A Milestone on
a Personal Journey

t all started with my mother.

In a long distance telephone call last spring, I just happened to mention that I’d never been baptized. To my surprise, my mother was aghast. "That ruins any chance of your ever getting into heaven," she told me.

I responded that I hadn’t been worried about that because I believed my getting into heaven depended much more on what kind of person I’d been than on whether I’d ever been baptized. I would be judged on whether I’d tried to help alleviate pain and make the world a better place – or whether I’d just lived for myself, not caring about others.

Mom said she agreed that living right is extremely important and she wasn’t absolutely sure that getting baptized was necessary. But doing it, she thought, is like taking out an insurance policy: You do it "just in case."

Mom went on to explain that the main thing was that in getting baptized, I would accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and my personal savior. I voiced my concern that, while I definitely considered myself a Christian, in accepting Christ in this formal way, I would be trashing all other deities and belief systems since I don’t view Christianity as the only valid way of looking at "God" and all that He/She/It/They created. But Mom assured me that making this commitment wouldn’t mean I was disparaging other beliefs.

Well, my mother was undergoing chemotherapy and, in a few months, would be turning 80. I love my mom and the last thing I wanted was to cause her worry. Getting baptized seemed like such a small thing to do to help ensure her peace of mind. And after all, if one wants to get into heaven, isn’t kindness to one’s mother right up there as a value to strive for? Besides, I didn’t have any real objection to getting baptized. It was just that it hadn’t been done for me when I was young, and I never saw any point in doing it myself later on.

You see, even though I grew up more or less in the Bible Belt (Kansas City, Missouri), my father was a lapsed Roman Catholic and my mother was ashamed of her family’s Pentecostal roots in the Assembly of God – or, as my father mockingly called them, the "Holy Rollers." The atmosphere in our home was decidedly non- if not outright anti-religious.

Even so, as a child I braved my father’s derision and briefly sampled various churches, like the Baptists, Methodists and even the Roman Catholic Church.

Looking back on it, I think it must have seemed pretty odd for this little girl to just show up on Sunday, sans parents, stating that she was there to attend the worship service. People were always very nice to me though, and usually sent me off to Sunday School. One church even gave me a Bible. It was white leather with a zipper. I took good care of it, even polishing it with my white shoe polish.

However, none of it stuck. Even though I had no idea what I was looking for, I didn’t feel I was finding it in church. Soon I stopped trying.

After leaving home at the age of 17 and moving to New York City, organized religion played an even smaller part in my life. To make a long story short, in the late 1960s I spent a few lost, painful and very confused years "self medicating" with drugs and mired in the many negative things that can go with that lifestyle. Fortunately, before it was too late, I was able to leave behind what I knew was a slow suicide and get my life onto a better track, going in the direction of social activism and progressive thought. That stuck.

In terms of religion and spirituality, however, I was again predominantly associated with people who had very little use for religion and saw it as beside the point when it came to the "more important" secular work at hand.

Nonetheless, in the privacy of my own heart, I believed God had spared my life because there was something He intended me to do on this earth. I saw myself as committed to a spiritually driven life just as surely as if I had taken vows. But in my circumstances, I was embarrassed to even admit to these feelings, and it never even crossed my mind to join a church, let alone get baptized.

That’s pretty much how things remained until the approach of the millennium when, for various reasons, I began reevaluating my life centrally. This included questioning whether, in the way I was going about it, my social activism was making enough of a difference.

One outcome of my reassessment was that I made an even deeper and more active commitment to anti-racism and pro-reparations work. I began reaching out to other white people with a workshop on white-skin privilege and became the Communications Director for Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation (CURE).

To my good fortune, this work brought me in contact with a great number of people who were very serious about their religious beliefs and strived to put them into action. As I look back on it now, I believe that this provided the first tiny opening for me to get in touch with my own overtly religious feelings.

At the suggestion of my dear friend Barbara Davison, who is Co-Chair of Recovery Ministries of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, in 2002 I began volunteering at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. From the first day, I was hooked. I found that interacting with these disenfranchised men and women to whom we served lunch in the church sanctuary was a deeply moving, even spiritual experience. Feeding them fed my soul.

Also, at the request of Bishop Mark Sisk, the Diocese of New York had formed a Task Force on Reparations, and I was asked to be on it. I enthusiastically said yes. The very fact that a segment within the Episcopal Church was even attempting to grapple with the difficult issue of reparations to descendants of slavery caused my respect to shoot through the roof! My kind of church, I thought. They don’t just talk about God and Christ; Holy Apostles actually feeds the hungry, and this diocese has people who’ve got the guts to take on an issue as tough as reparations.

Though I had attended special worship services every now and then at Holy Apostles, I began attending more regularly. When I told Rev. William Greenlaw, the church’s Rector, that I wanted to get baptized – probably in Houston, Texas where my mother lived – he asked me to consider doing it right there at Holy Apostles. He explained that in the Episcopal Church, baptism is looked on as a communal event, and that baptism is not about where you’ve been, but about where you’re going and who you’re going there with.

Well, as soon as Father Greenlaw gave me the option of getting baptized at his church, I knew it hit the spot. Along with the reasons I’ve already mentioned for why I gravitated towards Holy Apostles, I also liked and felt comfortable with the people I’d met there, clergy and parishioners alike. Also, somewhat to my surprise, week by week the Episcopalian rather "high church" form of worship was growing on me (I was accustomed to a more free-wheeling informal type of service), and, extremely important, I liked the decidedly progressive viewpoint consistently expressed from the pulpit.

Now, as the weeks had worn on, even though my original motivation for getting baptized had been to ease my mother’s mind, more and more that faded into the background. I was doing this for myself.

As I contemplated baptism, though, at first my biggest concern was that I didn’t really understand how Christ could have died for my sins, and I wasn’t sure I really grasped what it meant to accept him, as my mother expressed it, "as my personal savior." No matter how hard we try, we can’t force ourselves to believe anything, and I didn’t want to have to fake it at my baptism, pretending to believe things I didn’t.

I thought it might help if I reread the New Testament in its entirety, so I set aside a Saturday for that. But far from helping, as I read it I thought, "Holy cow! What on earth am I getting myself into?" Instead of gaining clarity, the more I read, the more perplexed and – I have to say it – horrified I became. There were all sorts of things that either made no sense to me or seemed totally whacked out – like Christ cursing that poor fig tree because it didn’t have any figs for him to eat. That didn’t sound very Christ-like to me!

Fortunately, I had also begun attending the discussions that take place after Holy Apostles’ Sunday services. From the beginning, one of the things I really liked and found refreshing about the Episcopal Church was that discussing the Bible was fun. We actually have a good time as we tear into the meaning of the scriptures and try to see what they say to our lives now. And we don’t just take up "The Bible’s Greatest Hits" so to speak; we grapple with the stuff some might prefer to pretend isn’t in The Good Book.

After my Saturday foray into the New Testament, that particular Sunday Rev. Barry Signorelli was conducting the discussion. I told him how floored I was by some of the things I’d read, and he immediately laid my mind to rest. He explained that while the Bible was divinely inspired, it was, nonetheless, written by human beings who were affected by the prevailing views of the society, time and place from which they came. He made it clear that I was not expected to accept the Bible whole cloth; the aim is to see it as a living document worthy of ongoing study. In other words, contrary to my fear, I didn’t have to totally understand or accept everything in the Bible – especially not before I got baptized. The important thing was the exploration.

As it turned out, the date of my baptism was set for September 11^th, the fourth anniversary of the tragedy at the World Trade Center. Though a little startling, it felt right that this day of great personal joy for me would also have with it a permanent reminder of the suffering of others.

As my baptism drew nearer, I was surprised at how much I looked forward to it. I had read over the Episcopal Service of Holy Baptism many times, and the words moved me every time I read them. Aided by members of the Holy Apostles Church, people on the Reparations Task Force – especially Brother Reginald Martin Crenshaw in our talks on our subway rides home – and anyone else who cared to discuss such matters, I’d been having a wonderful time considering all kinds of Biblical and theological matters I’d never bothered with before. And most of all, I really loved discussing them over the phone with my mother. Slowly things were falling into place. I was able to tell her that I did accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God who died for my sins and was resurrected, and that I felt certain my understanding of other things would come in due time as I continued to read, ponder and talk. My heart was at peace.

The day of my baptism dawned bright and sunny. I felt a little like I was getting married and was a tad nervous, but not much. After all, I had my four sponsors who would "hold my hand" if necessary. They were my friend Barbara Davison who was like a sister, and Clyde Kuemmerle, Richard Longinetti, and Muriel Moore, who I had bonded with through our work at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. I was also glad that several friends from my past were going to be there, as well as Kenton Kirby, the Managing Editor of Caribbean Life newspaper, who is such a pleasure to work for.

When Father Greenlaw had gone over the baptismal service with me, he had advised me not to get caught up in worry about doing everything perfectly. Instead, I should feel free to experience the moment to the fullest. I planned to do just that.

Sitting there in the front row with my sponsors, I was deeply moved by Rev. Elizabeth Maxwell’s sermon. She did a masterful job of bringing together the anniversary of 9/11 and the resulting quagmire in Iraq "in which we find ourselves with so many deaths, so many billions of dollars spent, and no end in sight"; the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina which exposed the clear divide along racial lines where "the rich were able to escape and the poor were left to drown"; and my baptism. "Surely, because of recent events," Mother Maxwell said, "this sacrament, which uses water as the element by which Christ’s death and Resurrection are accomplished, is made all the more potent, for we know the power of water now in a new way. Let us also remember the power of water to bring us into new life, into Christ."

Much of Mother Maxwell’s sermon, which was based on Matthew 18:21-35, dealt with the imperative to be forgiving in order to experience forgiveness. "We hold onto our grievance because we think it hurts the other person, but actually it damages us," she noted. "In the immortal words of Ann Lamott, ‘Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.’ We are tortured by the closing of our own hearts that will not let real forgiveness and love in if we cannot give them out."

Accompanied by the inspiring music of the organist David Hurd and the choir, following the sermon we proceeded to the Baptismal Font where Father Greenlaw was to baptize me. When the moment came and he asked, "Do you desire to be baptized?" I was glad to respond with a resounding, "I do!" And when he asked the congregation, "Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support this person in her life in Christ?" the church rafters rang with the vigor of their, "We will!"

Perhaps the most emotional moment for me came when, tracing on my forehead the sign of the cross with oil of Chrism, Father Greenlaw pronounced, "Donna, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever."

So that, friends, is how I came to get baptized in the Episcopal Church at the age of 56. I’m grateful to my mother for starting me down this path, and I look forward to the rest of the journey.

Read more of Donna’s articles at http://www.donnalamb.com/

Read Donna's Last Column