
The author and her family celebrating baptism
As preacher’s kids, my sisters and I were forever baptizing our pets. We come from a tradition that baptizes infants as a celebration of God’s grace; we don’t choose to be baptized, because it is a recognition of how God chooses us. It is also not an action we ever have to repeat; there are no re-baptisms in the United Methodist tradition, because God doesn’t mess up choosing us. But I don’t think we believed that we had to baptize our poor cat Amanda for the 403rd time (seriously, why didn’t she run away?) because God messed up; we just liked splashing in the water, and we liked remembering we were a part of a bigger story, something cosmic and ancient, even in our play.
I have not baptized my pets as an adult, though my dog has had her fair share of communion bread (some of which was not on purpose- sorry to all the shut-ins I was supposed to take communion to that one time!), but I still have dreamed of my own child being a part of that cosmic and ancient story. My spouse comes from a different tradition of baptism, but as our wait for a baby extended from months to years, and as that wait for a baby was clouded by pregnancies that ended in miscarriage, even he wanted a ritual celebration of love for a living child.
Once we did finally have a living child, the pandemic limited our ability to celebrate in person, so we decided to wait. We waited until we found out we would be moving. If we continued to wait, the congregation who walked alongside us for the fertility treatment, pregnancy, and birth would not get to celebrate with us. So my spouse and I finally just wrangled our families together and picked a date.
This ceremony was not a grab-the-child-and-stick-him-in-the-bathtub-like-we-did-with-the-cat kind of event. It wasn’t just important to me but also to my own clergymom, seminary friends, and colleagues, all of whom were celebrants willing to take part in ritual creation and leading worship. It represented a kind of gratitude to the church where I stood crying, trying to tell them I was finally pregnant and they stood and clapped and clapped. It was me making a vest for my child out of leftover fabric from my wedding dress to add another layer of love and creativity and sparkle. It was a Big To Do, though my less liturgical Baptist spouse put a limit to the pageantry, as did the continued pandemic.
Read more
Recent Comments