In a recent Gospel, John the Baptist tells the crowds in the Judean desert: “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Lk 3:16-17). Water and fire have been prominent in the past week and months. Not so long ago, southern California faced flooding. We saw the destructive impact of water in North Carolina in October. Now we see fire’s impact in California. At the same time, we see how water can be salvific: things would have been different had those California hydrants had water in them. And fire not only destroys but can purify.

All the Gospels open Jesus’ public ministry with His Baptism in the Jordan (and temptation in the desert). All the Gospels, more or less explicitly, connect His departure after the Resurrection with the coming of the Holy Spirit. At Jesus’ Baptism, the Spirit appears “in bodily form like a dove” (Lk 3:22). Later, He comes as “tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on” each of the disciples (Acts 2:3).

There is a tendency to associate Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan with our own, though that association is not wholly congruent. We need baptism because we are sinners and thus require God’s grace to be His adopted sons and daughters. Jesus was sinless. Jesus is baptized not because He needed it but because He wanted to show His solidarity, His sharing with us, and to create the model for what we would need. Since Jesus’ Baptism is qualitatively different from ours, we should be careful about drawing facile parallels between His and ours. At the same time, because our liturgical year tends to spread out the mysteries of the Life of Christ over time, we tend to separate moments in that life that ought to be together.

Most of us, after all, are baptized a few days after our birth. (Pope Francis’s Angelus address of January 12, here, several times repeated a legitimate question: Do you know the day of your baptism? Do you know what priest celebrated it? In the Catholic Church, your sacramental life — Baptism, First Confession and Communion, Confirmation, Marriage or Ordination — should be documented at the church in which you were baptized. Do you have a copy of your baptismal certificate? How about asking for one from that church?) The Baptism of the Lord closes out the Church’s Christmas Time. This year January 13 began “Ordinary Time” again. But the gap between Jesus’ birth and His Baptism is not three weeks, as our liturgical calendar might suggest, it’s 30 years. So, let’s not let what the Church wants to teach us as important be diminished because the liturgical year separates it.

What I’m getting at is the connection between Baptism and Confirmation. Recently, some Belgian theologians entitled a book about Confirmation “the forgotten sacrament” (Le sacrement oublié). John speaks of water and fire, the primordial symbols of those two sacraments. For the longest time, the two were celebrated together in the Roman Rite. They still are in various Eastern Rites, e.g., the Byzantine, where a child is baptized, confirmed, and communicated at the same time. The Polish National Church, under Franciszek Hodur, went so far as to collapse the two sacraments into one, calling it “Baptism and Confirmation.” But even in the Roman Rite, while Baptism and Confirmation are usually separated by time, they are united in a broader understanding that they are “sacraments of initiation,” i.e., two of the three sacraments that make one a full member of the Church. That’s why the East still celebrates them together. And, even though the West has for historical reasons separated them, they still all go together to complete one’s full incorporation into the Church.

After all, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that sin has two sides to it: turning from God and turning to a creature. Conversion, then, also has those two sides, somewhat reflected in the distinction between Baptism and Confirmation: Baptism is a turning from sin while Confirmation is a fuller turning toward God, even in bearing public witness to my status as a son or daughter of God, “for that is what we are” (1 Jn 3:2). Obviously, that distinction is rough, because Baptism also decisively turns us to God. It’s a faulty thinking that somehow Confirmation (especially when administered to adolescents) is a “choice” about being Catholic, about embracing one’s faith. Confirmation is not a “contract renewal.” Baptism is not a rescindable act. By virtue of Baptism, one is forever a Christian. One may be a good Christian or a bad Christian, but a Christian one is. Nevertheless, Confirmation turns us to God in a special way by a special infusion of the “gift of the Holy Spirit,” precisely to fulfill our missionary responsibility to testify to Him before men.

So, when we contemplate the effects of fire and water, we should recognize their profound spiritual effects in these two sacraments — and be grateful for what they accomplish in our lives through “creative destruction,” destruction of sin so as to strengthen the life of grace in us.

I’ll close with some literary reflections. Robert Frost wrote a short poem in which he stated: “Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.” As we’ve seen, in God’s hand fire and water can be creative. But when we push away His hand, they can be very destructive. To draw out what Frost suggests, let me point to hell, the consequence of man’s final refusal to accept God’s work in our lives. Most people imagine hell as a lake of fire, which has ample Scriptural precedent and, in light of what we saw last week in Los Angeles, should terrify us.

But Dante, in his Divine Comedy: Inferno, describes the very bottom of hell as an ice pit, Satan and his closest minions both producing and submerged in dirty ice. That’s a profound insight, because love is warm but its absence is cold. And there is no place love is more absolutely absent than in hell.