Baptism

One cold Sunday evening late in February I was early for an appointment and was waiting out on the sidewalk in front of the rectory. Very cold: one of those late winter snaps that can drive the weather-weak to despair. A native Midwesterner, I tell myself I’m made of heartier (or possibly just colder) stock, but still I could feel my shoulders inching up toward my ears, my fingers numbing in my gloves, and decided it might be best to keep my hearty stock moving. So I began to walk back and forth across the street: over to the grade school, back to the rectory, over to the grade school… At one point, midway through one of my tiny commutes, I happened to look down the street and was stopped in my tracks by the remnants of a sunset still blushing the sky in a peony pink streaked with a few fingers of grey cloud. It was so beautiful I prayed the Phos Hilaron (“O Gladsome Light”), a hymn I often pray at Vespers, as Christians have since the 2nd or 3rd century. I whispered it, pushing the ancient words into icy air, into the silence. There’s not a lot of things that can make New York City quiet, but cold does a pretty good job.

A couple weeks earlier I’d made a home retreat. Initially I’d planned on a week at the monastery (I’m a Benedictine oblate with a monastery about five hours outside of the city), but a couple appointments kept me here, so I decided to try to recreate the retreat experience as best I could within the confines of my bedroom and the two or three blocks to my parish church. And I was largely successful: I reinserted a couple prayer periods from the Office that get sacrificed when I’m on my regular work schedule; devoted more time to spiritual reading, to lectio; and, while the city, even at its quietest, can’t remotely approach the austere exterior silence of the monastery (we’re delightfully in the middle of nowhere: coyotes, bears, that sort of thing), I hoped at least to recapture some sense of interior silence to see what, if anything, God had to say to me in it—and what, if anything, I had to say to him.

My side of the conversation—typical of my retreats and, I suspect, a good deal of my prayer life—was largely defined by yearning. Oh, I’m joyful, grateful, and can pray a complaint psalm with alarming ardor, but underneath it all I’m always yearning, very deer-and-running-streams. And what I yearn for, ask for most is for God to be close. Contrary to any number of psalms, I don’t ask to see his face. I don’t want that. But I do ask him to touch me. My favorite miracles are the ones where Jesus touches the person he’s healing—and I’m stunned when he uses his spit. And I think they move me so because the person being healed had to let Jesus touch him, it was part of his faith. When the blind man felt the mud-and-spittle paste being smeared on his eyes, when the deaf and dumb man felt Jesus’ fingers in his ears, tasted Jesus’ spit on his tongue, for all their faith, they still must have thought, “What’s this guy up to?” But they let him go on. They gave themselves over to his touch. They surrendered—and they were healed. And somehow I was thinking of this again as I stood in the street, in the cold, watching the pink fade away.

Then Father Michael came out of the rectory and we headed down the block to the former convent. In its heyday, it housed some two dozen Sisters of Mercy, all of whom worked at the school. Now it’s a catchall of parish activities and events. At Thanksgiving it’s where we cook the come one/come all free parish dinner; Saturdays it’s where Brother Scott does his Old Testament class; the youth group meets there; the AA group; the food pantry has a room off the kitchen; the women’s shelter is about to reopen in the basement; sometimes retreat groups use the tiny bedrooms upstairs. Father Michael and I were going to use the chapel: one of my second graders from the religious ed program was going to be baptized. This was my appointment. This was why I was early.

I don’t really know why Isaac wasn’t baptized as an infant. There’s always a story in these cases, it’s always complicated, and if his mother told it to me, at the end I still probably wouldn’t know why Isaac wasn’t baptized as an infant. The important thing, whatever the story, was that he was finally being baptized. And in a way I envied him. As Father Michael got things set up on a small table—the candles, the oils, the bowl of water—I thought how wonderful it was that Isaac would actually remember his baptism; that he would remember hearing his parents say yes, this was what they wanted for him; remember the smell of the chrism, the coolness of the water running off his head. I certainly didn’t remember my baptism—either of them. The first time I was presented to her in the hospital room, my mother, from the decidedly Irish side of the family, first made sure I had the correct number and placement of limbs and digits, then reached for the nearest Dixie cup, poured some hospital-grade water into it and, with the ardor of a mother’s love (if little knowledge of canon law), performed a lay baptism. For that matter, canon law says that lay people can perform baptisms in cases of emergency and, to my mother, the possibility that any baby of hers would end up in Limbo was emergency enough. A few weeks later I was welcomed into the Church with an actual parish ceremony. Maybe Isaac wasn’t baptized as an infant because he had a post-Limbo mother.

His older brother Isaiah, about whom I’d heard but hadn’t yet met, was also being baptized that night. What I’d heard was that he was profoundly autistic, and when I first met him and said hello, I wasn’t sure whether the encounter registered with him at all. His head rocked rhythmically side to side—a movement researchers say is self-soothing—and his eyes had that strange autistic cast that manages to seem both distant and deeply internalized at the same time. He would occasionally say a word or fragment of a word, sharply, abruptly; say it again; stand up; sit down; stand up; say it again; walk over to his father; say it again; say it again, until a gentle, infinitely patient word from the father or mother would calm him down, bring him back to his chair. I didn’t know much about Isaac’s family situation, but I noticed in class that he always talked about his mother, never his father. Father Michael wasn’t sure whether they were divorced or not, but just being in the room with them, their estrangement was palpable. It was so sad, so human, so beautiful all at once: somehow along the way they had lost patience with one another, but the patience they showed to Isaiah was sanctified, holy. Pure grace.

Some people cry at weddings. For me, it’s baptisms. (Not sobbing, mind you; just like: teary.) Baptisms and First Communions. For a while I thought I was just getting old and sentimental. But then I realized that my teariness was prompted by a deeper sense of what was going on in the sacrament and had more to do with my being a catechist than a member in good standing with AARP. As Father Michael said the blessing over the baptismal water, as the prayer moved from one scriptural water image to the next, I thought: I’m the one who told Isaac about the abyss before Creation; I’m the one who told him about the Parting of the Red Sea; and in a few weeks, as we move toward Holy Week, I’ll be the one who tells him about the water flowing from the side of Christ on the cross. And I’m the one preparing him for First Communion. Yes, I was a guest at the baptism, but I was also a guest with a heavy investment in its outcome. What’s not to cry about?

Freed from original sin, Isaac’s thoughts turned immediately to cake (his godmother had brought something extravagantly over-iced), and the baptismal party broke up fairly quickly after the final round of welcome-to-the-Church applause. As I shrugged on my coat and began to fit the two parts of the liner’s zipper together, Isaiah stopped rocking his head, suddenly engaged, and looked over at me—or rather, at my hands. He walked over to me, came very close (I almost thought he was going to hug me), pushed my hands away from the zipper and began fitting the pin into the zipper himself. I moved to help him, but he pushed my hands away again. I heard his mother say, “Oh, he loves doing this.” He got the pin in and zipped the liner up to my neck. I thanked him and reached down to begin buttoning the coat itself, but he pushed my hands away again. He buttoned the bottom button, then the next one up, then the next. And somewhere around that third button I had the most amazing feeling: the feeling of letting go, of giving myself over. Somewhere in my soul I realized this was my mud-and-spittle moment. I surrendered and let Isaiah take care of me. And once I let him take care of me, touch me, the miracle happened. I didn’t need to see God’s face. I just needed Isaiah to button my coat.

It didn’t feel quite so cold walking home. I was too happy to be cold. Happy that Isaac had finally been baptized; happy that Isaiah had. And happy that I finally had.

Third time’s the charm.