Initiation
An initiation is a beginning. To be initiated to to start follow a particular path. It can be seen as the initial step in a process of formation.
In our lives we are likely to undergo multiple formations which means we will go through a number of initiations. These processes are part of our urban as well as our spiritual formation. These may be formalized by, for example, completing a test to receive a professional license or by undergoing a ceremonial rite as in a baptism. They may also be less formal but however structured these initiatory processes mark a change in our status and our place in the world.
Baptistry in Siena Cathedral
Many years ago, I was on a short pilgrimage to Italy with a small group of other Episcopal clergy. We had been traveling through a string of jewel-like cities in Northern and Central Italy. It was near the end of this pilgrimage that we arrived in Siena for a short visit. Siena is a beautiful hill town in Tuscany first settled by the Etruscans. As we entered the historic center of this walled city and took in that distinctive shade of brown that captures the name of the city, we were easily transported to a time in the Middle Ages when this city was a stopover on the Via Francigena, the pilgrimage route that went from Canterbury to Rome. It was love at first sight.
Today Siena is best known for the Palio, a famous horse race that takes place twice each year in the summer months, where horses run on behalf of one of the seventeen neighborhood that lie within the city walls. As our group walked through this picturesque city we saw some of the principal sights including the majestic town hall known as the Palazzo Publico, the massive Cathedral of Siena and the home of a saint, Catherine of Siena,whose head is preserved in a reliquary nearby at the church of St. Dominic.
What left the most lasting impression, however, came as our group arrived at the to the entrance to one of the seventeen neighborhoods. I was walking slightly ahead of our group when my eyes were drawn to a graceful fountain. Struck by its beauty, I was curious as to why it was there. I saw our guide nearby and asked whether it had any significance. She quickly replied: “Oh, my yes! It’s quite significant. When a child is born into this neighborhood, they are taken to the Cathedral or to a parish church to be baptized into the faith and then they are brought to this fountain to be baptized into their neighborhood.”
It was many years later that I learned more about the meaning of that neighborhood fountain, but that passing encounter was enough to convince me that I had stumbled upon a profound truth about how a faith tradition can inspire an engagement with the city and how the city can illuminate questions of faith.
Learning about these twin baptisms or rites of initiation I had something of an epiphany. It was the beginning of a growing awareness that my experience of being formed as a city dweller and as someone on a spiritual journey were remarkably similar experiences.
But what was this similarity?
When I reflected on my experience at the fountain in Siena, the similarity was easy to describe. For in each of these acts of initiation whether taking place at a baptismal font in a church or in at a neighborhood fountain, water became the tangible or “material” symbol that was used to mark the incorporation of the one being “baptized” or brought into a specific community that had distinct traditions and defined expectations of the one being “baptized.”
Years later I returned to Siena where my guide was a woman whose father had sculpted one of the fountains. I learned from her that these neighborhood fountains were of fairly recent origin. The fountains began to appear as families who had been brought up in one of the tight-knit neighborhoods saw that their children were moving away from the neighborhoods to places outside the walled portion of Siena or far from Siena altogether. They struggled with how they could maintain a continuing relationship to their family’s story, a story rooted in “place’ that went back generations. The fountains became a way of initiating their children into the ongoing life of the community. And so a religious rite of initiation was literally “borrowed” to give form to an initiation into the life of a civic community where water was used to carry symbolic meanings. As with their baptism in the church, the baptism at the neighborhood fountain conferred upon those being “baptized” an identity, a place in the story, and an incorporation into a living community.
The Three Functions of Initiation
We can see these three initiatory functions at work today in the lives of those of us who become immersed in the life of a community of faith and also “thrown” (or immersed) into the life in a city whether as the place of our birth or by a later act of choice.
Through this initiation:
We receive a new identity and come to look differently upon ourselves and to be viewed differently by others.
We are placed in a story and so acquire a past, a role and a direction for the future.
We become part of a living community is to receive the support of others as well as to be accountable to them.
Seeing these dual processes of initiation at work in our lives as both city dwellers and as people of faith opens us up to a deeper inner conversation about the meaning and purpose of our lives. In this conversation the everyday and the spiritual dimensions of life intersect.
Other Perspectives posts: Orientation • Intersection
