Full Immersion

A West Texas Story of the 1960s

John Steuart Curry Baptism in Kansas, 1928. Whitney Museum of American Art.

(Note: This is a revised version of a piece I posted to Facebook last year.)

Full immersion was not all I’d hoped it would be. “Born again” seemed to promise so much more than I felt when I came up out of the water. Washed, yes. Even “Washed in the blood,” if the preacher said so. But, as he lifted me up out of the baptismal pool, I suspected in my heart that I was still a damnable sinner, convicted by my own guilt. Plus, I had wet underwear. No one had warned me to take my Jockeys off when I changed into the baptismal coveralls.

It was the fall of 1963. I was an earnest and racked 15 year old. My father drank, and had fierce hangovers. My mother had panic attacks; we called them “spells” then, for want of advanced medical vocabulary, and Mother was not best pleased one Sunday when I told her friend, Mrs. Williams, she couldn’t come to the phone because, “She’s having one of her spells.”  

Already, I’d realized that my interest in boys had nothing to do with their skill at passing, or catching, footballs, and never would – that my fascination with basketball focused completely on locker rooms. This specter had been hovering around me for a decade, since I was five, and the neighbor boy, a precocious six, had placed paradise in my hand one summer afternoon behind the privet hedge at the back of his yard.

Nothing like that had happened to me since, in part because the neighbor boy was absolutely banned after I made a tearful confession of naughtiness to Mother, but the memory (and the longing) lingered. By 15, I’d reached the age of accountability – and I knew full well that I had thoughts aplenty, if not actions, to be held accountable for.

The Church offered a way out. Specifically, the Church of Christ – Campbellites, some called us, without instrumental music, which had been banned as a Devil’s distraction – and made for rather dismal hymn singing, when even the pitch pipes had to go. And with full immersion, the Truth distinguishing us from the sprinklers, affusionists and partial immersers. It was such fine distinctions that made us The One True Church – which has made finding another church, later on, problematic. But that’s a later story.

At 15, I hoped to find my way out of assured damnation through the Church’s five-step program: Hear, Believe, Repent, Confess, Be Baptized. By October of ’63, I’d reached steps three/four/five, which could be taken in quick succession – best not dawdle once you’ve made the decision. In this life, you never know when disaster might strike, and an unbaptized soul was one lost for eternity. So there I was that Sunday, standing in the pool high up behind the pulpit, in the white coveralls, nervous, waiting for the curtain to open.

During my childhood and youth, my family had not been overly religious, to say the least. Church-going had not been frequent. Easter Sunday, in new dress-up duds, yes, though not officially acknowledged as a special religious day by the Church. Otherwise, seldom. There were the hangovers from Saturday nights, and the Sunday spells to contend with. My father claimed to be Catholic, though I’d seen no evidence of it. My mother came out of that Campbellite/Church of Christ stream, but didn’t spend much time splashing in it.

True, Puritanism and conversion experiences had been part of the family fabric going right back into the Seventeenth Century, at least. Since there’s nothing more boring than other people’s ancestors, I’ll spare you the details of mine, but we’d been “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” for a good long while by 1963; some of us had even heard that jeremiad at its premier. And, still remembering that hand in the privet hedge, I knew for sure that I was a sinner in God’s Angry Hand – and desperately wanted to jump out of it before it clutched around me forever.

By then, I’d become a Church of Christ three-times-a-weeker: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night. I looked forward to Vacation Bible School not just because of the free ice cream. Something of a little prig (though some of the fascinating boys I so admired, and so tried to impress with my doctrinal  erudition, might have changed that to “a little prick”), I didn’t just go to Sunday school, I excelled at it. I quoted chapter and verse as though I really understood them. By 15, I was even giving mini-sermons to enthralled congregations, though I suspect they were mostly concerned with what cookies would accompany the coffee at social hour, and not my insights into the true meaning of scripture.

For years I’d been Hearing, and Belief had gradually come forth from it. That particular Sunday morning, I went forward when the call came, trying to convince myself, as I walked to the front, that I Repented all my wicked sins (are there any non-wicked sins?) I’d accumulated by then – though knowing deep down that I wasn’t really repenting that boy fascination – but otherwise, Repent, Repent, Repent. I Confessed my Belief and Love – and then it was off to the changing room and the white coveralls.

As I walked up the steps to the pool, I heard the congregation, my soon-to-be brethren, launch into a cappella hymns – “How Great Thou Art,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I Want To Be Ready To Meet Him” – the singing starting slow and getting slower with each step I took.

And then the curtain opened and the hymns stopped. The preacher, also standing in the pool, put one hand on the back of my head, and squeezed my nose shut with the other, and back I went, just as I heard the words, “I baptize you in the name of …” And then I was under the water and then up again almost before I knew it had happened.

The curtain closed, and the preacher helped me find my way out of the pool as the congregation struck up a hymn of joy, at a slightly more sprightly pace than before (though once again getting slower with each step I took). And then I was back in the changing room, wondering what to do about my wet underwear as I put my Sunday suit back on.

Over cookies and coffee at the social hour, brothers and sisters congratulated me on my salvation, and welcomed me to full membership in the Lord’s Family.

I went home to lunch, nothing special, the usual Sunday stewed chicken with my mother’s toothsome dumplings. Delicious. Since I wouldn’t be playing football with the other boys, I decided on a movie matinee instead – Under the Yum Yum Tree, with Jack Lemmon – I’ll assume I didn’t know the plot. After Sunday evening service (more congratulations, though not so many as the morning), I finished my weekend homework, what little of if was left to do, since I was a conscientious student (some of the other boys might have repeated “a little prick”). And so it ended, my day of being Born Again.

I stayed with the Church a few more years. Then I went to college, and fell away. My mother once lamented that she’d let me go to such a wicked place as college – but I don’t think she really meant it.

I stopped going to church, even on Sundays. The closest Church of Christ congregation was a long drive away from campus, and I didn’t have a car – and once you’ve been part of The One True Church, no other, even though closer, will do. Besides, it was so tempting to sleep late that one morning a week – even though the dreams of frustrated efforts to levitate over church steeples had already started. They’d fill my nights for years, along with the angst of still longing for those other boys. Could there have been something Freudian about those church steeple dreams, do you think?

Eventually – it would be years ahead – I made it over the steeple one night, and woke with a start as I came down with a thud on the other side. And the boys? Well, they were pretty much a deal breaker where the CoC was concerned, and the subjects of many other stories I may tell sometime (or maybe not).

So for me, even full immersion didn’t work in the long run. Or maybe the truth is, I just wasn’t made for it. I do sometimes wonder if it might all have been different without the wet underwear. But I guess probably not.