Taking the next step

Today's installment in the "Where You At, Little Dawg?" series

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At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

The above vignette is from the first installment in this irregular series of check-ins on the state of my faith walk.

I’m going to get baptized the first Sunday in June. Actually, I did get water sprinkled on my head when I was about six weeks old.

I’m not saying that such a form of that sacrament can’t be a pivotal moment, but I think it may have less of a chance of sticking, unless the baptized infant went on to be raised in a consciously Christian household, receiving a steady dose of guidance and support. My own upbringing was full of mixed messages. More on that in a bit.

But sometimes I consider my late sister, and how the fact that one of her sons is still, now well into middle age, a basically secular agnostic. He even remarked at his mother’s (my sister’s) memorial service that it was the first time he realized his own sons did not know the Lord’s Prayer by heart. My sister one time said, “He’s all equipped if he’d just say yes. He’s been baptized.”

So . . .

It’s interesting that my sister, a philosophy major, got really, well, churchy early in adulthood, shortly after she got married. It took me several decades to embark on a serious faith walk.

We were raised in a Presbyterian Church USA congregation, and my dad held several positions. But the PCUSA and our local church were tilting leftward and becoming more preoccupied with secular concerns. By the time my friends from church and I were in high school, our conversations were about (secular) music, girls, and where we could get a bottle of wine.

My parents left the church when I was about that age. The final straw was the PCUSA contributing to Angela Davis’s defense fund.

But I continued to go to senior high fellowship on Sunday evenings, because it was hip. We had hip youth ministers and lay adult mentors. There used to be an old two-story house next to the church campus and the church ran a coffee house in it. It quickly became a place for local hippies to gather. In fact, the FBI paid a visit, because someone had painted an upside down American flag over the men’s room door.

My dad was big into character formation. He taught sailing in the summer time at Culver military academy. Was a scoutmaster, even scoutmaster of the Hoosier Hills Council troop that went to the 1951 National Jamboree at Valley Forge. He was involved with the Exchange Club’s Boy of the Month Program. He tried his best to get me on the program, but the countercultural influence prevailed.

And I think that, in the end, was the main level on which he engaged with religion. He could recite the Apostle’s Creed by heart, but I know for a fact that when he came upon crunch moments in life, such as a couple of downturns in his business, he had doubts about anything beyond his own resources for facing them. He had anger issues and swore with great regularity pretty much all his life.

So I think that partaking in immersive baptism as an adult, part of which will involve proclaiming that Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior, will be a way of sealing the deal, letting God have me.

Put another way, I think it’s the next step in exploring this notion of dying to self, which was the subject of the most recent installment of the Little Dawg series.

Maybe I’m just afraid of dying to myself. Would the nature of my thought patterns change? What happens to viewpoints and preferences?

I think baptism can be a chance to get a glimpse of one’s factory settings, the design by which God fashioned a person, before sin, that pesky perennial of the human condition, gummed up the works.

I like C.S. Lewis’s keyhole model for the relationship between individuality and one’s status as a child of God:

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

―C.S. Lewis,The Problem of Pain

It’s not something one has to worry about. You couldn’t possibly be anyone but you.

So I’m taking this next step, mainly because I know I can’t escape from the fundamental truth about this universe, which is that God rules over it with inexhaustible love.