The Baptism
by Ernest Morrell
April 26, 1981. One day before my 10th birthday. It is a Sunday very much like many others in my childhood that now run together as a composite cultural experience, but this one stands out in my memory for reasons I will shortly explain. I am sitting in the back of a small church in Brookfield, a ghetto neighborhood nestled in the East of Oakland, California. Built during the war years, the small edifice has seen better days. The paisley green carpet is worn to the bone in some spots and threads creep up like belligerent weeds in others. The old oak splinter-inducing pews have been replaced by folding chairs, which gives the arena the feel of a school assembly gone badly. Birds make a nest in the upper steeple, and, in this moment the small gathering of sixty or so listens intently to the preacher man, my father, as he delivers the morning sermon. My father is an excellent speaker. He is a tall, intelligent dignified man, with full command of the audience and the scriptures. His life is above reproach, and his moral authority is without question. In my lifetime before I left the church I must have heard him deliver maybe a thousand sermons and, even when it pained me to walk into the house of worship and to associate with the elect, I was always amazed at his sincerity of tone. He was, what you would call, a true believer.
You see, my father is a man who believes completely in the Word of God in a way that I have never completely believed in anything in my life, but I am getting ahead of myself. At this point I am a nine year-old boy and my father exists as a God really. For a moment, he looms over the small, decrepit building and its parishioners the way he looms over my life generally. As usual, I am in awe and fear at the same time. The man is perfect; he is my father, my God, my religion, my provider, my value system, my history, my present, and my hope for the future. What nine year-old boy doesn’t see in his father himself in the distance? My father is my source of life and life itself; he is the messenger and the message at once. Mine is only to listen and to try to comprehend. But there is something different during this message of hell and damnation. There is a rupture, or as Foucault would say an epistemic break in my smooth trajectory of cultural acquisition. I swear in an instant I am no longer in tune with the plan of salvation, the “amens” and “preach it brothers,” the thundering echo of his foot stomping against the raised stage, or the gentle spring breeze flowing through the cracked and multi-colored plastic windows. Unbeknownst to myself I am having the one truly spiritual experiences of my life; one that will leave me forever altered. In my father’s stead I see a white light emitting from the pulpit and the voice I am hearing is that of my own soul. I understand that I am no good and that I will never be. I will constantly be counted among the damned and the sinners; me and all of the wretched of the earth.
One Sunday in the distant future I will make the most liberating and painful decision of my life; to never set foot in church again. This momentous occasion occurs only after years of inching toward the doorway, when I am fatally sick of the double life of drunken binges purged by the tears of repentance; only after lies on the altar become nauseating vomitations hurled into secret scroll books and locked away in the sock drawer of my conscience; only when the poems become soundtrack, only when I scar myself into action with a tattoo that is literally and figuratively a symbol for courage. Only then will I make the leap and declare myself free of the shackles of organized religion. But, freedom is a relative concept and not without its costs.
Am I a bad person? I know that I am no good, but I often wonder whether I am truly bad. It’s the church that taught me to hate myself more than I learned anything about love. I am not bitter. I just need to know how I got to where I am so I know where to head when I am writing myself in the opposite direction. Words are funny things, both mine and theirs. Language, an innocuous sign system, becomes the substance that separates us from ourselves, and the one thing that can bring us all the way back to where we were before. My words are only intended to heal; my words are the mirror and the shield. And why were the men of Constantine so angry about humanity that they created empire and left us the bible? And what did we implicitly hate in ourselves that led us to go along? Why do we latch on to Eve as vixen? Why do we fantasize about the suffering of Job? Why do we crucify those who only want to teach us how to love? Now crosses have yielded to bullets and character assassinations but the theme remains constant, kill that which we do not understand; worship those who inspire the greatest fear. And why is the most violent man in the book the one after God’s own heart? How many wars are fought under the sanction of the cross? If heathens are bombed in the jungle and no Christians are present, do their screams for mercy constitute a sound? Perhaps a murder is only the unlawful killing of a Christian human or fetus; that would make better historical sense as I think about the implementation of the sacred commandments. And life with the scriptures does not create a heaven on earth. The generals and the weak somehow seem to live forever. Those with true vision are never compensated and only relished in the time when they become ghosts and artifacts; the artists work only to forget in order to remember. The drama plays itself out in the punk rock theatre of the ridiculous, in the curves of a naked hip smoothed out against the texture of the oiled canvases of modern rebels, between the stanzas in a poetic verse, and on the belted notes of depraved prophets, their voices wavering in time and space like some cosmic hiccups.
But, on this particular Sunday, I am not yet ready for hell, I do not want to disappoint my father and, in a moment of courage and clairvoyance I rise and begin to walk down the aisle where I am immediately intercepted by Byron Smith, the assistant minister, and taken to a side room for “counseling.”
What’s the matter son?
I had known Byron since I was two or three years of age. He grew up in the neighborhood, lived like a thug until he met my father, who took him in like a son, and taught him how to be a preacher. Byron was probably in his mid twenties at this point and was the spitting image of my father when behind the pulpit. In other arenas he was still quite flashy, he drove a Chevy Trans-Am, liked to roller skate, and owned more bellbottom jeans than anyone else I knew. All of this was before his brain tumor of course. What’s the matter son? The matter was that I saw my past, present, and future pass before my eyes and I knew I was lost. My only hope lay in the infinite grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, a savior and a go-between who would represent the damned on the Day of Judgment. When the victors of Armageddon would banish the Bohemians to the Lake of Fire and Brimstone. If I could repent often enough I had a chance of being in the good graces of the almighty at my moment of demise. I would avoid the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I would join my parents and the congregation in that home above the clouds, where there would be only sunshine, and the chorus of angels, and the gospel for all eternity.
I want to be baptized.
I was only nine years old. In the Christian Church one is not baptized as a baby. Only those in full knowledge of their sins were eligible for the submersion; those who had, in the words of the doctrine, reached the age of accountability. Here I was nine years old staring the assistant preacher, my friend and older brother in the eye admitting to my life of sin and my need of salvation. He was flabbergasted.
Are you sure?
Without a moment’s hesitation I responded. I had never been more certain of anything in my life and in retrospect I am not sure if I have been as certain of anything since. I was a sinner. I was afraid of the devil. I wanted to be saved. I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders; I felt dirty and ashamed. I felt weak and I needed the strength of the Word; the strength of my earthly and heavenly fathers. Ironically, it would be the strength supplied by my earthly father that would ultimately help me to walk away from the institution erected in honor of my heavenly one. Ironic, I say, because he stayed behind to sink with the ship. Or, maybe I was the one drowning or maybe, as is more likely the case, neither one of us is drowning, but we are on separate boats and drifting in opposite directions, lost to each other amidst the sea and the fog. The strength of my earthly father is also what has helped me to leave him behind along with the church he so greatly loves. And now I write with a mixture of sadness and triumph, as if I cut off a limb to keep from falling off of a cliff. I get to walk away, but not completely whole.
Byron did the only thing that he could. He went to my father to see if it was alright that I be baptized. My father looked surprised, normally these are formal and drawn out affairs and the usual clients are at least in mid adolescence. Not me. I stared back at this towering edifice in my life. Me, his spitting image, his namesake, standing there in his presence as stubborn and resolute as I knew how to be. What else could he say? What choice did he have? Who could argue with the voice of God?
My mother helped me out of my clothes and into the attire that was needed for the ceremony. All sinners at our church donned a white robe for their moment of transformation. And we didn’t have any natural waterways that flowed through East Oakland at that time. No rivers, ponds, or lakes to rush out to; we did it in a baptistery. A coffin-like box that filled with water in about 15 minutes. Cold ball crushing water as I was to learn, and I would come to the baptistery again, not only as a victim, but as representative of that faith that I would only learn to question in time. But that again, is getting ahead of myself. For now, I am nine years old and at the apex of the religion, about to cross over into another realm, the land of the redeemed.
Do you admit that you are a sinner?
I had heard my father perform this ritual a hundred times. He rolled up his sleeves and held my back firmly against his forearm. I was seated in the baptistery waist deep in water, ready for the plunge. With his other arm he held my chest; he was ready in a moment’s notice to send me deep into the abyss, where I would in mock reference to the Master die, be buried, and reborn. I was shaking from the bitter cold. The audience sat transfixed on me and my father.
I do.
And do you acknowledge that Christ is your Lord and Savior?
Every year our church’s youth attended an all week camp in the mountains outside of Lake Tahoe. For a week we were bombarded with the scriptures, and nature, and the ways of the church. We also ate marshmallows by the campfire, hiked, swam in a dirty pond, and competed for the “Awesomest Future Christian” award, which was won by memorizing scriptures and doing other things saintly, like being able to look up bible verses in a flash. I was always a wiz at those things and I knew that the shortest verse in the bible was John 11:35, Jesus wept. A statement so simple, so elegant, so brutal, and so emotive. The most important figure in the history of humanity, so open and honest with his feelings, and so saddened by the fate of the species he loved. How many times would I make Jesus cry? At that moment I had no idea.
I do.
Then I now baptize you in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit.
Underneath the cool waters I could make out the outline of my father’s hand but more than that I remember the overwhelming cold and the whiteness of the artificial lights reflecting off of the water. I lay there for what seemed an eternity, joined in a cultural practice as old as the Western calendar. Even the Master himself went under. It sounds weird to say, but I could hear the silence in the crowd, the silence in my heart between its beats, the silence of the streets of the ghetto filled with its fried chicken, heroin addicts, and blind optimism just outside. I could hear the silence of the air and wind, and the oceans still in anticipation, and the hushed voices of the angels and God himself who would record in the book of life the one millisecond in my depraved existence where I was actually on the right side of right.
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