Baptisms

I’m wearing nylon running shorts and my husband’s t-shirt. I’m barefoot, in line behind a man whose tattooed shoulders block my view of our pastor, waist-deep in the Whirlpool. The aqua water ripples in the dark wood floor, and the familiar smell of chlorine feels out of place here in the mostly empty church, like a beach ball rolling between aisles at a funeral. In a way, a funeral isn’t far from what we’re doing here—burying our old selves to unearth the new.

My heart has migrated north, into my head, where I hear it thrumming against my skull, and the knot in my throat keeps rising, threatening to turn into tears or vomit. Maybe both.

Then it’s my turn. I’m invited to say something about my decision to turn my life over to Christ. I mutter something wooden, hyperbolic—words that don’t match the intense relief and elation I felt three years ago, during a midnight prayer circle I almost didn’t attend. I smile nervously at the small crowd gathered at the edge of the stage—a handful of my church friends, others’ friends and family, and on the margins my husband, who laces his fingers behind him and watches with a mix of curiosity and skepticism.

Our pastor says a few words and tips me under. Tepid water shoots up my nose and then I’m clambering out again, sopping wet, wrapped in a towel and sent to change in the women’s room. One friend said she felt as if her blood had been changed, an inrush of new energy and a draining of old fears. Sitting on a bench in the bathroom corner, I mostly feel clammy and embarrassed.

“I am the gate,” Jesus says to his earliest followers. “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

He has just warned the disciples about other leaders who would try to manipulate them, saying they would know their true “shepherd” by the voice of the “gatekeeper,” and the shepherd would open the gate for them. I love this passage because it’s such a beautiful image for the mystery of the relationship between God and Christ—and because it puts so much faith in the follower’s ability to recognize God’s voice.

I want that kind of faith. Once, running circles around a track, I listened to a book on tape about learning to recognize God’s voice. I got so distracted by the terrible, car-salesman-like delivery of the narrator that I had to play the tracks several times before they sunk in. In the end I didn’t understand any more than I had before, and I felt frustrated—with whomever chose the narrator and with myself.

Bible commentaries tend to focus on the narrowness of the gate in this passage, on the utterly confusing word salvation, and the danger of taking any other path to God. But I love the interpretation that picks up on Jesus’ subtler message—that we’ll go in and come out of enclosure as we follow him nomadically over hills and into valleys. That there’s a push-pull to this journey, and we’re not expected to enter the gate once and never need to enter it again.

It’s not that I want to be baptized ten thousand times, but that I can expect absence and presence—times of feeling close to spiritual guidance and times of feeling far away. My feelings aren’t in question here. What matters is that I’m held and watched over, as well as given freedom to question and explore.

This wasn’t my first baptism. That happened when I was a year old, just before the gears of my memory caught and began recording. My parents, raised Lutheran and Methodist, brought my sister and me to the United Church of Christ to be baptized.

My mom attended with us until I was twelve or so, when I took the informal confirmation class with my friends and made my own decision to join the church. Then she stopped going, and shortly afterward, when I started high school, I did, too.

My mom is reserved in friendships, unlikely to speak up in large groups. Watching her, I learned to be careful and reserved, too. But I desperately wanted to know what it felt like to be her. I asked her: How did she get through high school? Did she believe in God? She had a yin-yang jewelry set: little studs and a small pendant with the Taoist symbol for interdependence, its fish-like swirl. On my friends’ T-shirts and school binders, the symbol looked cliché, but on my mom it was elegant, thoughtful.

“I believe in balance,” my mom would say, and something always held me back from asking more. Did she mean karma? You reap what you sow? That good would always be present in life, in balance with evil? Could there be balance and a Creator?

I return to church secretly, at 26. I’m living on a farm as an apprentice, getting up in the dark to meditate before the workday begins. Wrapped in an old blanket on the floor of my shared room, I wrestle sleepiness and anger, equal parts desperate to find peace in myself and frustrated with my mind’s constant wandering.

After leaving church in high school, I had picked up my spiritual leanings and taken them to yoga classes and books by the Dalai Lama. In college, I rented meditation tapes from the library, traded work for room and board at a yoga center, attended a ten-day silent retreat. Working for my mom’s employer during summer break, I invented a rigorous yoga and meditation routine for myself, getting up early to practice in my parents’ backyard.

So this peculiar asceticism isn’t a new habit. It’s a really old one, dressed up in new clothes.

After meditating, I get up to make breakfast, feed the chickens and collect the eggs if it’s my turn, then report to the fields with everyone else. In the summer we twist speckled eggplant off prickly vines, and in the fall our hands redden with cold lifting heavy Napa cabbages into crates. I throw my body into the physicality of farm labor, trying to burn up the energy that eats away at me—this sense of purposelessness and guilt.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I am too exhausted to listen to the negative thoughts in my head. I cook dinner and drink beer and laugh with the rest of the apprentices, and fall into bed heavy and thankful.

But deep down, I’m approaching a breaking point. Manual labor and meditation aren’t cutting it. Reading Wendell Berry’s radical agrarian writing like everyone else in the farmhouse, I begin to pay more attention to his perspective on the Christian faith I had abandoned. It strikes me that maybe I need to go back to church. Just to see.

My long-sleeved work shirt is stuck to my spine when I finally arrive at the A-frame church building on a hill above town. The minister is halfway through the blessing of the bread and the wine, and she catches my eye and smiles at me as I slide into a back pew.

I haven’t told any of the others where I am, but Sunday’s our free day. Most of them are relishing the chance to sleep in, to drink coffee in bed instead of out in the field.

“Come, for the meal is ready,” the minister says, arms wide.

My heart is beating wildly, as much from the seven-mile walk in unexpected heat as from fear. I’m not ready to take communion, not after twelve years of absence.

“Healing God, we come before you broken, yet seeking wholeness; isolated, yet seeking community; overwhelmed, yet seeking simplicity; shamed, yet seeking grace,” she reads.

Then I’m borne up on the deep vibration of the congregation’s voice answering back. I don’t want to be here, but I don’t know where else to go.

I’m becoming someone I never thought I’d be: going to bible study, potlucks, and women’s retreats with women decades older than me at church. They pick me up at the farm in air-conditioned cars and ask me kindly about farming, my family, what I’m reading. They ask how they can pray for me, and take me out to lunch.

I help one older congregant weed her backyard and visit a homebound member of the church family. I revive a large vegetable garden on the south-facing slope of the church property, testing my budding farming knowledge and recruiting others to help me. We grow a modest crop of spring vegetables for the food pantry, and organize skill-shares and work parties.

In Buddhist thought, the community of seekers (sangha) is an essential part of the spiritual path. You work on your inner world within that community, building up both at the same time. This is the first time in ages that I really feel at home in a community of seekers. The people in this church remind me of the people in my childhood church—ordinary people doing their best to love and serve one another. Suddenly, I’m flooded with good memories of my early Sundays, with gratitude, and an overwhelming hunger for the space in my life that God once occupied.

“I always urged my Western friends to go back to their own traditions and rediscover the values that are there, those values they have not been able to touch before,” Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Living Buddha, Living Christ. I’m seeing church through fresh eyes after years of questioning and searching elsewhere.

Here, at the end of every service, we join hands in a big circle around the sanctuary for the last hymn, a rousing single-lyric “Alleluia.” Then somebody, usually one of the kids, calls out, “Where is the living body of Christ?” and everyone raises their interconnected hands, responding, “Right here!”

When, after several weeks of slipping away on Sundays, some of my fellow farm apprentices catch on and ask to come to church with me, they poke fun at this closing ritual. But I love it. It appeals to the side of me that wants to earn my place at God’s table—that still thinks this is the way God’s mercy works.

Really, though, it’s a deeper affirmation of self than I can really grasp, a kind of physical koan, as profoundly illogical and mysterious as, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” We are the body of Christ, and Christ is the ground of our being.

The Buddha spoke of the self as a set of five changing processes: the body, our feelings, thoughts, and behavior, and our consciousness. But these are not our “true self,” and so in Buddhism there is the dual concept of self and no-self, of emptiness and fullness.

This new self of mine is going to bible study, planting a giving garden, returning to the faith of my childhood. But none of that is really me. Underneath all of these actions, both Buddhist and Christian thought seem to say, there is something deeper and much bigger—something that just is. That’s the exact opposite of deserving or earning acceptance. It’s the bare fact of my fullness and oneness with God, the reality that waits inside all of us.

Shortly after my second baptism, at 31, I discover I’m pregnant. A week of heavy snow has kept us from driving to the store, so I’m more than a few days late when my husband and I finally pick our way down the icy streets to Kandy’s Kwik Stop for an over-priced test. Two dark lines show up immediately, and we’re elated.

I’m going to be a mother.

And then, just as quickly, I’m not. Bleeding sends me to a hastily-chosen OB, who tells me she’s pretty sure I’m miscarrying, but sends me for an ultrasound just to be sure. Are congratulations in order? The overly chatty receptionist at Imaging asks me as I fill out the forms. I mutter that I hope so, but I’m not sure. Tears plop onto the page, smear my signature. Well, we’ll pray real hard, then.

I want to be comforted by her prayers, but I’m not. I want to believe the technologist’s silence is normal, but I don’t. I drive myself home to wait for the doctor’s call, and am barely there an hour when the phone rings, and she tells me to drive back to the hospital and go straight to Emergency. The pregnancy is ectopic, life-threatening.

I’m crying so hard on the phone to my husband, he can’t understand me. He comes home early, has to piece the story together later as he drives me to the ER. I’m wearing the same T-shirt I was baptized in. It’s Valentine’s Day, and we sit in a cubicle while they inject me with methotrexate, an immunosuppressant used for chemotherapy, arthritis, and apparently, this.

We’re told to wait six months for the drug to clear my system. I try to feel grateful—we “caught” the pregnancy early, nothing scarred or ruptured, and we should be able to try again with the same chances as before. But it’s hard to feel thankful and angry at the same time.

Anger is a secondary emotion, the insurance-covered psychologist says calmly in the low-lit office. I admire the terrarium lamps on her desk.

I’m allowed thirty minutes a session, which is barely enough time to unpack the notebook from my purse, let alone the mountain of emotion that has surfaced with this loss. I’m still bleeding, and the insides of my arms are bruised from alternate-day HCG draws. I feel like I’m being emptied of innocence, the part of me who could waltz into conceiving a child without fear. Every day I am losing, with nothing being put back in.

We talk a little about mindfulness, a few exercises to get grounded when I’m overcome by anger or sadness. She lays out an incomprehensible plan for attending a wedding this summer, where I’ll see a friend who’s baby is due when mine would have been. It’s something about letting myself feel what I’m feeling, and then repeating “my truth” to myself. I think it will help me precisely not at all.

I don’t want to be present in this present moment. I want to rewind to early February’s blank snow—snow of suspense and suspension, snow that hid the truth from me, leaving me floating in possibility.

A week later, my sister has a major mental health emergency at home in southern California. She has been struggling to care for her two-year-old and four-month-old sons while being her family’s primary earner and doing the bulk of the housework.

I take a week off work and fly down to help my parents with the boys while my sister recovers at an outpatient facility. I schedule my blood draws at an unfamiliar clinic in my parents’ neighborhood, tugging my shirtsleeves over my bruised veins while I give the baby a bottle, visit my sister, and play Legos with my nephew. The baby doesn’t sleep well at night, so when it’s my shift I rock and sing to him in my old bedroom, pacing the narrow patch of floor beside the window.

There is something both soothing and agonizing in the heft of the baby in my arms. My eyes are thick with tears and missed sleep, but the knot in my chest loosens when he blinks up at me. I want him to sleep, and I want to sleep—and I also want to look into his clear gaze forever. I can’t explain what I see there—an ocean? A sky full of stars?

Maybe it’s trust, without an inch of suspicion or fear. This little being is entirely dependent on me, a virtual stranger as far as his mother-hungry body is concerned, and yet he trusts I will give him what he needs.

It’s a relief to pour myself into that responsibility, all of my hurt and anger channeled into the straightforward tasks of diapering, cleaning and filling bottles, soothing and rocking.

It’s also a shocking reminder of how little I resemble this perfect baby in his transparent dependence and security—how insecure I feel, by contrast, when I think of the uncertain road toward motherhood that’s ahead of me. All of those empty months of waiting, when I should be watching my belly grow. God, I pray while I gently lower my nephew into his crib. I don’t know how to trust you. I’m so sad, and angry, and I want to be a mother so much. Please show me how to get through this.

My second baptism was supposed to set me free, and instead I feel like a prisoner. I feel like I’m trapped in a new world where the God I believed in has disappeared, replaced with one who allows pain I never anticipated or imagined. One who allows such pain to visit me, his beloved child. I’m bound to a savior who can’t save me from the emotions that threaten to drown me. What, then, does he save me from?

Because there is no external savior, the Buddha is reported to have said just before his death, it is up to each of you to work out your own salvation.

In the darkness of those months following the loss, it feels true. It feels like there is no savior, like Jesus has up and abandoned me to the darkness. My journal pages fill with constant prayer—the same grieving plea over and over, day after day. I feel like I am writing to no one, that no one hears me, nothing will save me. I go to work during the day and drink too much wine in the evenings. Inside, I feel empty.

Where am I? Who am I without this would-have-been-baby? I’m not the same person I was before I was pregnant, but I’m not who I thought I would be, either. Where before it was enough to be a wife, a writer, a teacher, now I feel this gaping hole where the word mother should be. But how is it possible to mourn the loss of a baby that could never have survived? Or to mourn a part of my identity I never really had in the first place?

When my husband and I had first met, at 20 and 21, I’d told him I didn’t think I wanted kids. I had seen the way my mother poured her creativity into Halloween costumes, birthday parties, home decorating—and sometimes her own pursuits, at night while the dishwasher hummed and we did our homework. I was afraid that if I had children, I might be unfulfilled. What if motherhood meant that I wouldn’t achieve my creative dreams, and my children would sense that?

But I also think my mom did find fulfillment as a mother, that those outpourings of love and creativity were satisfying for her. They just weren’t acknowledged and celebrated by the larger world in the same way a novel might have been, or a series of paintings, or a musical score.

Now that the dream of motherhood—brought so close—is suddenly out of reach, I want it so badly. Buddhist thought would tell me I am suffering because of that desire. But Christian thought would say that God knits our desires into our hearts because they are a reflection of her will for us.

Is it really only seven months that pass before it happens? Sometimes it seems like one minute I’m crying in a church pew on a rainy April day, and the next minute I’m holding a positive pregnancy test again, in the bright blaze of mid-September. Other times, it feels like years that I wait and wrestle with God.

The wall I keep banging my head against, during the months we wait to try again, is Why. Why did this happen? Why would God do this to me—the good Father who wants only good things for his children? I wear myself out trying to divine the answer, and in hindsight I see God’s gentle hand holding me back from hurting myself, asking me to set down the burden of needing to know.

In hindsight. In the present, which is always endless, I do not see God there with me. I feel like I’ve lost God—another hole rent in the fabric of a difficult year, in which we lose our baby and my sister’s marriage dissolves. It must be my own fault if I cannot see God in all of this, I think.

For the first time, books from the Old Testament seem relevant. Here, God is the good Father, but she is also the mysterious, unknowable life force that created the universe. The book of Job, with its frightening story of God testing his faithful servant, turns out to contain some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read, with passages about morning stars singing together in the darkness, and the seas pouring forth from God’s womb. It’s confusing for me to accept that God is in control of a world where pain and suffering exist alongside beauty. How can this be?

Slowly the pain mellows. One morning, I search my heart for the familiar weight of sadness in the mornings, like a tongue hunting a loose tooth, and find it isn’t there. Or it’s there, but different. Part of me will always flinch a little at the mention of Valentine’s Day, and I’ll still mark that original due date, but I don’t feel quite so sad anymore.

Instead I’m nauseous, and more tired than I’ve ever been, and cautiously happy.

Our daughter is born in high summer, in a heat wave. When she’s two weeks old, just barely divided from my body, we move to a neighborhood across town. In the new territory of motherhood, it may as well be across the country.

After the flurry of visits and casseroles subsides, we’re on our own, deep in a new current of time, where feedings blur together and the solid lines between day and night disappear. Slowly, my kid-free friends stop calling, and I don’t reach out, not wanting to admit that I feel lonely in the role I’d longed for. Sometimes I’m so desperate for human contact I push a cart through Trader Joe’s just to talk to the cashier.

Yet for all the shock and numbness of sleep deprivation, I love caring for my daughter, love the strange newness of this responsibility. I’m both alone and not alone during our long hours together. There’s a sense of expansion in this liminal fourth trimester, where the boundaries between my body and hers are still forming. I nurse her to sleep and read while she breathes against me, heavy on my chest, carefully turning the pages of my library book so I don’t wake her.

“When we look more closely at the container called our skin we discover a picture of interdependence,” Sarah Napthali writes in Buddhism for Mothers of Young Children. “If we were truly separate and cut off from the world outside us, then there would be no ‘non-me’ elements within the boundaries of our skin.”

I think of an article I recently read on fetal cells, about how during pregnancy, cells from the fetus cross the placenta and become part of the mother’s tissue. They stay there for decades, explaining at the cellular level what mothers have known for generations: that your children are always with you. The article describes how mothers who have been pregnant multiple times may even transfer the cells of previous babies to their siblings, meaning the baby who came before my daughter may in some real way be alive and present in her.

At the most intimate and microscopic level, then, I’m no longer who I was before. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,” Paul says to the earliest Christians. The old “you” is gone, he is saying, and more than that: through the mystery of Christ alive in each of us, God is creating a new world. The focus here is not on what I’ve lost, but the vastness of what I’ve gained.

In church as a child, I had loved the baptisms the best. The shuffling parents, the way the babies cooed when the water touched their foreheads. The hypnotic lilt in the minister’s voice when he recited the prayer: “May God bless you and keep you. May the radiance of God’s love shine upon you. May God be gracious unto you, and give you peace.”

My daughter’s first birthday comes and goes, and I hesitate to baptize her. Of course I want God’s radiance to shine on her. Of course I want her blessed. But how can I commit her to such a huge promise—something I barely understand as an adult? I’m still baffled by the evidence of grace in my life, still learning how different the texture of God’s peace can be from the elusive calm my mind stubbornly expects.

Raising a child has expanded how I think about love. I see God the Father/Mother differently, because if this human experience of unconditional love threatens to break me, how much more must God love me, love all of us?

My daughter wakes from her nap and I pick her up from her crib, sweaty and sleepy. She buries a wet cheek against my chest, walking her pudgy feet, one socked and one bare, up my chest. She tries to curl up there, her bottom sticking out and slipping down, like a cat who still thinks she’s a kitten. I hold her while she shifts and fights, trying unsuccessfully to climb back into my belly.

Inside the intensity of my love I find grief for my body’s aging, and fear for the discoveries she will make, sooner rather than later, about the many ways this world is broken. Inside the joy of experiencing newness through her eyes—water from a hose, the sound of a harmonica—I find sadness for the immense loss most of us move through life with, bereft of wonder, often dulled by years of trauma and pain.

Motherhood brings me to my knees more reliably than anything has in my life so far. It humbles me, showing me my weakness when I lose my temper. Every day as I learn to parent, I am reminded of how deeply in need I am of God’s forgiveness and guidance. On Sundays at the communion table, I recommit to following Jesus over the hills and valleys of parenthood. I recommit to loving myself, all parts of my identity, when the priest breaks the bread and says, “Be what you see. Receive who you are.”

I know for certain that baptism was just the beginning—that its purpose was not to get rid of my self, but to come into the fullness of it.

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Melissa Reeser Poulin is a poet and writer. She is co-editor of Winged: New Writing on Bees (Poulin Publishing 2014) and author of the chapbook Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press, January 2019). Her most recent work appears in Coffee + Crumbs, Hip Mama, Relief, Ruminate, and Writers Resist. You can find more about her work at her website.