Episode Summary
Being part of a religious or spiritual community can be a wonderful support in life. Shared customs and traditions can bring comfort, connection, and a shared experience of the Divine. But what role does ritual play in all of this and how does it help us connect to the Divine? Join us for an exploration of Baptism as a Rite of Passage - from both sides of the pulpit.
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Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Torres: This is a public demonstration of what's actually happened already in them, that they have recognized Christ and received forgiveness.
Thomas: So the person had their experience with Christ in their own self and then chooses to have the Baptism sacrament and is publicly...
Torres: Right. It's a public testimony. Yes, public witness.
Being part of a religious or spiritual community can be a wonderful support in life. Shared customs and traditions can bring comfort, connection, and a shared experience of the Divine. But what role does ritual play in all of this and how does it help us connect to the Divine?
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. We often speak about using ritual as a tool for personal transformation, but today we’ll will focus our attention on the use of ritual within one particular religion: Christianity. This journey will actually take us through several traditions within Christianity to explore how they feel about ritual and how they use it. Two of the rituals we will delve into today the most deeply are baptism and communion. If you are familiar with Christian traditions, especially Protestant ones, you will most likely have had some kind of exposure to one or both of these rituals. If you’re new to them, then you’ll have a chance to learn all about them today.
Joining us for our conversation is friend of the podcast Tina Torres. And when I say friend of the podcast, I mean long-term friend of the podcast. Tina has been one of Shame Piñata’s main cheerleaders ever since day one - and this conversation is one that she and I have been meaning to have for almost that long.
As a bit of background on where I’m coming from as the interviewer today, I grew up in Christianity but never fully felt I understood it, so I’ve been grateful to speak with Tina over the years about her lifetime of experience, including cross-cultural experience, withшт the Christian tradition.
Rituals within the Christian tradition are often called sacraments. Here’s a definition from Britannica: Sacrament: Religious sign or symbol, especially associated with Christian churches, in which a sacred or spiritual power is believed to be transmitted through material elements viewed as channels of divine grace. At the start of our conversation, Tina gave me the lay of the land on how the various denominations are related to one another and how they each feel about the concept of sacraments.
Torres: Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox are very… we'd call it ritualistic. They have a lot of ritual. They actually have seven sacraments. They have infant baptism, confirmation, communion, matrimony, reconciliation, holy orders, and last rites. And Protestant have two. They only have communion and baptism. Mainstream… mainstream would be like Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Anglicans in the UK. And then among the evangelicals, you have Baptist, Pentecostal, Assembly of God, and also many independent churches that are non-denominational.
Thomas: Got it. So it sounds like there's a distinction between mainstream…
Torres: …and evangelical, yes. So Protestantism is very… it's a big umbrella. So you’ve got your mainstream who tend to be more… well, let's just say more ritualistic. And then your evangelical is less. They don't have prescribed prayers… There's more of a formal order in the Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian than the evangelicals. The evangelicals are more free-form.
Thomas: So is it true that we get sort of less prescribed or less formatted or ritualistic as we go from Catholicism to mainstream to evangelical?
Torres: That’s right. Exactly. Yep.
Thoms: Okay, I'm getting the… I'm getting the pattern.
Torres: …gettin’ the drift here, yeah. And then you also have the other kind of main group would be, for instance, the Society of Friends, the Quakers, and the Anabaptists. This is regarding sacraments. They believe the two sacraments are merely reminders or commendable practices, but they do not import actual grace. They call them ordinances. So they don't give them the spiritual significance that your mainstream and your evangelicals do.
Thomas: That's interesting.
Torres: Yeah, it is interesting. There's a lot of history here too. [LAUGHS]
Thomas: A lot of history.
Torres: And very interesting too, because in some cases, the sacraments: baptism and communion, have been the causes of almost civil wars in Protestantism, which is kind of crazy. I studied that… I got that in seminary and you know, in a Christian history course. And it's like, how is that possible? You know, the Anabaptists are very vehemently against baptism and so they do not commune with the Baptists or the Presbyterians. Anabaptist also would be like Mennonite.
Thomas: Interesting.
Torres: A fascinating subject isn't? To me it is. [LAUGHS]
Thomas: Well then what makes something a sacrament?
Torres: I found a definition by St. Augustine of Hippo. He was from Africa, Northern Africa. He called it “An outward sign of an inward grace that was instituted by Jesus Christ”. So it's an outward sign of an inward reality.
Thomas: And is that a definition that you would use yourself or that you… that resonates for you?
Torres: It does, it does because it's something that you do. It's symbolic, it's a ritual. But you know, for instance, in baptism, in adult baptism, the adult is between two other people, and that the person is dunked, you know, into the water which symbols their old life and then they go into the water of spirit and then they come up to their new life when they come up out of the water.
Thomas: Nice.
Torres: Yeah, it is. It's beautiful. It's very moving.
[MUSIC]
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So as you can see, there is a wide variety in how sacraments are utilized within different traditions. And those differences kind of denote how these groups are different from one another. So let’s look now at what it’s like to live and breathe within these communities. Tina is the perfect guide because she’s lived and worked within a wide variety of Christian traditions, beginning as a child in her family’s church that in her words was “sort of fundamentalist, sort of Baptist”. And then on into her time in Mexico when she was part of an Evangelical non-denominational community. And later in life when she attended a Presbyterian seminary, and becoming a pastor, and up to today when she’s part of a small home church that meets informally. I asked her to walk me through her journey.
Torres: Well, looking back, and to many years, I believe God was leading me into different areas. And so, you know, for quite… from when I was about 18 to 30. I was in a prodigal stage. So I did not go to church at all. I rejected it totally. And then had kind of a spiritual crisis when I was 30 and realized that… I needed God, and I needed forgiveness. And because I was, I was kind of a mess. I was depressed, I was drinking. And then, at one point, I said, you know, I just can't go on like this. And I started to remember and I thought, you know, maybe, maybe that God thing is not not so bad. Maybe I better check it out again. So I did. And that was when I actually called on God, asked for forgiveness and felt that I had been forgiven and felt the presence of Christ. And I was about 30 at that time. So it's been since then. Yeah, it was, it was dramatic. It was... So it's kind of the difference between following when I was a kid, you know, they tell you to do this, go to Sunday school, go to church, learn the verses, learn this… And I did all that, but it kind of was in the head. It was all in the head, not in my heart. It was a long journey, many years. And so I was baptized in Mexico, probably around age 30, I think.
Thomas: Had you been baptized also as a child?
Torres: No, because in the non-denominational group, they did not believe in infant baptism. They would do baby dedications, but there was no baptism, there was no oil, there was no water sprinkling or anything. It was just praying to dedicate the parents, dedicate to bringing up the child - which is a good thing. But it wasn't a ritual let's put it that way. I was brought up in a non ritualistic… and this is funny too, because I was brought up in that context where they said, “Oh no, written prayers. You know, they don't really mean anything because it's not… it's not spontaneous.” So there was a kind of a Christianity and had ritual involved to it. They thought that was less sincere than the freewheeling non-denominational, if that makes sense. God brought me or I ended up at the Presbyterian Church. I really like the ritualistic I really like the reverence. I like the… I like the rituals! And there definitely are rituals in the Presbyterian Church. And so they do infant baptism. They do, of course, adult baptism, and communion is taken very seriously. They believe that something… and I believe something… really happens when you take the bread and the wine. Whereas the group that I was brought up with, they said, “Oh, yeah, we'll do communion. But it's just… it doesn't… nothing really happens. It's just kind of a memorial thing. It's, you know, remembering, but nothing really happens.” And I'm like… [makes doubting noise] I guess I guess I wasn't convinced or I didn't know. But later in the Presbyterian, I understand that something does happen when you take communion. Yeah. It's very interesting.
Thomas: You've been the one doing that communion, right, as the pastor.
Torres: That's right. Yeah. As a pastor, I did. Yes. Mm hmm. Yeah. And actually, you know, home church, they asked me… I'm the one who… who does… presides over the communion when we do it once a month, the first Sunday of the month. And I have a shawl from Mexico that they use, and they like that, they say… Because one time I said, “Well, here's my shawl, but I don't want to stand out as being different for everybody else.” And they said, “No, use it. We like it. It adds to the whole communion thing.” So I said, “Okay, fine.”
Thomas: Right. And in the doing of a sacred ritual like that, it's nice to have, you know, have it be a special moment have somebody wearing a special something… because I feel like that's what's so beautiful about ritual is that we can… we can drink a coffee because we're drinking coffee or we can make it a moment where we are remembering our grandmother who used to drink this coffee, and maybe we will put out, you know, the tablecloth that the grandmother made…
Torres: Yes, exactly…. and the china. That is true. I'm getting to like rituals more under your influence, Colleen, and it's very good. [LAUGHS]
Thomas: They allow us to have that moment of the numinous…
Torres: …specilaness. It's not an ordinary moment.
Thomas: Right.
Torres: Not an ordinary moment. Right.
Thomas: Exactly.
Torres: And it can mark a certain passage or something, things like that, too. Like baptism is a huge one.
Thomas: Totally. So you've done baptisms also, haven’t you?
Torres: I have. Yes, I have. In a river, Sacramento River, we did we did one there. You can do it also in a swimming pool. People have done that, you know, any body of water, but a river is kind of nice, you know. Some people do it in a spa kind of thing. But I like the river. I like the the nature…the natural water, body of water.
Thomas: Absolutely. And I'm just curious if you have any reflections on how it's been to be on, like quote unquote, the other side of those rituals as the one performing them.
Torres: It's very exciting and it's important to be “prayed up” to use an expression… before. To make sure that I'm in a place… really, of close communion with God in order to do that. Because it's a big responsibility. Yeah, you're really doing something very meaningful, very spiritual and so you want to give it all the importance, all the time, all the preparation. And it's very exciting. It totally is. My first baptism I did was an adult baptism… was at Lake Tahoe. We were at a retreat, a church retreat, and there was another pastor there and myself and, and me. And so the two of us baptized several people at that time, a young man and his dad… maybe five or six people. And it is really neat, because you kind of start with prayer and then each person generally says something about their journey with God, a brief thing, testimony about how they met the Lord and how that changed their life. And then when you go into the baptism, it's a visual thing of the old life, and then you come up to the new life. So it's very beautiful.
Thomas: As the leader of this ritual, the sacrament do you tell people who've just been baptized, like, you know, “Go home, drink a lot of water. Go home, pray for a week…” Like is there aftercare [LAUGHS] after a baptism?
Torres: Not as such. There's more preparation, meeting with the people before and saying, “This is what this means.” And asking them how their encounter with God and how it happened and what it meant so that they realized that this is a public demonstration of what's actually happened already in them, that they have recognized Christ and received forgiveness. And this is a step of obedience because Jesus… when he told the disciples he told them to baptize, “Go ye into all the world baptizing and making disciples in the name of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit”. So that is the… where Jesus institutes the baptism.
Thomas: Got it. So the person had their experience with Christ in their own self and then chooses to have the Baptism s acrament and is publicly, with people bearing witness to the fact that they are making this choice, and… yeah, yeah.
Torres: Exactly. Right. It's a public testimony. Public witness. And it is very meaningful. And if you do it, it's interesting, outside - well it's best done outside at a, you know, by the river or something - and people will come over and say, “Hey, what's going on,” you know? So it kind of starts…. Sometimes people are curious about what's happening and it's just really exciting. And really, the person being baptized, it's very, super… there's, when you come up out of the water, there's this kind of sense of euphoria and spiritual exultation. You know what I'm saying? It's very, it's a very powerful experience. Very powerful.
Thomas: Right. That's very beautiful.
Torres: It is, it is. Yep.
Thomas: Well, thank you for sharing these insights and learnings and your wisdom and your journey with me today.
Torres: No, thank you. It's a privilege!
I love that Tina was able to give us a look into communion and baptism, arguably the two most well known Protestant rituals, from both sides of the pulpit. And I hope you could hear her genuine excitement and joy at being part of religious community - transcendent of denomination. Over the coming week. I invite you to reflect on the definition she shared of sacrament as “an outward sign of an inner grace”. That’s pretty much what a ritual is, right? Something we do on the outside that signals a change we’ve made on the inside. How cool is that?
Tina Torres spent seven years as the pastor of a Spanish-speaking congregation in West Sacramento. She is a Spanish-English translator and interpreter with a passion for languages and background in Mexican culture and customs. Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on YouTube, IG and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata dot com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. Also be sure to check out Everyday Magic for Ukraine, short 10-minute weekly meditations that support you as you support Ukraine. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening. P.S. Get up to 2 months of free podcasting service with Libsyn. Check out the show notes for your promo code to get started podcasting today.