My Baptism

I was baptized two months ago, on 27 April, 2025. I had never been baptized as a child, so it was up to me whether and when to go through the rite as an adult. I chose to do it in the Exeter College chapel, where I've been more deeply immersed in religious life this past year than ever before.

I had two main motives for getting baptized. One is that the community of the church has become quite important to me since I started worshiping three years ago, and I wanted to be fully a member of it. That means going through the church's most important act of initiation, baptism. But my other motive is that I wanted to make a public promise. In essence, I promise to point my life and my efforts toward the good.

In the part of the sacrament sometimes called the examination, I made three declarations:

I turn to Christ. I repent of my sins. I renounce evil.

What does this mean? What did I take myself to be saying when I spoke these declarations aloud?

Turning to Christ is about the other world. It means keeping the faith that there is a world beyond this one, and Christ is its emissary.

Repenting of my sins is about the inner world. It means reflecting on my thoughts and impulses and disavowing those that are misguided, or sick, or wide of the mark. This is precisely what we do in the confession. We call to mind all the ways we have gone wrong in thought and word and deed, and we repent. That is to say, we acknowledge our mistakes. We withdraw our endorsement from them. We make them no longer our own.

Renouncing evil is about the shared world. It means taking responsibility for the kind of force I'm exerting on the world around me and trying to make it a force for good. As I went on to pray at the end of the baptismal liturgy, I want to be an instrument of peace and pardon, not one of hatred and injury.

This is the essence of my baptismal vows. I declared them publicly because I want to be held to them and to be called out if I fall short. The congregation present at my baptism promised that they would uphold me in my new life in Christ, and I hope they are not the only ones who feel empowered to do so. If you see me doing evil or shrinking from the hard work of reflection, I want you to remind me of what I promised to do and who I promised to be.

Thank you to my two sponsors, Lu Post and Charles Yang, for their guidance and prayers. Thank you to Andrew Allen, the chaplain of Exeter College, for baptizing me and for discussing the ecclesiological and personal meaning of baptism with me beforehand. And thank you to all of my friends and family who supported me or witnessed my baptism.