Baptism

My relationship with the Church moved fast: I first started to attend church about eighteen months ago. Six months later, I moved into a room upstairs in said church. Seven months ago, I was baptized there.

This beautiful little church that captured my heart so is a joint Lutheran and Episcopal campus ministry in the dead center of the big state school that I will graduate from in two weeks. It offers its own Sunday service (with dinner included), and a lot of intimacy - there is only one clergy member, who is a Lutheran pastor, and about twenty-five parishioners on any given Sunday. All of the music (and there is a lot of music) is done by students, and the dinners are brought by local Lutheran and Episcopal churches. Every year, seven or eight students live together in the church in an intentional community.

Having the opportunity to live inside your place of worship, like I have for the past year and will again in the year to come, is one of the benefits of being a college student active in a campus ministry. Being immersed in a spiritual setting is a gift that campus ministries can offer new Christians, like myself.

I was baptized on All Saints Day in this little campus ministry at the age of twenty-one, and it is one of the most important day of my life. In the Lutheran Church, a person affirms various Christian beliefs and makes vows to God; the community, in turn, makes promises to that person. The promises include inviting them fully into worship, teach the person about God and about the Bible, and the community promises to take care of the person and pray for the person. All of these things are incredible importantly, but the promises and vows themselves are not the things I consider to be the biggest thing that happened for me that day.

On All Saints Day, I finally accepted the love of others and of God, and dedicated myself to loving others and God in return.

Accepting love from God and from the community was a struggle for me, because the question I had before was never "Does God love me?", but rather "Could God love me?". Whether or not one is lovable is a different question entirely than whether or not one is loved, and having such low self worth was something crafted in me by others. As a child and adolescent, I had been the victim of neglect and other kinds of abuse. And though it is clear to everyone that these things are abhorrent, but what might not be clear to those who have not experienced them is that one of the reasons these kinds of cruelties against a person are so horrible is that it destroys a person's sense that they are worthy of love. When horrible, scary things happen to a person enough times, they begin to believe that they caused it because they deserve these horrible, scary things.

Because of the horrible feelings other crafted within me, baptism was a bold move on my part. If I am honest, I was quite afraid to be baptized. To be baptized is to declare that you deserve love just as much as anyone else, and to claim that no sin is too great for God to still love you. Baptism was not just a formality of entering the Church, but was also declaring to myself and to the world (and to my abusers!) that the abuse and neglect I suffered as a child and adolescent was not my fault, and that I deserved better.

When the moment finally came, John, my pastor, poured a small cup of water on my head for the Father, and the Son - and it was invigorating. My whole body and brain buzzed, drunk on holy water. But, when he finally poured water on my head for the Holy Spirit, it was different; all of the breath left my body and I inhaled sharply, and tears stung my eyes. I felt the sacrament on my skin and in my heart, and I was dizzy with a feeling of being loved with an intensity that I could have never conceived of before. I truly believe that I experienced divine love in those few moments.

Since October, my sense of being a beloved person has not faltered. Though the water dries, the grass withers, and the flower fades, the love received in baptism does not.