29 April 2012

Who's left holding the baby?

It was about a year ago that Sheila commented to say she enjoyed hearing about local church customs which "outsiders" might not know about or even necessarily notice - like the significance in Finland of the number of candles on the altar.

Today, seeing Emily's beautiful photograph of her son being baptized in the Cathedral of St. Andrew, reminded me of another Finnish practice. Here it is not the priest, nor a parent, but one of the godparents who holds the baby.


Anglican and Lutheran priests alike accept this practice here. I've mentioned some features which distinguish our Lutheran priests' baptismal practices from the Anglican ones in another post.

The photograph below was taken the first time any of the children chose to work with our baptism materials, only a few weeks ago. An older girl chose to work with them alone first, but she finished before our Response Time was over and so this other girl was also able to use them. I didn't intend the photo to be quite so blurry, but it does a good job of obscuring her face!



1 comment:

  1. Sheila02 May, 2012 06:19

    Such a lovely practice! And as it should be, since priests come and go, but godparents are usually constant figures.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for conversing with me about Godly Play®! I do moderate some comments for the sake of the children I write about. Please be polite: to quote the Velveteen Rabbi, Whatever you're going to say in response to my posts, consider whether it's the sort of thing you would say to your host or their children if you'd been invited to someone's home for tea. If it isn't, then please don't say it here.

If you're new to commenting on blogs, I recommend that you "Comment as" Name/URL. You can use your real first name or a nickname. URL is the address of a website that you want to be linked with your name - feel free to leave it blank. Before your comment is accepted, you have to pass a spam filter. After clicking on 'post comment' or 'preview', just type in the sequence of letters you will then see (or click on the wheelchair for a recording of characters to type). Thanks for reading and commenting!

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)