Sign and Symbol

I failed so spectacularly as a godfather that my first and only godson, aged twenty, publicly sacked me by denouncing me for various failings in the pages of a British national newspaper. It was, I admit it, the first and last communication between us since his baptism. This was not totally my fault, but I also can’t wholly escape the blame. I could explain everything, but I won’t. There was justice of a sort in the rebuke, and I’ll leave it at that. I’m afraid I may have been influenced, in my slackness, by my own godparents, of whom I can, alas, remember nothing at all. I always envied my brother’s godfather, who was generally good for a handsome present at least once a year. Christopher was far more grandly launched into the faith than I was, having— according to family lore—been sealed with the Sign of the Cross aboard one of His Britannic Majesty’s submarines in the great naval station of Malta. The ship’s bell, by maritime tradition, was upturned, blessed, and used as a font for the ceremony. Many years later, on another formerly British Mediterranean island, Cyprus, he was received into the Greek Orthodox Church in order to be married, thus leaving the Anglican Communion. This is otherwise rather hard to do. You cannot just resign, or grow slack in the faith. The Archbishop of Canterbury will take no notice. You must actually join a rival church to quit the Church of England.