Baptism Sunday

Waking up beside him, we dressed quickly, kissed

before leaving the house, drove to the stone church

where bells already were chiming. The clouds darkened

everything, street, red leaves, and stain glass, with dampness.

They would linger throughout the cold afternoon as if nothing

had changed: the cat still sulking, the woman I passed that day

still milky eyed and blind. Dressing for the ceremony,

I never envisioned a strong rippling of the Spirit

like exuberant joy or the crucifix flinging

itself off my wall. “Baptism,” a reverend declared,

“is nothing more than a sprinkle of water and

nothing less than a demonstration of belonging to God.”

In some theological way we all belong, but submersion

in water is a choice, like acknowledgement of a fact.

When I knelt at the alter and another reverend recounted

the Trinity, I did feel the heavy expectations of history,

camp revivals and subjugated Africans and even the Christ

in the river Jordan: how they had each moved powerfully

with tongues spoken, community washed and conquered, and

godhood revealed. Drops of water on my hair the denouement.

Kneeling at the velvet green altar was a rich tradition

like admitting love. The baptismal fount recycled centuries of

a continuous water cycle, while all the time generations of pagans

and Christians alike procreated zealously to produce children

that would procreate zealously: evaporation, condensation,

precipitation, collection. I remembered I learned to say “fuck”

from a girl on a trampoline, whispering and spelling her dark secret,

“F-U-C-T,” while other children practiced back flips

and my mother waited on the bleachers watching us.

It wasn’t about sex. Fuct was the basest insult she knew.

I can’t remember our conflict, or her face, whether or not

she was otherwise kind, only that she also told me baptism

was the key to entering Heaven, and I, a boy already fearful

of the afterlife, considered that proclamation many nights.

I hardly slept as a child for the terror of Hell, for how nice

but impossible was the assurance of salvation.

To know, at eight, despair. Night fell like a prelude

of eternal damnation, the lights from downstairs were burning

white hot embers, and even around others I felt so isolated.

The earth allegedly had some proofs of God, in the order

of tree veins, how meticulously a garden spider eats moths,

and pods of beached whales, dying together on the sand—

I remembered especially in the years I doubted most of faith.

Before returning, as so much of life is cyclical, to church,

to family, and love: the other institutions, I’ve heard somewhere,

that offer a glimpse of divinity. I was thinking during baptism about sex,

which my father once told me was a gift for marriage, that yes,

it was sometimes called fucking, and meanderingly

the biological specifics of what I claimed I never wanted to do.

We were driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. He had flown me

from Texas to San Francisco so hearing about making love

would have a momentous effect. It was a parenting theory

my mother had read somewhere; my sister had received a necklace

and five-star dinner in a Dallas tower. I was in a rental car distracted

with desire to feel an earthquake during our trip. There wasn’t water,

except what we drove over, and yet all this like a torrent

came to mind during the proclamation in church to flee from sin,

that abstract noun. Still a virgin none of this should have mattered,

but rather than the Spirit I felt—doubt? Fear? I wondered

what would discount me from baptism, which I suppose I believe

like that girl is an extension of God, of salvation. All of Christianity

is being inadequate or feeling too adequate or believing

that any of this matters to the unknowable character of God.

At the forefront of history, who wouldn’t question self-worth?

When the Christ emerged from the Jordan, a dove descended,

a voice proclaimed, “With you I am well pleased,” but here

the deed was done, Christian name given, droplets of water

clinging to my hair until I walked out into the clouds of fall

and rain that intermingled with the ritual.