t simply become a member of the church in an institutional sense. 

Erik Varden That is why the notion we talked about earlier, mystagogy, is such a helpful term, a term to expound to people if it sounds a bit outlandish, because it means precisely that – an entrance into the mystery, the mystery not just as a notional conundrum, but as a personal mystery, as the fact of Emmanuel, of God with us It speaks of being, in Pauline terms, grafted onto the body and becoming a member of that body, thereby enabled to begin to discover what it might mean to live in Christ. This key Pauline expression is such a crucial dimensional statement, a paradigm of Christian living. 

It’s essential to insist on baptism as an intimate and personal insertion into the personal mystery of Christ, while at the same time insisting that that insertion, precisely, isn’t restricted to a subjective and experiential aspect, but also has a juridical aspect in canon law. I remember once attending a ceremony of reception into the church when I was a student. When the priest had duly performed all the rites and the person was received and confirmed, he said brightly, “right, that’s it now, you’ll always be a Catholic; the only other thing you can be now is a lapsed Catholic”. The fact is that something happens both ontologically and juridically that defines me in a new way in terms of my relationship to this body, personal and collective. So, it matters always to make sure that we keep those dimensions together, which is challenging in our times, because no one now seems to have any inclination at all to keep more than one thought in one’s consciousness at any given time.

TG But what does it mean to live in Christ? It sounds very beautiful for a lot of people, but when you have to determine what is the content of this term, how can you define it?

Erik Varden I can’t define it, because it is of its nature ineffable. I can indicate it by pointing to the physiognomy and personality of Christ as revealed to us in Scripture, in the Gospels, and in the great prophetic foretellings of the Old Testament. That is why it is so important to contemplate the life of Christ, to contemplate the mystery of Christ, to pursue the Word both, as it were, “enbibled”, the Word as expressed in Scripture, and the Word in His incarnation and to begin to get some sense by fixing our gaze on Him, some sense of the length and the depth and the breadth and the height of what He represents. And to be inserted into the life of Christ is to consent to and to start to experience that extension of dimensions in my own being. 

Saint Benedict speaks memorably towards the end of the prologue of his Rule about the enlargement, the broadening of the heart, which in Benedictine self-understanding and theology has always been a symbol of that existential enlargement, that capacity to live more deeply, to apprehend more profoundly, to feel more purely, and for my heart and my entire perception to become larger and larger in order to assume the proportions of God’s own heart, which is by definition without boundaries. So, to begin existentially, humbly, step by step, to enter into an experience of and a participation in eternity, is fundamental to embark on an initiation into the life in Christ.

TG You referred to the Benedictine tradition, and there is one more term in that tradition that might be important in relation to baptism – conversatio morum. What can the monastic tradition add to the understanding of the drama or process of human life, if you understand it as a conversatio morum? What can it offer for the broad assembly of the Church, this monastic idea?

Erik Varden I think conversatio morum, to some extent, is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive term, and it points towards a resolve always to remain in movement, never to stand still. There is an intrinsic dialectic in the Benedictine vows and in the monastic commitment. On the one hand, monks make a vow of stability, which is a vow not to run away, to remain fixed in one’s community, which will normally mean being fixed in a place. But complementing that, you have this vow of conversatio morum, which is a vow never to settle into resignation, never to think, oh, that’s enough, I’ve reached a sufficient goal, or I’ve had enough. The vow of conversatio is a readiness to let oneself be questioned, also in one’s perceived self-justification or one’s perceived sense of virtue. The narrative monastic tradition, the lives of the fathers, are full of stories of monks who seem to be paradigms of virtue, who are respected, admired, who sometimes have a certain admiration for themselves, who are then confronted with something entirely new, either through a direct divine intervention or through an experience of sin or through an experience of grace or through an encounter with another human being (think of the encounter of Mary of Egypt and Zosima), and then they are led to reconsider everything and to start realising, oh, “I thought I’d arrived and I haven’t really even started”. 

I wish we had a little bit more of that consciousness installed into our sort of process-minded church. We’re surrounded by secular and political structures that work in terms of electoral periods of three or four years, and we constantly expect revolutions to take place within electoral periods, and when they don’t, which they can’t, we’re disappointed, and then we start again, and then we express our righteous indignation, and we’re caught in this illusory cycle. The perspective of conversatio morum is a much more realistic perspective in that it embraces by its nature the perspective of an entire human life to its natural death, and looks at the entire canvas of human life and looks forward to that as a process of constant incremental change into a personal perfection that corresponds to God’s providence, but isn’t an entire mystery to each one of us. So, to live within conversatio morum is constantly to give one’s consent to say yes to a process of becoming whose goal is unknown to me. 

TG I think one the founders of Communio, Hans Urs von Balthasar, would be very glad to hear this.

Erik Varden Oh, well, I think he was very much on that wavelength. 

TG One more thing in Balthasar that I wanted to address is that if you are baptized, then usually, in a way, you have to confirm or make concrete that baptism. You have to get confirmed at first, and then you have to decide which form of Christian life you want for yourself – it seems to be very difficult, if not impossible, to be just a “general” baptized Christian. How do you see the relation between baptism and the other sacraments that give a concrete shape to your life?

Erik Varden Well, obviously, baptism is the foundation. To some extent, baptism is what equips us for a mission, for a task, whatever that is. And as you said, that can take multiple forms. I suppose the important thing (and that’s why I think it’s very good that you’re placing your spotlight on baptism in this way) is to keep reminding us of what we have, in fact, received already. Because it is my experience in confession or spiritual direction that people quite often think that they’re constantly starting from scratch and feel great perplexity. By reminding them what they have, in fact, already received through the sacraments of initiation, you give them a sense of realising that there is already a launchpad there. 

You talked about confirmation. The validity and effectiveness of baptism obviously doesn’t depend on confirmation, because it has its own integrity. But confirmation is intended as an awakening and as a challenge and as a summons, which is intrinsic to any human life and to the Christian life, as a summons to make significant choices. It’s telling us, look, you’ve been given this extraordinary resource and you carry within you an infinite source of grace and of life. What are you going to do with it? How are you going to make this grace fruitful and constructive, not only for yourself, but for the sake of the Body whose member you are? How can you pursue happiness, freedom, fecundity for yourself and at the same time be a blessing for others? That sense of commissioning is perhaps an aspect of the Christian life that we could accentuate a little bit more. 

TG There is one more aspect of the sacraments that you seem to highlight rather intensively and it is the aspect of healing. Your new book with the title Healing Wounds which is the 2025 Lent Book, but also your other books deal extensively with this. Why do you think that wounds are so important today? And what sort of wounds do people have and what does healing mean at all?

Erik Varden Well, I’m consciously using that terminology also based on my understanding of sin, an understanding which I try to expand in my book on chastity. In the West, conditioned not least by 16th century controversies, we have a tendency to think of sin in terms of guilt. We think of sin in terms of a Dostoevskian scenario of crime and punishment. We get the balance sheets out and we do our sums. I’m not saying that that understanding is illicit or that it’s entirely useless, but it’s insufficient.

It is useful to recover consciously the more biblical and patristic understanding of sin as a primordial wound, as a loss, as a bereavement, as a kind of amputation in the sense of being cut off and yet yearning to become part. By setting out from the narrative paradigm of wounds seeking healing, we have a better chance of capturing the attention and the interest of our contemporaries. Because we live in times that in some ways are obsessed with wounds. And we live in a culture in the West very largely of victimization. We victimize ourselves or we victimize others. And much of our entertainment, whether in newspapers or in media or in films or in novels, is about a consideration of wounds.

But what our times are largely lacking is any perspective that wounds can actually be healed. That is why a Christian light on this dynamic is really, really important. Because Christianity and Judaism, so biblical religion, is extremely realistic with regard to human woundedness. But it’s constantly reminding us not to identify ourselves in terms of our wounds, not to fall for the temptation to say, “oh, I am the man with a withered hand”, or “I am the man who’s lying on a stretcher with no one to carry me into the water”, or “I am the man who endured this loss when I was a child”, or who was compromised in this way, or who received too much of this or too little of that.

Scripture isn’t uninterested in that factual basis of human experience. And it says, right, own that, own every aspect of your existence and your history without hiding anything or without trying to pretend that anything isn’t there. But be assured that there is no wound that cannot be healed. And be assured that what you’re made for and what you’re intended for, if not in this life, then in the next, is integrity, wholeness, and happiness. 

TG And what does the contemporary Christian suffer from mostly, according to your pastoral experience?

Erik Varden I think hopelessness. I do think the awakening of hope is an immense task. The preparedness to live prospectively, to look ahead, to believe that there is something to look forward to. Not just in the banal sense of looking forward to having a beer this evening, or having a birthday next week, but of life, my own personal life and life as such, the life of world, having an intentional finality of it moving towards a goal, which isn’t just a disaster. We have to entertain that hopefulness while being at the same time entirely lucid and open-minded about the extremely disquieting state of the world we inhabit and for which we are held responsible. 

TG As for the contemporary world, part of your mission seems to be to address the imagination of the contemporary culture. How do you imagine the relation between contemporary Christianity and contemporary non-Christian culture? How can you find ways to address anxieties, concerns, ideas, interests of people?

Erik Varden I’m a citizen of the contemporary world like everyone else. I’m interested in it because I like to live with my eyes open and my ears open. So I try to listen out for its significant statements. I’m not so much interested in just hearing the background noise because the background noise in any historical era is the same. It’s just got a different rhythm. But I’m interested in its essential statements. I’m interested in the questions people ask, even if they don’t ask them explicitly. I’m interested in the questions that are implicit in their statements, be they discursive statements or artistic statements or films or whatever. I’m interested in what people are afraid of. I’m interested in what they desire.

It’s a question I often ask in pastoral situations – what do you desire? For a preoccupying aspect of the world we live in now, certainly in this country, but I think more largely in the Western world, is desirelessness. That comes back to the absence of prospect we talked about earlier on. It’s particularly sad when you meet that in the young, when you run into 17-year-olds who feel that they’ve already sort of experienced everything, that there’s nothing left, when you see their existential fatigue. I listen to that and I try to prick it with a needle and to try and find the desire that must be there, because it’s implanted in our human nature by virtue of our iconic constitution, and to try and awaken that desire.

So I simply try to engage sympathetically with the world I inhabit. I get very quickly and very easily bored by attempts to just condemn the contemporary world, or to proclaim that it’s gone off the rails, it’s going nowhere. I’m much more interested in trying to really encounter the people whom providence puts on my path, sometimes without talking to them, but just looking into their eyes and seeing if the light is on or not, and if not, what could possibly illumine it.

 This is a seemingly entirely banal thing to say: ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ – but we so easily forget, as Christians, about just the ardent intensity of that love, and that the love for the world isn’t a love for some sort of notional world that just exists in God’s mind, but it is a love for the world as it is in its waywardness, and its perversity, and its lostness, and its high aspirations. If we as Christians could only look out on the world with a bit more love, and again I don’t mean a feeling lovey-dovey love, I don’t mean being emotional or being endlessly affirming, but looking out on the world and seeing it as a world that merits to be saved by grace.

TG If at the end we return to baptism and to the situation in Scandinavia, how do you evaluate the ecumenical dimension of baptism? Baptism is our common ground. What are there fruits in terms of ecumenical relations in Scandinavia? How do you see prospects of this?

Erik Varden There are always fruits manifest or hidden, but I come back to your point from earlier on about confirmation. The main thing is to be intentional, about commitments, and also about obligations, to remember that baptism isn’t just a gift, but it is also a commission, and that it is a commission to live in the truth and to confess the truth.

I’m haunted by, and I very often think of that great phrase that John Paul II launched when he visited France in 1996 for the anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, and he preached at an open air mass, and he preached very graciously and very learnedly, and congratulated France on this great jubilee, and talked about her great mission, her civilizing mission to the world. But then at the end, wonderfully, with that rhetorical skill that was his great force, he said – dear France, permit me to ask this question. We are here to celebrate the millennial anniversary of a baptism, which you like to think of as your baptism, as the baptism of France. What have you done with your baptism? What’s become of it? What have you made of your baptism? 

That is a question we must all ask ourselves on a regular basis. It’s what we must ask ourselves as Catholics, and it’s also what we must ask ourselves in ecumenical encounters. If we ask that question in truth, and if we answer it in truth, there is a real chance that that question and the grace it implies will bring us closer together