Reclaiming Baptism
Reclaiming Baptism: The Water Remembers Before the Church Does Baptism was given to me as a beginning that belonged to someone else. A font, a priest, a name spoken over my small body before I could speak for myself. For years I thought that was the whole of it, a single door, opened once, on someone else’s terms. It took me a long time on the water’s edge, and longer still on the mat and in ceremony, to understand that the church did not invent this. It only borrowed it, narrowed it, and asked us to forget where it came from. Long before there were baptismal fonts, there were rivers. There were shamans leading the sick into cold currents at dawn, elders pouring water over the crown of a newborn’s head while chanting the names of ancestors, priests in the Ganges lifting their palms to the sun and letting the current carry away what no longer belonged to them. Water has always known how to do this work. It does not need permission from a church to remember a soul back to itse...