All in My Power to Support This Young Person

I have the honor to be invited to be a mentor for a confirmand, a young woman I have not met before, and this means so much to me. At baptism, we who sponsored and witnessed promised to do all in our power to support this person in her life in Christ, and Confirmation mentoring is a way of doing that.

Confirmation began when early Christian communities grew too big for the Bishop to baptize each new member. The presbyter baptized and then when the Bishop came around he (always he, of course, until the 20th century) laid hands on the new Christian and "confirmed" the baptism. In the early church, baptism was something you came to after three years of instruction.

Confirmation is thus bound up with baptism; but over time the rites grew apart. By the time I came along some 1600 or 1700 years later, you got baptized as an infant but did not receive the communion or certain instruction until getting confirmed as an adolescent or adult.

As an aside, I remember one beautiful woman, a parishioner at St. John's in Arlington, Mass., who reached the stage of needing pastoral visits and eucharist in her home. One day when I was there she told me of her Confirmation day sometime in the 1920s.

"I wore a white dress," she told me, "and when the Bishop laid hands on me such a Spirit came down that I was overcome with bliss and unable to speak to anyone for the rest of the day. Everyone was having a big party for me but I felt apart; I was going around in this blessed state."

Around the time Elizabeth was getting confirmed in the old tradition of white dress and veil (which she still had in her closet--the veil, that is--and showed me), the Episcopal Church was going through liturgical renewal and debate about Confirmation, a debate was still continuing in the 1980s when I was serving at St. John's:

"If Baptism is your entry into the Body of Christ, why is communion withheld until Confirmation?" one side asked.
"Because," the other side responded, "the young baby doesn't understand the sacrament."
"And at home," the renewers asked, "do you withhold food until the child understands nutrition? And besides," they continued, "who can claim to fully understand this mystery?" The outcome of this debate: all baptized Christians are welcome to receive the sacrament.

Confirmation now becomes not your entry into communion, but your own affirmation of the vows that were made for you by others at your Baptism. The church's Christian education is now begun in children's Sunday School continues in special instruction and mentoring to confirmands. Baptized Christians participate in parish ministry from childhood on up and regard religious study as our lifelong endeavor.

I give thanks to God for the invitation to this ministry to a confirmand and pray for the power to carry it out.

This is the Prayer Book's Collect for Young People:

"God our Father, you see your children growing up in an unsteady and confusing world: Show them that your ways give more life than the ways of the world, and that following you is better than chasing after selfish goals. Help them to take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a chance for a new start. Give them strength to hold their faith in you, and to keep alive their joy in your creation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."