Immersion and Ascent

“There is a time for everything…” Ecclesiastes 3

The water in the baptismal rings out, shiftting crystal housed in a brilliant teal, and the church smiles on, encouraging the ruddy, nervous seven-year-old. Barely containing his excitement, he steps down into the green basin. Above the baptismal, a Mother’s Day sun breaks apart as it passes through a round, stained glass centerpiece, streams of light passing through the down-stretched arms of an ascending Jesus.

The young boy sets his folded hands into his father’s massive paws. The father nearly fills out the massive baptismal waders that many men wear up to their chests. From her view in the second row, the little boy’s mother cries softly. With a hand raised, the father asks the boy to raise his, and to repeat the Sinner’s Prayer.

“I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God…” The recitation comes and goes; the words are lost in the focus of getting it right.

“And now, because of your good confession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

The boy pinches his nose hard, just as he was instructed by the smiling woman at the door to the pool. The father holds the boy’s wrists powerfully; the boy’s deep breath, almost a gasp, signals that he is ready. The crystal water swims up around him, enveloping him in swirling marble greens, soaking through the white gown, soaking through his shorts, his shirt—soaking through.

The descent ends and he is underwater. The pause lasts only a moment; firm hands bring him steadily back. Now a steady rise. The feel of passing water ensures him that he is moving up to the surface, ascending. He breaks the surface, but the surface stays with him, and he is still rising, the feeling of falling up and falling away. And he is with the stained glass and with the Mother’s Day sun.

The surface breaks, and he is wet. His father loves him, hugs him, and the church’s uproarious applause meets him in the sparkling wetness. The boy smiles wide at them. He turns to glance at Jesus ascending; he knows the feeling well. He sees his mother and she is happy but not smiling. Her eyes are closed, her face tilted up, reflecting the light off Jesus and the sun.

* * *

I sat in Mr. John Rott’s fourth period Conceptual Physics class, hanging on to his teaching, never by much. He conquered Indiana’s all-male engineering and aeronautical school, earning a 4.0 GPA en route to becoming the painfully overqualified teacher of my remedial Physics course at Brownsburg High School. “Conceptual” Physics—not to be confused with—“Theoretical Physics.” Philosophy and genius makes physics “theoretical.” Rounding and pictures makes physics “conceptual.”

The teaching methods of choice, rounding and pictures, turn 9.81’s into 10’s, show Stick-figure Jack and Sally throwing balls off a balcony to Stick-figure Steve, the path of the ball, a red dotted line. And I struggled—standard procedure for science classes. Natural sciences were always unnatural. My only niche in the scientific world was “The Debate.” God vs. The Bad Guys—The Dumb Guys. Creation vs. Evolution.

Somewhere in my childhood, I took an interest in the all-pervasive Evangelical Proofs. These pillars of the faith protect the fold from the prowling wolves, enclosing them in a high, three-runged fence. The first rung—the unassailable perfection of the Bible. The second—the incontrovertible fact of Jesus-as-God. The third—a clear refutation of Evolution.

The non-denominational churches in our area denominated when celebrities came to town. Celebrities like Ken Ham, the patron saint of stopping Evolution. We all piled into one of our sister churches to listen to the Australian who looked frighteningly like Abraham Lincoln. The crowd was pleased, convinced once again that our schools had been infested by an insidious sham, a sham started by a small, God-hating scientist club, presided over by Darwin himself. “Evil-lution” t-shirts sold hot. Books that hit like an uppercut were gobbled up. My mother bought Ken Ham’s opus for me—The Lie: Evolution. I gobbled it up, impassioned, excited to show the world what Ken Ham and I knew.

The nightstand next to my bed supported an obnoxiously large, round lamp, and also, my nightly reading material. Ham keynoted my nightstand for years; he faithfully provided rounds of ammunition for my conversations with my friends (acquaintances, really) of liberal dissent.

I was familiar with a fair number of the arguments, having proven Evolution to be a farce at least twice during junior high school with stunningly conclusive papers. So during class, when Mr. Rott mentioned the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics, I honed in. He wasn’t talking about Evolution, not even remotely, but I stayed after class to break the news about The Lie to him.

He disagreed, and he explained why. And he was smart, and he made sense. And he knew more than I did. And he was nice about it. I was confused.

* * *

I kissed girls in high school. I spent my weekends trying, and sometimes succeeding, always just for fun, always innocently. The summer before my senior year, I decided I shouldn’t do that. After all, I was still a Christian, even if I had some pretty serious doubts about some of it. I swore off girls for three months.

Three months later, I had succeeded. It was late fall, nearing winter; I had kissed no one, flirted with a few—nothing grievous. The following weekend the state student council convention descended on our high school, and with it, my demise. Girls, everywhere, thinking I was important. Three months were up. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

The next weekend, I went to watch my cousin Jordy play in his sectional final. I went by myself, certain that I would find someone to sit with, knowing many of the people in his small Christian high school. After the game, I went milling around, smiling, shaking hands, enjoying the friends, the crowd, and the cool night. My friend Phil was also there. Phil was always talking, almost always to a girl, usually an attractive one. He was talking across a small group to a gorgeous brunette, so I approached and intruded.

“Hey Phil, what’s the homework in that Chemistry class?” I was not in Phil’s Chemistry class.

“Oh, I don’t know just some problems in the book,” he said and kept talking to her. I stood in silence, half in the circle, clearly not introduced. She was stunning. The group dissipated and she left with them.

“Who was that?!” I asked, surprised that I hadn’t met a girl that pretty in such a small circle of towns and churches.

“Her name is Meagen; I think I’m gonna ask her out.” I knew Phil. He asked everyone out.

“No way, man,” I shook my head and smiled at him, “that one’s mine.”

A few weeks and a few failed attempts after that game, Meagen and I went on our first date. Almost all of our friends were mutual; we lived in the same town; we had almost met countless times.

Our first date—a double date with her best friend, who happened to be one of my eight elementary school classmates—ended on a couch, watching a movie, but mostly flirting. I was going to kiss her. She wanted to kiss me. She asked me to wait, to leave our first kiss for a night that we knew each other better, so it meant more.

I drove the minivan back to my house, wondering what it feels like to find the person you are going to marry.

Her father was a pastor—a Charismatic pastor, at that—and she loved Jesus like I did, or at least as much as I did. We talked about God sometimes, but we spent most of the time staring at each other, wondering how we ever survived before we met.

Through Meagen, I met John, a teacher at her school. He became my mentor, and through John I met Luke, one of my sister’s friends who asked me to help teach a Bible study. They called the Bible study “Phish,” because they liked the band and because they were sophomores in high school. I became the senior leadership. We met in Luke’s parent’s basement and attic (depending on the part of the service), and God shook their house with passion and with bass.

In six months, God revealed Himself to me—not many parts of Him, but parts of Him that were true enough so that I knew I could never forget them. I spent those six months as a single note in a grand symphony, certain that everything before had led to that point, and everything after would crescendo to glorious completion.

I met God through Meagen, but she never met the same “Him” through me. The meeting of a person, a Person, is a finicky process, one in which both parties have to be actively participating.

At the end of six months, I would dismiss Meagen, breaking her heart, feeling certain that I must, feeling led by the warm and tactile love for God that I had learned, somehow, through her.

* * *

College students are said to change their majors, on average, six times. At the end of my senior year of high school, I had declared a double major of Economics and Business Administration, sure that I would switch once I found what I wanted. And I found it, even before classes started in the fall. A man named Francis Schaeffer wrote a lot of books that convinced me that religion and philosophy were the weightiest stuff around, the stuff most worth my life. I entered college as a Religion & Philosophy major with a leery eye on the writing program. I had, after all, gotten to know God the previous spring.

Studying religion turned out to be much more like a biopsy than the deepening of a friendship, and philosophy—philosophy began to look like my faith’s bigger, braver brother. By the end of the first semester, my mind began to itch. I had followed a few trails, looking for answers that I needed but couldn’t find. I found myself thinking about losing myself, and hoping that a bigger, stronger brother to philosophy would turn up. And I found myself wondering about the God of the spring and about the God of my mother.

There’s something you should understand: My mother loves me. She loves me with the irrational kind of love, the strong kind of irrational, the kind that doesn’t care what you think or why you think it. The kind that psychologists purse their lips and nod at, and the kind that reminds me what it felt like when God met me.

In the spring, I decided to start over. I decided that Ken Ham wasn’t a real scientist and that my faith had more frayed ends than I could live with. So I dropped it all, told God that I wasn’t to be trusted, and resolved to figure it all for myself.

* * *

A young man sits on the edge of a comfortable hotel bed in Sopron, Hungary. His brother is sprawled out across the far side, mouth open, snoring softly. The young man is leaning over, elbows resting on his knees; his hands hold open a small book with a springy binding. His legs drape off the bedside. He is tired. He is reading because he is tired, exhausted by eighteen months of unmoored drifting, exhausted by questions piled on questions, exhausted by giving up on his mother’s God. His brother mumbles and shifts, taking up most of the bed.

The young man is alone, familiar with the deadened void left behind by a lost relationship. This conference has brought him to Hungary, to Hotel Pannonia, for the second time. This time his family has come. His mother and father are in an adjacent room, asleep. The hotel is filled with Christian philosophers and theologians. Down the street, the conference center sleeps as it prepares for the coming day. But the young man has not found his answers.

The room’s high walls look down on him; gaudy patterns on the wallpaper seem to stare with Soviet eyes. He checks his watch, double checking the date, and flips to the corresponding page—a small book, called a daily devotional, written by a man named Oswald, who died young.

The young man has read this page before. At least twice. But it does not matter. The page arrests him, and a voice pierces him, and it starts the beating of his dead heart—

“…At the most unexpected moments there is the whisper of the Lord – ‘Come unto Me,’ and you are drawn immediately. Personal contact with Jesus alters everything. Be stupid enough to come and commit yourself to what He says.”

And it was a familiar voice that pierced him, nothing like the cold prongs of his philosophy; almost as if a knife had been imbedded, dormant but warmed through the cold years, suddenly cutting loose a warm flow.

The room’s Soviet eyes soften, the hotel shifts, and the feelings of ascension stir. The young man is not okay—with himself, with God, or with the boy—but he is alive again, and almost ready to breathe.