What are “years of discretion” anyway? I’m sitting at my desk looking at Procter and Frere’s A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, and thinking of our confirmation candidates. Footnote 3 on page 605 tells me that the rubric in the 1661 revision advised that confirmation “is most meet to be ministered when children come to that age that partly by the frailty of their own flesh and partly by the assaults of the world and the devil they begin to fall into sundry kinds of sin”. In other words, puberty. An extra dose of the Holy Spirit for when your hormones hit. Previously, children might be confirmed as soon as they were able to say the articles of the faith (that would be the Creed), the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. It was a matter of learning, not adolescence. When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, all the Catholic and Lutheran children in my class were dismissed early on Thursdays. This was known as “Religious Release”. The Catholic kids got on a bus to the convent and the Lutherans headed off in the other direction to St Michael’s Lutheran Church. Jeff Murray and I were left in the classroom. He was Baptist. I was Jewish. We caught up with our homework and fed the gerbils.
And then, when I was 16, I too was prepared for confirmation, because Reform Judaism had, it turned out, established its own version, which was older than I thought; the relic of a moment in the early 19th century when, it was hoped, confirmation might take over from the Bar Mitzvah as the rite for coming of age. I have therefore been confirmed twice. The first time in 1974 by Rabbi Schwartz and Rabbi Lerner at Mount Zion Temple, in a scene which my memory conflates with the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man. And then a second time, as a quick and quiet postlude to my baptism some 16 years later. I barely noticed it happening.
The more I know about confirmation, the more confusing I find it. We admit children to Holy Communion from the age of about seven, as the Catholics do. We tell them then that, at their baptism, they became full members of the Church. For us, confirmation is not a ticket to the feast. Why then, they ask, do they need to be confirmed? I have trouble answering.
I’ve told my confirmation candidates that, back in the old days, the children of the village would line up along each side of the road and the bishop would amble past on his horse, laying a hand on each head in passing. If this isn’t true, it ought to be. Anyway, confirmations only really picked up in the Victorian era, with the invention of suffragan bishops and the railway.
The Church of England doesn’t have an age below which you cannot be confirmed. B and H are our two youngest confirmands. They know their Lord’s Prayer and can define a sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. We decided that opening their door when I knocked, and giving me tea and biscuits, is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of hospitality. They loved to hear “Keep your hands from picking and stealing.” “Picking?” “Noses and scabs.” They are eight and seven. I’m worried that the bishop will think they’re too young. It goes back to that annoying rubric in the 1661 edition of the BCP. They are not yet of an age to have fallen into sundry kinds of sin. But are they ready to be examined by the bishop? I believe they are.
For these two, confirmation is about a public declaration of faith: saying in their own voices what they had no words for when they were babies. They answer the questions that the diocese asks about “how have you come to the point of wanting to be confirmed?” and “briefly, what is important to you about being a Christian?” by writing about God, faith and prayer. Our older candidates, the six teenagers and the one adult in the group, write about belonging; of the importance they give to being confirmed with friends and siblings in the village church, and, through this ceremony, coming closer to all Christians everywhere. In other words, recognising and acknowledging that you’re rooted somewhere. We all have our stories of how we came to belong.
“My own confirmation came close to being a disaster,” a friend told me. “I stood out like a sore thumb among a sea of 12-year-old girls in white. We ran out of petrol in driving rain and pitch darkness on the way home. ‘Now you know what kind of outfit you’ve joined,’ said Father Peter Brett as we trudged to the nearest petrol station with an empty can. And I was happy.”
