Every year I celebrate the anniversary of my baptism with a day of prayer, renewing my personal relationship with the Lord and my decision to follow him as a disciple.

On August 17, 1941, a hot and muggy Sunday afternoon, I was baptized at St. Anne Church in Castle Shannon, Pennsylvania. My parents and godparents crowded around the baptismal fount in the tiny alcove at the back of the church. I presume the church was semi-dark, stuffy, and smelling of incense and floor wax, as it always was years later when I served there as an acolyte. Mom and dad, and my Uncle Tony and mom’s cousin Antoinette, my godparents, watched with delight as Father Angel (his real name, no joke!) performed the ceremony.

My mother had dolled me up in a long, lacy white dress and bonnet, which Italian American women required for all babies at baptism, whether boys or girls. And which would have embarrassed me to death had I been capable of realizing what I was wearing. Looking back, however, I am glad for that white dress and bonnet because of what they said about me: God was cleansing me of all sin and launching me in a brand new supernatural life.

I don’t know if I cried when Fr. Angel poured the water on my head. But now many years later I like to imagine that I squawked loud and long. That would have been an appropriate response to what was happening to me. We cry with sadness at a death and with joy at a birth, and my baptism was both a death and a birth. I was dying with Christ and rising to new life with him in the Holy Spirit, dying to my “old” self, as young as it was, and putting on a new one. I hope I wailed at the top of my lungs.

The moment Fr. Angel poured the water on my head, I died with Christ. In some mysterious way, a way I cannot fully understand, the sacrament transported me to Calvary where I died with Christ on the cross. Or better, where God put me in Christ, and Christ died with me on the cross. Again, the moment the baptismal water touched me, somehow I rose with Christ from his garden tomb. Or better, God put me in Christ, and Christ rose with me to a new life.

So, when Fr. Angel baptized me, wonderful things happened to me. The Lord cleansed me of all sin. I even smelled clean because of the fragrance of the chrism, the blessed oil that he had smeared on me. And by sharing in Christ’s eternal sacrifice I had become a New Creation. Helpless infant that I was, I had begun to live a supernatural life. Recently born a human being, I had already died and was now living a divine life. And I, a baby in a small Italian American family, had become the newest member of the Body of Christ, the universal Church.

All that was required of me to receive all these benefits was something I could not do—repent and believe. Fortunately for Baby Ghezzi, my parents and godparents stood in as my proxies and did these things for me. They said on my behalf that I renounced Satan, turned from sin, and believed in God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in all that God had done.

But while Baptism produced its effects in me as an infant, that was not enough. At some point in my life, I had to fulfill for myself the sacrament’s requirements of repentance and faith.

As a young adult in my late teens and early twenties, prompted by the example of friends, I professed faith in God and decided to become a disciple of Christ. In those days I assumed personal responsibility for the decisions my parents and godparents had made for me on that Sunday in August, 1941. And now seven decades later on my baptism’s anniversary I celebrate my life as a New Creation and as a disciple of the Lord.