Drowning For Jesus: part 3 of a childhood memoir

My inner ears are deformed, preventing water from draining out of them properly, causing many ear infections as a little girl. Swimming therefore terrified me, because a stint at the pool usually ended in pain and two weeks of amoxicillin.

If swimming frightened me, you can surely imagine what I thought of the idea of full body immersion baptism. I put my foot down.

“But I don’t wanna be baptized!” I cried. Even saying the words, I felt slightly like a traitor. Jesus, after all, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried, and I was throwing a tantrum over spending five minutes in a holy wading pool. But traitorous or not, I held my ground: Jesus did not have to suffer two weeks of amoxicillin.

“Don’t you want to be born again, baby? Like in the Bible?” My mother’s eyes were pleading.

“I don’t like swimming,” I whimpered.

“It won’t be like going swimming,” my mother explained for the hundredth time. “You’ll plug your nose, fold your arms over your chest, and the minister will dunk you under for just a few seconds and then we’ll be done. I promise you it won’t hurt your ears.”

I sniveled and shook my head defiantly.

“You can explain it til your blue in the face,” LaVerne said reasonably. “but it won’t make any difference. If you want to hear the end of it, offer a B-R-I-B-E.”

Cutting my eyes sideways, I asked, “What’s a ‘bribe’?” mostly to remind LaVerne that I was 8, not 4, and perfectly capable of spelling single-syllable words.

My mother heaved a sigh. “After the baptism,” she said slowly, “I’ll buy you a Cabbage Patch doll, okay?”

After a moment’s consideration, I nodded, satisfied. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a Cabbage Patch doll. My mother considered the matter closed and we didn’t discuss the upcoming ordeal any further.

Years later, when asked why she didn’t bother to discuss the baptism with my brother, my mother would recount a story from when he was three years old. We were at a public pool with some of my mother’s friends, I in the shallow end playing with little kids, my mom and her friend dangling their feet in the deep end, my brother somewhere in the background playing with toys.

At the far end of the pool, a large man cannon balled into the water, causing an enormous splash: women screamed for fear of the ruin of their carefully coiffed ’dos, and children broke out in uproarious laughter and applauds. I suppose it was this reaction that my brother simply couldn’t resist.

My mother says that as she sat on the edge of the pool, she saw a shadow on the water, and noticed something flying over the top of her head. Next thing she knew, my brother was flapping wildly in the pool, heading bobbing dangerously under the water’s surface. He couldn’t swim of course—he just hadn’t known that at the time. My mother jumped into the water to save him, dragging him out coughing and gasping. He threw his arms around her neck and said, “Let’s do that again!” My brother, it seemed, had no fear of water.

The baptism was held on a Tuesday night. My mother was all nerves and excitement, as all three of us were to be baptized in the pool together. “Hurry up and get dressed you guys,” she said. “We have to be at Church on the Way in thirty minutes.”

My brother tugged on my shirt. “On the way to where?” he asked.

I shrugged. I had often wondered the same thing. “On the way to Toys R Us, I guess,” I said. “Mom said she’d buy me a Cabbage Patch afterwards.”

“What?” The unfairness of the situation did not escape his five-year-old mind. “She didn’t promise me anything!”

“That’s because you didn’t have to be bribed,” I said smugly, pleased to be able to use my new word.

My brother turned angrily to our mother. “I want to be bribed!” But she ignored him and shuffled us to our rooms to finish dressing.

An hour later, we were dressed in our white baptismal garments, standing on the edge of the water. Hundreds of people sat in the pews watching the ceremony. The minister led the three of us into the tank of warm water. I felt calm. My mother was right: there was nothing to be afraid of.

In fact, we were so comfortable in the water that my brother started dog paddling around the baptismal tank. Several people in the front rows snickered. My mother, mortified, trailed after my brother and yanked him to her side. “This is Jesus’s water,” she said sharply under her breath. He scowled, but stood still. We both knew better than to incur our mother’s wrath.

My mother was dunked first. I went second: it was quick, just like I’d been promised. But when my brother’s turn came, my mother paid for not having explained the process to him, for no sooner did the minister dunk my brother under water that he started flapping his arms and kicking wildly, splashing water everywhere.

His little head broke to the surface and he gasped loudly, “I’M DROWNING! I’M DROWNING! HELP! HELP!” He was crying and screaming, little body thrashing about in the water. In his terror, he’d forgotten that the water only came to his shoulders: if he’d just put his feet down he would have been just fine.

My mother collected my brother in her arms, too embarrassed to look at the minister. I thought she was going to fall through the floor when my brother wailed, “I don’t wanna be born again! I was born just fine the first time! That’s why babies cry when they’re born, you drown them! I don’t want to drown for Jesus!”

We left the church that night in sobriety, but we arrived home with a Cabbage Patch doll and a bagful of Transformers in tow. As we sat on the living room floor ripping open our bribes, my brother proclaimed, “I love Church on the Way to Toys r Us.” My mother sighed, withdrawn and defeated. I don’t think it was the experience she had hoped for.

{Note: As it turns out, Church on the Way is so named because it is on Sherman Way in Van Nuys, California, not because it is on the way to Toys R Us though, to my mother’s shame, it often happened that the one followed the other.)

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