This is a series of accounts about baptism I'm posting through Lent.
Today comes from Sara Miles and her memoir Take This Bread, which is described as 'the story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion.' Sara runs The Food Pantry in San Francisco. Below she describes her baptism.
I knew, in my heart, that baptism wasn’t about purity or the washing away of sins. It wasn’t going to protect me from anything. Like carrying a child, baptism would require going deeper into mystery and darkness, into eating and living, eating and suffering, eating and dying. It would mean being baptized into the crucifixion of the world, as Saint Paul wrote, “into Christ’s death ... into the tomb with him.”
Of course I was scared.
“Honey,” Lynn said. She was chuckling. “Just look at the baptismal vows in the Book of Common Prayer. See the first line? ‘Do you desire to be baptized?’ All you have to do is want it.”
I wanted it so much.
The prayer book called baptism the “sacrament of new birth” and promised that those sealed by anointing at baptism would be “marked as Christ’s own forever.”
I wanted new life, as fiercely as I’d wanted a child in the middle of a war. I also knew that I could slip into the same kind of romantic day dreams about baptism that I’d had during pregnancy. Sometimes I’d felt so uplifted by the thought of becoming special, “marked as Christ’s own” that I’d forget I was just one of millions of people making a promise to suffer and love.
…
So that Sunday morning, Donald Schell poured water over my head from a scallop shell, as I stood outside St. Gregory’s back door at the fountain, where sweet water gushed from a huge, split-open slab of rock. He made the sign of the cross, motioned Mark and the people around us to pray, and asked me to make some promises.
….
Nobody gets baptized alone. I walked out the doors to that rock in St. Gregory’s backyard because of the prophetic witness of a dead man, because of a cup of milk on a hot morning in a Salvadoran slum, because beloved friends and total strangers had carried faith for me in the war years when I was unable to feel it. I walked out because of my missionary grandparents and my atheist parents and Martha, who wasn’t afraid to be pray. I walked out because somebody had been tortured and murdered, and because Katie was alive and beautiful.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread (Canterbury, 2012 [2007]) pp.123-125
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