Aidan Kavanagh was a Roman Catholic monk and liturgical scholar who taught for many years at Yale. His roots, however, were Episcopalian. He grew up in Saint Paul’s Church in Waco, Texas, and was a graduate of the University of the South—Sewanee—an institution of the Episcopal Church. He became a monk at Saint Meinrad’s Abbey, a Benedictine foundation in Indiana. I recently read somewhere that Father Kavanagh used to begin work with adults preparing for baptism by speaking about a grass blade: a living thing that no human being could create. If a person can grasp or be stirred by that truth, it will not surprise that the first sentence of the baptismal creed is “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”
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