Our new album is officially out and beginning it’s journey to a streaming platform near you. We call it Ambrosian Catechesis, Vol. 2: The Light of Mystery. Our aim here is to journey with Augustine into the post-baptism instruction he may have received from Ambrose.
Listen to the album here:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4C7tgLScVOyhUECRwRtK1X?si=J3cRWY5jSWCm4nxb7xQalA
We draw on several sources for this album, chiefly a work referred to as On the Mysteries (listen to the entire work translated into English). This is a work of Ambrose where he explains to those newly baptized what they have recently experienced. It is a work filled with biblical imagery and explanation.
One example is Ambrose’s description of a practice where before baptism, the phrase Ephphatha was spoken over the person. This phrase comes from the Gospels and is a well known phrase Jesus spoke over a deaf man before healing. Ambrose describes it this way:
So open your ears, and take in the good fragrance of eternal life, breathed into you through the gift of the sacraments. This is what we signaled to you when, celebrating the mystery of the opening, we said: “Ephphatha”—which means “Be opened”—so that each person coming to grace would know what he was being asked, and would remember what he should answer.
Christ celebrated this mystery in the Gospel, as we read, when he healed a man who could not speak and could not hear. But he touched the man’s mouth, because he was healing both a man who could not speak and a man himself. In the one case, so that his mouth would be opened by the sound of the voice poured into it; in the other, because that kind of touch was fitting for a man, but not fitting for a woman.
Here Ambrose touches on the practice of saying Ephphatha as celebrating the mystery of the opening. It is meant then to symbolize both the act of God in bringing the person to baptism and as preparation for the act itself. It is a wonderful phrase that symbolizes God’s act of healing the human heart.
Ambrose himself held a view of baptism in which baptism is a real saving mystery in which God forgives sins, grants new life, joins the believer to Christ, and brings the person into the life of the Church. This is a view both similar and quite different than the view many Christians hold today. On the one hand a Roman Catholic for example would find much to agree with in the practice and the way it is described, seeing in the descriptions echoes of their own experience in the church. On the other hand an Evangelical would find this view of baptism to be stronger than the typical evangelical view that baptism is a symbol of an inward reality and perhaps be challenged by the ancient understanding to consider a different view. Regardless both view baptism on a basic level as marking a change that God has worked in bringing a lost person to Himself. And so we celebrate with Ambrose this mystery and consider that wonderful working of God in the heart.
Another interesting aspect of the quote above is the last sentence regarding the touch being fitting for a man and not a woman. This is not meant to say the practice of saying Ephphatha was not done over both genders. Rather here Ambrose is speaking to a real cultural reality of Jesus day in which to perform a healing in the manner of touching the tongue would have been inappropriate had the man not been a man. So think of it like a kind of side comment about the culture and time not as a indication that men received a different version of the rite than a women. Phrases like this can be a little jarring a times when reading ancient writers and they remind us of the gap in time and culture as I would doubt that a modern teacher would have said the same in that manner. One aspect this phrase brings out though is the very personal nature of the healing Jesus performs for the individual and this is something we know all to well across gender differences. When the Lord moves to heal us he does so at the most personal level. What a cool Lord!
All this to say we begin our new album with a song inspired from this mystery in the hope we all might experience as well as remember that healing. Ephphatha friends!
https://open.spotify.com/track/3lAzvI7EojaXwEtx0pguQs?si=wDE-HptzSbmO6P6XjNt__A