Baptism is the initial and essential mystery and an absolute, decisive action for the Christian. The benefits of Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection are mediated to the believer through Baptism.
Baptism engraves upon and imparts to each person afresh the image of God distorted by the effects of sin, an image continuously disfigured by the accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking of Adam's progeny and imitators.
The baptismal font becomes at once a tomb and a womb: "at the self-same moment you die and are bom; the water of salvation is at once your grave and your mother" (St. Cyril of Jerusalem). The triple immersion in and emersion from the baptismal waters is laden with meaning. Baptism is both a death and a new birth. The water destroys one life and it begets another. It drowns the old man and raises up the new. The liturgical act gives expression to two realities: the death of the old man, who in solidarity with Adam, is subject to sin and death, and the birth of the new man, who in his union with Christ, is provided with new members and faculties in preparation for the life to come.
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