When the Baptist preached the coming of Christ, he spoke of a baptism of fire, "I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire" (Matt. 3:11-12).
There was a video of one of the Altadena families who lost everything in the fires. In their case, everything was destroyed except for two statues: the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. So they returned to the home and dared to give thanks to God by singing the Regina Caeli, a hymn to Mary the Queen of Heaven. In the midst of all the sorrow, anxiety, anger, blaming and deflecting that this catastrophe evoked, here, for a few moments, was a voice of thanksgiving and hope right in the midst of ashes. They were baptized in a different fire than the earthly fire that swept through their community, and their voices proclaimed a different kind of judgment than anything the secular media could ever fathom. All they owned was consumed like chaff by the fire, but, in that moment, they were consumed by the Holy Spirit. People of faith understood them - for their hope was not the feel good stuff of wishful thinking, but the sober strength that comes from God.

What is this fire? This mystery has many dimensions so that how you approach it changes what you can perceive. It is not a matter of the beholder projecting meaning onto the blank screen of reality. It is that reality is so rich and deep that one's own disposition can limit or even reduce the full scope of what might be known in it. This is why to approach a mystery requires such humility. The mystery of fire is one that great contemplatives approached carefully - St. John of the Cross and St. Simeon the New Theologian both come to mind.
To see what these great saints saw when they gazed into fire, the idea of co-inherence in the writings of Charles Williams may be helpful to call to mind. His novels explore the access to heavenly realities hidden in the mundane as an answer to the hellish powers that seem at work in the world. He saw a heavenly and a hellish London co-inhere in the earthly London of his time, and he also pondered how we all co-inhere in Christ and in one another, even to the point that we can bear one another's burdens, and with Christ bear away the sin of the world.
If we take this perspective, perhaps the fire with which Christ baptizes and the fires that consume California co-inhere in each other, too. If this is the case, the challenge of those who would begin to pray is to contemplate how heaven is at work in the catastrophe until eucharist, that is thanksgiving, can be offered. For those who see the fire without Christ, the catastrophe can become just that - the creeping in of nihilistic destruction in a dysfunctional and dangerous world. But with Christ, no matter how bitter the tragedy, His saving presence changes every sorrow into a new blessing. When He entered the waters of the Jordan, He entered into the destructive forces of the world to bring this new blessing. When He baptizes with fire, it is never senseless destruction but always a new beginning - a cause, no matter how hidden, for thanksgiving.
My heart goes to my friends in southern California who now face the loss of everything. Californians have heard this story repeatedly - the Thomas Fire in Ventura, the Camp Fire in Paradise, and countless others, each more devestating than the last. One does not realize how traumatizing this actually is until he or his loved ones are burned by it. More and more of us have come to share the sorrow of loss and the hope of rebuilding. Yet, we have also seen in each instance men and women of faith rise up out of the ashes and give thanks. They do it through selfless acts of service, by a little extra kindness, and most of all, by prayer. This is Christ in the midst of chaos and death bringing new life - this is the baptism of fire not only for an individual but as well for a whole people. Not bad foundations for beginning again and building a new community.
The Christian faith, precisely because it is faith in the face of death, has something vitial for society today, especially in those places where it seems everything good, beautiful and true is lost, where anarchy and heartlessness reign. God has chosen to enter our catastrophes and to save us from our own cruelty and carelessness. If it is a chastisement, be assured that He only chastises the son whom he loves. This means He loves us - and this is the deepest most fundamental truth of all. This means that if we turn our hearts by faith to the love of God, hidden in overwhelming tragedy is a mystery of salvific importance. In circumstances of total loss, one is given the opportunity to learn how to truly pray and love.
Let our hearts contemplate the fire of God. Unquenchable visible flames that burn through California speak to us of an invisible fire that rages before the coming of Christ. Remembering this spiritual fire helps us situate ourselves in the reverence and humility that the Baptism of the Lord ought to evoke.
When Jesus went down into the water, he signified that the Eternal Son of the Father entered into this fragmented and broken world of time and space to bring a new fire, one that the waters of chaos and death could not destory. When he emerged from the Jordan, He revealed the beginning of a new world characterized by the outpouring of the Spirit command of the Father's voice - so that tragedy and death is never the last word about humanity. This new world is more real than anything else that passes away in this short life we now share. The words of a Serbian hymn come to mind. The song is about the end of time - Pobedna Pesma and its words resound with reverence and hope. It is a song of victory, of the return of Christ, but also a hymn of judgment. Hopefully, those who know this song will forgive this paraphrase below:
Behold, the coming of the Lord with His heavenly hosts arrayed for war. Let our foes be ashamed! Let them be ashamed and repent! Look how radiant, how resplendent, how resounding this terrible army! The highest mountains and the mightiest of the world fall down under its onslaught!
Look the Lord is coming to enthrone Himself! Seraphims charge forth! Cherubims surge swiftly behind them! All of earth is burning, everything is in smoke! All is smoke! We are breathless! The joy and horror cannot be described! No one to describe, this miracle of miracles when the heavens sieze the sinful earth! When heaven binds close the earth, the whole of earth's fruit becomes spoils! Then world is at its end! Myriads upon myriads of heavenly hosts arrayed for war take to the field of battle! Angels blast their trumpets! The righteous cry out their battle cry!
The righteous cry out, "Behold, the coming of the Lord! Let all land and sea go up in smoke! And , indeed, both the dry land and the waters are vanishing away! Look, all that the scriptures foretold is being fulfilled even now! A new heavens and earth are being born! Here comes the Lord! Rise up from the dead! Here He comes to judge the world! To save the world and save the flock! The whole cosmos shakes loudly! The Earth rumbles and Heaven roars! Our gold and silver are useless now! Gold and silver are passing away! And may you now shine on us, Son of God!"
In the midst of tragic loss, to be Christian is to cry out, "The Lord is coming!" Whenever we muster enough faith and hope to do so, we have joined ourselves with the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the whole array of heavenly hosts who fight for us against sin, sorrow and death. Myriads and myriads of armies arrayed for battle are coming in the fire of the Holy Spirit to bring about the New Heavens and the New Earth - established not anything passing but in the eternal sonship, love and truth of Christ. A new relationship with God opens up right in the midst of catastrophe. A new hope is born when every passing hope passes away. In this coming of Christ, there is a bright future, not only for humanity as a whole, but for those most affected by tragedy and loss. To cry out "Maranatha - come Lord Jesus", this is to embrace that future and to reject the impulse to dejection and anxiety -- it is to trust in Him.
Against this mystery, we begin to understand the powerful movement of the Holy Spirit in the family that offered a hymn to Mary the Queen of Heaven even as they stood before the wreckage of everything that was once theirs in life. Some only see the destructive baptism of whole communities in natural fire. But to be Christian is to see spiritually, to open the eyes of the heart to the coming of Christ. When everything has fallen apart and we are faced with death and loss, this is when we know that the Conqueror of death comes to breath into us the Holy Spiriit, to give new life.
The Holy Spirit flutters over all those who would join themselves to Christ by faith, and this Spirit recreates them into the Body of Christ so what Christ knew in his earthly body they might now know in his mystical body - the Father's voice, the descent of the Spirit. What can an earthly fire do to this Body that has already conquered death? How can a passing catastrophe obscure the vision of the Father's face who gazes on us in love? . To see with the eyes of the Body of Christ is to behold the truth about the world and the false judgments that trap people into a worldly way of thinking. To be part of this Body means to enter into the chaos of the world, to allow it all to wash over us including the tragic catastrophes of life, but then to rise up in confident hope that a new heavens and a new earth are already being born, and Christ is coming to wipe away every tear and to reveal the wonder of the love of the Father. Those who welcome this coming with the Mother of Christ, they know how right and just it is to give thanks and to sing to heaven.
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