Marilynne Robinson is regarded as one of the greatest living novelists, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gilead. The novel should be required reading for everyone going into church ministry. Gilead has been followed by two sequels - Home and Lila, which explore the same events of Gilead, but from the perspective of a different character. Gilead tells the story of a congregationalist pastor called John Ames. In this section of the novel, Ames remember when, as a child, he once baptised a litter of cats! (There is another baptism scene in Lila as well.)
Now, this might seem a trivial thing to mention, considering the gravity of the subject, but I truly don’t feel it is… Once we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymous lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were all pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play as we were… I myself moistened their brows, repeating the full Trinitarian formula.
Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a great deal. So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn’t really an answer to my question. We did respect the sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though, and I did no more baptizing until was ordained.
Two or three of that litter were taken home by the girls and made into fairly respectable house cats. Louisa took a yellow one. She still had it when we were married. The others lived out their feral lives, indistinguishable from their kind, whether pagan or Christian no one could ever tell. She called her cat Sparkle, for the white patch on its forehead. It disappeared finally… One of the boys said she should have named it Sprinkle. He was a Baptist, a firm believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was not. He told us no effect at all could be achieved by our methods, and we could not prove him wrong…
I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time…
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Virago Press, 2004), pp. 25-27.
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