Baptism, then and now

My tiny James Benedict was baptized on January 12, 2014. 

Since the rite of baptism includes the renewal of my own baptismal vows, I spent some time in the days leading up to James' reflecting on my that time in my life, nearly 15 years ago.  

My baptism at the comparatively tender age of 11 1/2 was a reflection of the kind of faith that I had as a child. In conversation surrounding the baptisms of older cousins, I was introduced to the idea that there are things that we could do to mark our relationship with God. This was a concept that I embraced with eagerness. Then, as now, I craved actions that mean something, and the active and visible elements of the conservative, separatist faith in which I was brought up became sacraments to me, although it would be years before I knew the word, and longer before I understood that it was what I needed.      

I was a comparatively young child to be seeking baptism in the Mennonite tradition. The normal age at our particular church was 12-14 years old, and I was nine when I first approached my parents about the possibility. Concerned about my possible immaturity and lack of understanding, they held me off for a year, but the spring that I was 10, nearly 11, I joined the instruction class for baptism. Along with a best friend who - at a little over a year older than me - was also unusually young, and nine other teenagers, I sat through months of Sunday morning classes that touched on Anabaptist history and theology, as well as more general spiritual formation. In the late summer of the year, we were baptized as part of a Sunday morning service.  

There is a feeling of radiance associated with the day in my memory. Although baptism had always and repeatedly been taught to me as a simple, though momentous, symbol of my commitment to follow Jesus, I felt vaguely even then that I somehow needed the symbol to make the commitment happen. From my current vantage point, the vagueness evaporates -  a sacrament, after all, is a sign that effects that which it signifies. And, although I didn't quite know it at the time, a sacrament is what I sought, and by the grace of God, it is what I found. In the tumult of ensuing adolescence and young adulthood, my relationship with God has shown a tenacity that I attribute to the real grace of baptism, as opposed to my own notoriously weak willpower.

 

My children are not my enemies

I don't remember when the thought first came to me.  Sometime late this past fall, probably, when Christopher was needing something.  I do remember the sudden epiphany: 

My children are not my enemies.  

It was only after I had the thought that I realized that I had a habit of thinking of and treating Christopher as, in some respects, my enemy.  My mental framework of our relationship set him up as my main competitor for some of my most precious resources - my time and energy.  If he got it, I didn't, and vice versa.  The best case scenario in this framework was a carefully choreographed tug of war, with my toddler and my conscience on one end of the rope, and my sanity, selfishness, and legitimate need all jumbled up on the other.  If I allocated resources just right, the rope stayed taut and we all stayed upright, but under continual strain.  In the less desirable but more realistic scenario, an unexpected tug on one end led to a giving way on the other, leaving everyone on the ground and nobody quite happy.  Christopher gets his snack, but maybe I yelled at him a little, and my sanity has a nosebleed.  Or my sanity gets its knitting break, but accompanied by much guilt, and Christopher doesn't get read to that day.  

But if my children are not my enemies, my competitors, then what are they?  My best answer for this at the moment is that they're other human beings, with whom I am in relationship, within the larger organic unity that is our family.  Basically, I think of us all as part of one organism.  There are still more demands on my resources than I can answer.  Those demands still sometimes seem to be in direct conflict.  But it helps to remember that this is not a win/lose situation; rather, what is good for one part of the body, i.e., our family, is good for the whole.  Practically, this means that instead of seeking a sort of static even tension, where everyone is getting just enough resources to stay upright and keep things balanced, there is flexibility, with an eye toward equilibrium.  Just as one part of an organism might temporarily demand more than its "fair share" of resources in order to heal or grow, so one member of the family might need more time and attention for a short while.  Sometimes that's one of my children, and I give up something that I legitimately need for their sake.  Sometimes, it's me, and my children go without something important, like story time, in exchange for a functional mother.  

I find this framework especially helpful during these days of early motherhood.  The fact remains that my children are very dependent parts of our family, and much more fragile than myself, or Landon.  They can't handle much deprivation of resources; James, in fact, can handle almost none.  It's comforting to know, however, that there's a reason that things feel off balance and a little feverish, and that this will not last forever.  

James Benedict

I have another son.  

James Benedict was born on December 13 at 6:37PM.  He weighed in at 5lb. 12oz., and was 19 1/2" long.  

I am grateful for this little life, and for the life of my growing family, in ways that I find almost impossible to express.  I don't want to make it sound too pretty; things have been rough the past two weeks.  I'm recovering from a C-section.  Christopher, at 22 months, is adjusting to a profoundly different family life. I've been sick, Landon has been sick, and Christopher has been sick.  I can't wait for things to smooth out a little.  But there are moments in the midst of this chaos, as many other parents know, I'm sure, that I wouldn't trade for anything.   

Introducing some future ideas

I've been thinking a lot recently about coherence, and reunion, and integration, in two seperate but related realms.  

First, I think about these things in regards to the Church.  The reasons for this should be pretty clear: I am Catholic.  None of my family and few of my wider circle of friends are, although many of them are Christians who live out of and often grapple bravely and honestly with a deep and alive faith.  In light of this, prayers at mass for the unity of the church always come as a tiny electric shock of sadness and hope for me.  I wonder often what a truly, visibly, united Church would look like, and I long for a day when we, or our descendants, discover that vision.

Second, I think about these things in regards to myself.  As I look at my relatively short life, I can pick out various people that I have been, but the transitions between versions of myself, and the relationship of one version of Marina to another, are not always clear to me.  In the past I've found this difficult to effectively unravel, and a project that hovers dangerously close to pure self-indulgence anyway, so I've let it lay, figuring that at some point I would gain the necessary perspective and distance.  In the past months, several factors have come together to bring this project of integration to the forefront of my mind.  My entrance into the Church is one of them; I find myself having made a formal move at odds with the community and communion in which I was raised.  It has been more difficult than I anticipated.  I have rarely been as acutely aware as in the past few months of the DNA of Anabaptists in my blood and bones.  The kind of code switching that was possible as a quasi-anabaptist searching Christian becomes next to impossible as a confirmed Catholic.  This is made more disorienting by the sense of continuity within myself - I'm the same person that I was as a conservative Mennonite.  How did I get here without my community?  

My formal change of identification has also, however, given me a new point of view on the rather fragmented versions of myself that lay in my past.  When I visited my home community for a wedding about a month ago, I found myself mulling over who I was in this place with much more clarity and calmness than usual.  Several weeks ago, I got an email from a good friend expressing gently but clearly their concern over my recent decisions, and inquiring about my relationship with scripture through all of this.  They had seen in my public writing a pattern that moved from an engagement with scripture to an engagement with mostly Catholic authors, and wondered if the Bible had fallen from it's place of due primacy in my personal life.   That email not only struck me with a renewed urgency to be purposeful about renewing the place of scripture in my life, but also led me to consider my past relationship with scripture, the reasons for my near-inability to read the Bible for several years, and - just now - the way that my journey into the Catholic Church really grew out of my efforts to approach the Bible with fresh understanding and perspective.  

In light of these thoughts, I hope (between toddler care, gestating the second baby Lehman, fall cleaning, and sysiphean housekeeping) to take simultaneous but different tracks with these two subjects.  First, I want to do some reading on church unity by way of church history and current thought on the subject.  This may or may not show up here, or in other venues.  Second, I want to do some thinking-out-loud in this space about how my past selves - who I was at ten, at fourteen, at nineteen - integrate with who I have become at the ripe old age of 25.  I'm a little afraid that this is an excuse for extended navel gazing, but I suppose that's what a blog about myself will do.  I hope, however, that in addition to clarifying my relationship with the past for myself, this will also be helpful for those friends and family who are confused, hurt, and otherwise negatively impacted by my decision to throw my lot in with the Catholic Church.  I know that many of you don't understand how or why this happened, and maybe this will shed some light on that for all of us.  

I struggle

Way back in the day, I chose "struggle" as my word for the year.  At the time I wasn't quite certain of what all that entailed, although I had a pretty good idea that it had something to do with housework and generally bringing some order into my life.  Now, almost ten months into that year, the focus has shifted a little bit from that, to struggling with making an effort in somewhat less survival oriented areas.

Recently, I've been trying to focus more intentionally on three things: writing, knitting/crafting, and parenting (not necessarily in that order).  And it is hard.  Although these things have been a part of my life for varying degrees of "a while" now, I've been fairly laid back about them, partly because trying is more difficult than just letting things happen and working with what you get, and also because sometimes you fail.  These things freak me out.  I'm scared of getting so wrapped up in perfectionism that I take another extended blogging hiatus.  I'm afraid of ruining my wrists and coming to hate knitting.  And I am terrified of regretting overly ambitious and stringent parenting 20 years from now.  Combine this fear with the normal resistance that I'm running into as I try to be more purposeful about goals and methods in these areas, and it is making my head spin.  And that is where the real struggle comes in.

It's normal for me to think, when I am tired, discombobulated, internally dizzy, that there must be something wrong.  Surely there is something that I have to change in order to feel again the security and peace of internal equilibrium.  Maybe, I think, I'm not focusing my priorities correctly; maybe I'm getting my relationships wrong; maybe there's some undiscovered sin in all of this.  In a lot of previous battles this is where I would have pulled back, certain that something this uncomfortable couldn't be right.  I'm slowly learning, however, that sometimes - like now - I feel tired, discombobulated, and internally dizzy not because something's wrong, but because I am growing.  I'm being stretched, and pushed.  I'm entering a new mini-phase in my life, and I'm not yet quite certain how to handle the attendant successes, failures, and tensions.  As tempting as it is, then, to retreat a little bit, to surrender even my ever-so-slightly elevated expectations, I'm going to try living with some tension, a little bit of mess.  Instead of bowing out, I'll take a break, ice up some sprains, and keep moving struggling.