water and fire

"We make vows we intend to keep, and then we spend our days in life's middle, clenching them tight. How could we know what our vows mean until we've dug our fingernails deep into them all those years later. How can we notice the hard beauty of such words, the thick holiness of hope, until we experience what living a vow requires? Vows always demand an entire life."" 

(Micha Boyett, Found)

When my oldest was nearly one, we ordered overpriced stationary, used my new-found online shopping skills to select a delicate white gown and bonnet, and commissioned a fancy cake in blue and green frosting with "God Bless Sylvie Noelle" scrolled across the top. Having grown up in traditions that practiced infant baptism, it seemed natural that my husband and I would have our first child baptized as a precious baby, to the oohs of delighted parishioners and the glowing pride of  first time grandparents. Neither of us were sure we actually believed in infant baptism, but were assured that the ritual could be performed and given whatever level of meaning we wished to ascribe to it. We called it "baptism" because "dedication" sounded a bit watered-down, but held the term loosely,our unformed theologies bridging the tension between the two.

Our oldest daughter had been a terrifying surprise and a sleepless baby. We seized on her baptism as a declaration of welcome, asserting  that yes, this child was God's wonderful gift, even if our future together now looked vastly different than we had planned. Yes, she was wanted. Yes, she was loved and adored. Yes, her life was desired and longed for, a sign of the hope that surprises and knocks us off our guard, the God who gives in unlikely times and unlikely places, to unlikely people, ready or not.

When my second was nearly one, she had just recently drawn breath with enough strength and regularity to earn freedom from the menacing oxygen tanks and tangles of tubing that had anchored her fragile self to our home for so many months. Her breath and laughter were as much prayer as I could allow in a world that had almost taken her from me, a world that now seemed ripped by the awareness that death is real, that the normalcy of daily life is heaven on earth and never to be taken for granted, that the universe is a capricious place, taking and giving life at a pace that left me almost as breathless as my child who wasn't supposed to live.

For months and months, I waited for the other shoe to drop. Why should my child live while others did not? Surely tragedy was just around the corner. I never let my guard down. Not for a second. And I never breathed a prayer. I was certain even a timid "thank you" would result in the earth swallowing her up, as a lesson to me for thinking that it should be otherwise.

We used her condition as an excuse to stop attending church, to take a break. We met for a while with a pastor and his wife who hoped to plant a new church. My oldest played quietly with toys on a blanket in the corner of the little chapel in which we met. My husband participated, praying and singing, and socializing. I spent the time repeating the one prayer I could pray, screaming silently to God "I need you to be good. I need you to be good. You have to be good. You have to be good." The baby careened around with reckless abandon, shouting "Alleluia! Amen! Glory! Glory!" But we didn't have her baptized. These pastors did not believe in baptizing infants. Only dedicating. And now, dedication didn't have that same, watered-down feeling. Now, it felt more sinister.

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In the Bible, dedication isn't merely a kind word, a sprinkle of water, and the polite clapping of friends and family. In the Bible, dedication is serious. Dedicating your child to God, pledging someone to the Holy One of Israel, can get them killed. Isaac avoided the fire by the grace of a goat in the brambles. Jephthah's daughter was not nearly so lucky. Samson was pledged to God as a child, grew his hair as a sign of that pledge, and it was this hair, this symbol of his dedication, that was both his strength and his undoing. Jesus was dedicated in the Temple, baptized in the Jordan, and crucified at Gethsemane. Certainly, Jesus rose again. Certainly, Isaac helped found a nation. But not everyone gets to be an Isaac. Not everyone gets to walk back down the mountainside. And the nation of people pledged as God's own, scattered like stars in this magnificently expanding universe, those people suffered and starved, were enslaved and sacrificed.

Dedication is never safe. Vows are risks. I had just received this child against all odds. I grasped her life, wrapped myself around it, and protected it greedily. She was mine. My beautiful, unlikely child. I couldn't take the risk of dedicating her to a God that asks for sacrifices. I was not ready to have that sort of faith credited to me as righteousness. I just needed God to be good. And to leave me and my child alone.

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But she has been God's from the beginning. I had made that pledge already, with the hasty intensity of Jephthah, going out to battle, with the naivety and uncertainty of Abram needing to believe that God is good, that this wild universe is woven together with glorious purpose, and gentle mercy. 

The night I was rushed to the hospital, at the top of the stairs, hunched over and screaming, wild and irrational, about to lose the life growing inside of me, I promised God my child. I promised that if she were allowed to live, she would not be mine, but God's. The blood, and tears, and terror were all bound together that night like an ancient sacrifice. My screams rose up like smoke on the altar. 

This world is more wild and awake than we like to admit. We create rituals to both remind ourselves of the profound mysteries and heart-stopping savagery of existence, and also to contain them.  That night at the top of the stairs, on the verge of heartbreaking loss, there were no birds split in two, no flesh consumed by flame, no precious oils or dreadful ash, but there was blood, there was holiness, there was dedication, and there was a vow.

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On Sunday, my youngest will be baptized in our church, a church that has pledged itself to the all-embracing love of a God of hope for unlikely people. She will have no gown, no cake, no embossed invitations. She will probably wear torn leggings, smudged glasses, and a goofy, self-conscious grin. Water will be poured out. She will make her own vow, a vow she has repeatedly asked to make, even if she does not fully understand it (do we ever fully understand it?). And I will not hold her back. This child is mine, surely. But she is also the child of a God who is larger and more terrifying than the inflatable hot tub/baptismal font and her goofy grin let on. She is my child, but she is also the child of a God whose love is wilder, freer and more profound than even our best rituals can fully reveal. She has never not been God's child. But now she will declare this daring truth, the one I dared not speak for years. And I will let her. 

Some rituals are fire, blood, and sacrifice. And some are water, oil, and new life. Our vows lead us to both. They curl up like smoke. and they leave us empty, vessels for spirit and living water. And in between is all this earth. In between is where we hold each other in the blessed miracle of day to day life, woven together with glorious purpose and gentle mercy.

And so I will continue to hold her, and her sister as well. Hold them as mine, and not-mine. Trusting that the pledges we make will shape us and leave us more whole. That they will lead  us into risking a more vulnerable and powerful humanity, living as children of a God who I choose to believe against all odds is breath-takingly and breath-givingly good. A God who is with us in the consuming fire and in the life-giving water, in the earthy forgetting of the everyday, and in our breathless, fearful vows. At the top of the stairs, knee-deep in baptismal waters, and every moment of the in between.

Alleluia. Amen. Glory. Glory.