I was baptized at eight years old. I was old enough to know wrong from right, I was told, and to make that commitment to God of my own grown-up volition. 

It felt like a big day. To my parents. They seemed pleased with me, anyway. The youngest of their three sons was finally reaching this religious milestone. I would officially count among the flock.

For me, it would become my earliest specific and noteworthy memory of doing something to fit in. A should that, at eight years old, while I supposedly was old enough to make my own decision to say yes to the Lord, I knew I was not old enough to say no.

This would be confirmed when in the following years, especially as a teen, my protestations against going to church would fall on stern and absolute ears. It was “exposure,” I was told over and again. That exposure would add up to somewhere in the area of 1,500 non-negotiable church services, by my estimate. 

On that Sunday morning in June, the one that fell soonest after my eighth birthday, which just met the law of the church, I went into the basement of our house, dressed to go. Slacks, short-sleeved dress shirt, clip-on tie. There, I saw my maternal grandmother crying. I was told that her father (step-father), the only grandfather I’d really known at all, and which boils down to a single memory at that, had died. She’d gotten the phone call at our house that morning.

A sensitive boy, and one so well trained to monitor facial expressions as a faithfully hypervigilant child does, I was concerned about my grandmother’s tears and feelings. I was concerned that my baptism day would interfere. That it was wrong, that I now was guilty of something.

My want to be baptized was limited to my want to please my parents. To please my grandmothers. To please the palpable expectations of all who would be in that church. I was entrenched in pleasing. I got attaboys for being compliant. In general. This day, under the auspices of having made a holy, lifelong choice of my eight-year-old own, would go forward as planned.

There was a minor measure of pomp to the event. In a country church that had, I don’t know, 20 pews on each side of a center aisle, all who attended could have fit into about a pew and a half on any given Sunday. When we had Wednesday evening services, they were rotated through certain members’ homes, the number fitting comfortably enough into the host-of-the-week’s living room.

The baptismal font, in actuality, was a double-entry fiberglass pool. For more accurate visualization, imagine a pool-blue, large and deep bathtub filled with tap water. On each side, a handful of steps for entry and exit of the “font.” 

When the moment for my baptism came during the day’s service, I entered the water from stage left. Fully clothed. Black dress socks and all. 

It might have been my father, an elder in the church, who performed the baptism. Neither of us recall with clarity these 40 years later. When I was laid back into full immersion, his hand (whoever’s hand it was) on my back, I did not fully lean into it with trust. I held onto my footing for an extra beat with my left foot planted until I felt that socked foot slip and give way. 

It was a brief immersion. Ceremonial. Metaphorical, the washing away of my young sins. The sensation that most stuck with me from that experience these past decades was my left foot, my last resistance, losing its purchase on the wet fiberglass bottom. Would the baptism have counted had my left foot maintained its resistance? Had I stayed grounded like that, underwater and out of view, would I have secretly held onto my sins?

I was raised upright to standing again, metaphor complete. There was no applause, no raised hands to the sky, no bellows to the Lord. It wasn’t that kind of vibe in this House of the Lord. It was quiet and dignified for a long breath, only the sound of my cutting through the water as I turned back to stage left and made my exit. 

After I’d changed into a dry set of “church clothes” in privacy at fontside, having heard the service continue with the singing of hymns on the other side of the wall, I reentered the sanctuary. 

I’d done my duty. Smiles and joyful eyes welcomed me into the flock. Officially now. I felt a lightness in my chest, knowing I’d pleased.

When I left home 10 years later, I made a new choice of my own. Long awaited. There would be no more church on Sundays when I went to college. And not on Wednesdays. Or on any other days. It was over; I was done. Still am.


The Baptism is #Twelve in the weekly memoir series, Among Other Things. What’s it about? Read Introducing ‘Among Other Things,’ A Weekly Memoir Series.

Humanitou