The Agony and Ecstasy of Baptism

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the reign of God unless they are born again.” “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the reign of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” —John 3:3-6

IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP to my child’s baptism, I wrestled with this passage from the gospel of John. While it doesn’t explicitly mention baptism, most of the churches where I had worshipped over my years as a Christian nevertheless drew significantly on it when they articulated their understanding of what it is we’re doing in the waters. And so, experiencing a deeply conflicted desire to raise my child—my daughter—in the church, I prayed for God’s Spirit to release fresh insight from old wisdom. I was yearning to understand what it was we were about to do.

Nicodemus is almost always presented as a fool in this story. What a silly question! What a silly man, thinking that there might be any kind of a special relationship between a person’s first birth and their second! I’ve never heard a sermon or attended a Bible study where we acknowledge that for someone hearing this brand new and seemingly nonsensical concept of being born again, Nicodemus’ question is perhaps the most logical one to pose.

Even more to the point, I’d never noticed before that Jesus’ answer to the question doesn’t dismiss the validity of a mother’s labor as the very context out of which we should understand what it is that happens in baptism.

It’s patriarchal theology that did that.

Now, the phrase “patriarchal theology” might be an offensive one simply to toss around. So let me just tip my hand: I’m a card-carrying feminist theologian, Baptist minister mama. From some angles I look like a jumble of contradictions, contradictions that I try to live with grace and glee.

But it’s not the fact that I’m a Baptist that gave me pause on the decision of baptizing my infant daughter in the Anglican church in Toronto where our ecumenical family happens to worship. Of course, as a Baptist minister I affirm the theology of baptism as an outward expression of an inward conversion, an expression that requires one be of a certain age to be able to proclaim it. But at the same time, my ecumenical sensibilities and general disposition of theological expansiveness mean that I simultaneously affirm a more Anglican theology of baptism—which sees God’s invitation to the community of faith as occurring through a grace that precedes our awareness of it. So, being a Baptist married to an Anglican, I didn’t really struggle with the idea of baptizing our daughter on account of her infancy.

Rather, I struggled to bring her to the font because the formal liturgy required solely masculine naming for the Divine. My daughter’s entry to the church necessitated the erasure of her birth from a woman, to instead be re-birthed by a Father, Son, and, at best, nongendered—but usually also masculine—Spirit.

This struck me as the epitome of patriarchal religion. But Jesus’ words gave me hope for a feminist reinterpretation.

Nicodemus was no fool

When Jesus extends his invitation to the reign of God, he points out that flesh gives birth to flesh, and Spirit gives birth to spirit. Historically, Christians have interpreted that statement as if flesh and spirit are dichotomously distinguished from each other.

But as feminist theologians have been pointing out for some time now, a fully incarnational theology—not to mention a fully orthodox one—cannot diametrically oppose the two. Bodies, we point out, are inextricably animated by God’s breath, God’s Spirit. What’s more, when we reach the end of days, God doesn’t just rip souls and spirits out of lifeless forms to drag them indistinguishable up to float through the mists of Heaven. Rather, Paul tells us, Christians anticipate the mystery of a bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1-15, 58), a reconstitution of each unique self that is as embodied as it is mysterious.

The living, breathing, dying, and living-again reality of the Word Made Flesh testifies to this numerical mystery: In birth, in re-birth, flesh and spirit are both one and something more than one. The soul is enfleshed; our bodies are ensouled.

We make a misogynist mistake, an error of patriarchal lineage, if we think the second birth of baptism somehow erases or, worse, fixes, the terror and the beauty of the first—a type of theological mistake all too common in the history of the Christian faith. The re-birth of baptism doesn’t erase the first; rather, it only makes sense in light of the first birth.

Nicodemus wasn’t a fool; indeed, perhaps he was a proto-feminist who, despite all his own patriarchal conditioning, somehow by the power of the Holy Spirit could hear the deep visceral wisdom of Jesus’ strange words.

And he was an inspiration to me as I prayed to understand my daughter’s entry to the church through the context of her entry to this world.

Spirit and flesh

For just over 38 weeks my body grew my daughter’s body, my soul grew her soul. We existed together as something between one and two creatures, contiguous, continuous, fused in spirit and flesh, sacred numeric mystery. I knew she knew I loved her because my blood carried that message into her blood. I remember realizing how insufficient words would always be to the task of bearing that love into her very being once our spirits were no longer intertwined in our shared flesh. I remember how excited I felt when I realized that, despite the impossibly hidden nature of such loving words, I’d spend my life searching for a way to speak them nonetheless.

As the days and nights grew close to her arrival, I felt my daughter distinguishing herself from me—felt her movements from inside as a message that I wouldn’t be doing this alone, but that we’d be partners in her birth together ... that soon we’d labor together to bring her into this terrifying yet beautiful world.

And then the waters broke, and we began.

Rocking, and screaming, and at one point biting (with genuine apologies to my husband for the vampiric mark I left on his neck that day), we found that rhythm and pulse of spirited, carnal life. Animalistic in the sweat and blood and shockingly unidentifiable bodily fluids, roars erupted from the gut of my existence in tongues I didn’t recognize. In the rocking and the roaring, I realized in fact just how close the animal is to the Divine, the thin space between the two being that indescribable place at which we transcend ourselves to some new plane of pain and existence.

Somehow my body knew when to push, not out of any knowledge from my own experience—this was my first labor—but instead as my body opened to the wisdom pouring out of ancestral mothers from across the animal kingdom and from the Mother of creation itself, God. And in that moment of opening, I felt the abyss of lifelessness—a simpler word here may be death—I felt the abyss of death in and beneath the pit of my guts as I wrenched my daughter from it.

That abyss was present and real and contained in my flesh as I and my child tamed it together.

And as she ripped forth from me (and rip she did), as the sacred math of us being somewhere between one and two became fully two—two ensouled bodies, two embodied souls—for the first time the water, the blood, the idea of life coming directly out of death, creation out of nothing, were so true in the depths of my own being, in that pit of my gut from which she’d come, that it was like I’d never really known that truth before.

This is what it means to be born of waters and the Spirit. This is what we’re doing in baptism.

We clean it all up for the ritual, of course, because we church-folk love to clean up messes. But the agony and ecstasy of childbirth are present in that moment of baptism too. We just can’t see them as clearly because no one’s screaming and no one’s getting bit. The struggle against death for life, and the aching, screaming labor that accompanies it, are in the broken waters and mighty Spirit filling every font and tank across this broken world.

In the waters of baptism, we connect with the most elemental parts of our existence, and in those depths we see beyond a shadow of doubt how much the life of faith will entail God’s labor and our own wrestling together to bring life out of death and into this world.

Parenting a child into the struggle of faith

In the end, my struggle to baptize Georgia, my daughter, wasn’t only about the patriarchal theology of baptism. Yes, I struggled with the idea of baptizing her into a worldwide communion of Christianity that in various insidious ways was going to teach her over the course of a lifetime that as a girl she matters less, or that would draw lines around its capacities to celebrate whomever she loves based on her and their gender. But my struggle was also because I wondered if I wanted to be responsible for adding one more soul to the ranks of a faith that has failed again and again at its mandate to see and make manifest the reign of God on earth.

I struggled with adding one more soul to the ranks of a Christian communion that has been utterly complicit in and a beneficiary of global colonization projects that are not just facts of history, but which are ongoing reality. I struggled with adding one more soul to a worldwide communion of Christianity that is just as likely to hold up and sanctify my daughter’s ethnic and cultural privilege as it is to ask her to give it up or give it away.

I struggled with committing her to a life of faith that was just as likely to wrestle death from life as it was to wrestle life from death.

By rooting the theology of baptism in a theology of birth and orienting it toward a theology of the reign of God, we take seriously the struggle of faith to which God calls us. And we take seriously what it is to parent a child into that struggle.

It’s not about driving our kids to and from youth group on Wednesday nights so that they can stay out of trouble. It’s about struggling with them to recognize and partner with God’s work for justice and healing all around us. Parenting a child into the struggle of faith entails being a disciple with them on the journey.

As Georgia’s mother, I’ll want her to be safe and comfortable. As her fellow disciple, I pray that she’ll experience danger and discomfort that convicts her of the wreckage of this world and her role in it. As her mother, I’ll want her to be whole, but as her fellow disciple I pray that her heart will be broken again and again by the brokenness around and within her. As her mother, I’ll want to give her the world, but as her fellow disciple I pray she’ll have the courage and conviction to give it all up for just a glimpse of God’s grace.

Georgia arrived vulnerable to this world on a cold December night in a downtown Toronto hospital. And she arrived vulnerable to the life of faith on a hot September morning in a downtown Toronto church. Whenever I find myself walking the few city blocks spanning the distance between these two locations, I’m reminded that the latter sacred site does not erase the sacred nature of the first. And from beneath the city streets that connect these two to each other, I hear the groans of creation itself in childbirth, laboring redemption into life (Romans 8:22).