Chrismation

The Church was born when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles at Pentecost; chrismation is that event arriving at one particular person. In the apostolic Church the gift followed baptism through the apostles' own hands: when Samaria received the word, Peter and John came down and "laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost" (Acts 8:17). As the Church spread far beyond the reach of any apostle's hands, the gift came to be given through anointing with chrism consecrated by the bishops, the apostles' successors — so that every chrismation, in a village or a cathedral, still carries the weight of those first hands in Jerusalem.

Notice what chrismation is not. It is not a graduation ceremony deferred to the teenage years, and not a "completion" of an incomplete baptism. It is given in the same hour as baptism, to a forty-day-old infant as readily as to an adult, because the Spirit is not a reward for maturity but the power by which any Christian life, of any age, is lived at all. The tradition speaks of the whole Christian struggle as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit; chrismation is where that acquisition begins.

The rite is brief and total. With a small brush of chrism the priest anoints the forehead, the eyes, the nostrils, the lips, the ears, the breast, the hands, and the feet — mind, senses, heart, work, and walk, the whole person claimed for God — saying at each anointing: "The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit." The words are ancient and precise. A seal marks ownership and authenticity; the gift is not a quality or a feeling but the Holy Spirit Himself, come to dwell in this person. St. Paul has the whole grammar of it: God "hath anointed us… Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts" (2 Corinthians 1:21-22); and St. John tells the faithful, "ye have an unction from the Holy One" (1 John 2:20) — unction being simply the old word for anointing.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem warned the newly baptized against underestimating what touched them: "But beware of supposing this to be plain ointment. For as the Bread of the Eucharist, after the invocation of the Holy Ghost, is mere bread no longer, but the Body of Christ, so also this holy ointment is no more simple ointment… after invocation, but it is Christ's gift of grace, and, by the advent of the Holy Ghost, is made fit to impart His Divine Nature."

Holy chrism is unlike any other blessed oil: a compound of olive oil and many fragrant substances, consecrated not in the parish but at the Church's highest level — by the primates of a number of the self-governing Orthodox churches, from whom the rest receive it, traditionally in a rite spanning Holy Week and culminating at the Liturgy of Holy Thursday. From there it is distributed to dioceses and parishes — which means the small vial in a country church physically connects every newly chrismated Christian to the whole Church across the world. Nothing in Orthodox initiation is a private, local act.

Chrismation has one further use: it is the usual mystery by which converts whose baptism the Church accepts are received into Orthodoxy — sealed with the Spirit within the Church's unity, without repeating baptism (practice varies; more here). The contrast with the later Western pattern is instructive rather than polemical: the West came to defer "confirmation" until a bishop could be present, and eventually until an age of discretion; the East kept baptism, chrismation, and first Communion together as one unbroken whole — which is why there is no Orthodox "age of confirmation," and why Orthodox infants commune from the start.