Renewing your vows

Yes ... the Novus Ordo  suggests that we renew our Baptismal Vows before Confirmation and annually at the Easter Vigil; priests are required to renew priestly vows at the Chrism Mass; married people reaching significant anniversaries ...

I am.genuinely unsure what I think about all this; or how strongly I think it. Let me make a prosecution case.

All these renewals renew vows or commitments made before sacraments which indelibly mark the soul (or, in the case of Marriage, set up an unbreakable union which can omly be broken by the death of a partner). They are not soluble by fiat or consent or desuetude.

Is there not a risk that people might think they are renewable in the sense that a professional qualification may be renewable?

Is there not a risk that people of weak or faltering Faith might agonise over whether they want, or are able, to renew them? So that the Easter when one didn't go to Church and renew one's vows might come to seem the occasion when I ceased to be obliged by them ... when, so to speak, they gently walked out of my life.

In a sense, we renew our Baptismal commitment every time dip our fingers in the Holy Water Stoup. But this meaningful and elegant symbol is not structured so as repeatedly to set a stark black-or-white choice before our elective capacities. And we renew our fidelity to our Baptism when we go to Confession.

S Paul once told the Roman Christians that the End was was nearer "than when you believed" [hote episteusate]. In English, that makes it sound as if the believing was something one used to do in the past! But the Apostle used the aorist tense, which ... roughly ... points to a single past action. So S Paul is here referring to the momentary action when, having professed pistis, one was baptised into the Body of Christ and, having shared His Death and Burial, one entered upon His Resurrection life.

And that single event, which is unrepeatable, abides for all eternity.

Just as God's Covenant with Israel, to which His People have so often been faithless, is a rock-solid permanency rooted in His faithfulness.

We should think of these states as Acts of God rather than as acts of revocable human choice. I am not a Christian / a priest / a husband only on those occasions when I feel like it. The old Anglican 1662 Form of priestly Ordination put it beautifully bluntly by using the words of the Lord to His disciples, as in the medieval pontificals, and then adding a temporal specificity to them:
Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven etc...

I am afraid that all this emphsis on Renewing runs the risk of smuggling into our responses a fashionable modern subjectivity as well as modern notions of personal autonomy.

Does it?