Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Deception Pass -- a story (i)


Just yesterday, I was reminded of a story I wrote ten years ago already, maybe more, when a magazine wanted me to write stories with themes that connected to how we worship. It had been a while since I'd thought about that story--and a ton of others thusly conceived--so I thought I'd run this one for a couple of days. This particular issue was to be devoted to how we do baptism, and in my theological world baptism is an infant thing. So, there's the assignment: write a story that has something to do with the sacrament of baptism. 

Here 'tis, from a magazine titled Reformed Worship, a story about baptism that happens to be set in the Pacific Northwest.
___________________

What is unique about Reverend Gordon Martins--and his whole congregation at Snowhomish Church recognizes it--is his penchant for doing meaningful baptisms.

Often it means a children’s sermon with all kinds of visual aids--a goldfish, a baby hamster, a meat cleaver (of all things!), five hundred-dollar bills, and the one no one would ever forget, his own wife in a bathing cap. Each baptism had its own, special music: Amy Grant done by kids, teenagers, and even in duet, one time, by a mom and dad; the three-year-olds singing “Jesus Loves Me”; and “Feed My Lambs,” that Natalie Sleeth pastoral, with flute accompaniment by the baptized child’s sixth-grade sister.

What no one at Snowhomish Church knows, however, and what few anywhere understand is why Pastor Gordon has this thing for baptism. There is, after all, a reason.

Pastor Gordon’s father was a firebrand preacher, a man driven to purity in doctrine and life, a dissenter in the denomination into which he was born, and like the pilgrims who settled Plymouth, Massachusetts, finally a separatist who left his childhood denomination to beget a new and more rigorous assembly.

His mother was the exact kind of woman his father required: she slid along in his sometimes turbulent wake without once second-guessing the surf her husband was creating. Both of them were small, hunched in appearance, stern-faced but full of the spirit; their eyes seemed to match, dark and foreboding and wary after all those years of battle.

Gordon was the oldest of four children--three boys and a girl. His brother Autrey sold carpets and taught ninth-grade Sunday School in Eugene, Oregon; while Rebecca, their sister, like her mother, had set her sights on motherhood, married a man who became a professor at a Christian college, and the father of their four children.

Then there was Jeremy, the prodigal.

*

It is August, 1985. The Martins family is camping at a park in Whidby Island, Washington, together for the first time since the death of their father two years earlier, when the children decided they should get together more often, not just wait for the next funeral.

The place is called Deception Pass, more than an hour from Snowhomish Church, a place Gordon picked for its beauty, where each day billions of gallons of tidal water from the sound rush through a thin, deeply cut crevice in the earth, back and forth, to fill and then empty the basins of the island.

Jeremy and Alexandria, his second wife, arrive in a beat-up Volvo, a pair of bikes on a rack on the trunk. The rest of the family knows that the first time he was in church for years was the funeral of his father. Alex is his wife now, but she wasn’t when their baby, Aaron, was born, just two months after the funeral--and believe me, that’s another story.

Jeremy and Alexandria are the first of the children to arrive, after Gordon, of course, who with Donna, his wife, has set everything up. And perhaps because they are alone--Gordon, the preachers, and his brother Jeremy, the prodigal--Jeremy asks Gordon a question Gordon hasn’t really anticipated.

It’s asked in a flourish of hope, Gordon thinks, when the two of them are standing alone outside the cabin where Alex is nursing the baby. Jeremy is lifting the trail bike off its hooks, when he looks at his brother, smiles, and says, “We want you to baptize Aaron--here, now, with the family.” Then he puts the bike on the gravel, lifts the front end off the ground and spins the front tire, as if to see if the long trip from Minnesota did any harm. “We think it’d be nice, with all the family around. It’s something we’ve thought a lot about,” Jeremy says. “We’d like you to do it.”

Gordon’s first reaction is his father’s: a family is not a church. But although he is a preacher, Gordon is by no means his father’s clone.

“I mean, when everybody’s here,” Jeremy says, taking hold of the second bike, the one with the baby seat.

So much within Gordon wanted to rush into a wonderful baptism in the same headlong fashion by which tidal waters pour through the steep gorge on the coast. Baptism was a step after all, a baby step, even, toward faith for his brother Jeremy, who the whole family had prayed for endlessly through what?--fifteen years of rebellion and personal problems.

“It just seems right to us,” Jeremy says. “It’s not just for Dad’s sake either, it’s for us--for Aaron.”

It was a mark of how far Jeremy had wandered from the path of his father that he would even ask such a thing--so sure Gordon was of what would have been his father’s immediate response.

“Wouldn’t it be great for Mother?” Jeremy says.

Gordon helps his brother lift the suitcases out of the trunk. What he knows, of course, is that he can give no answer so quickly, so he offers his brother the only response he can think of right off hand. “I’ll have to think about it,” he says. “It’s not just something one does, Jeremy-like nursing the baby.”

Something dies, just that fast, in his brother’s eyes, and Jeremy turns away, carrying a pair of suitcases up the worn board stairway and into the cabin. Behind him, the screen door slams, slapped shut by a long spring. Just as quickly, Jeremy reappears. “You’re so dogmatic, Gord,” he says from the doorstep. “Just like Dad, there’s no humanity in you.”

“I haven’t said no,” Gord tells him.

“But you’re thinking about it,” Jeremy says.
______________________________

Tomorrow: conclusion

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I eagerly await tomorrow's installment. I have been reading your book "Honest to God" and the story of David in the Bible. You and God are my Spring Break companions. I'm on Page 47 with you and the death of Saul with God. I hope there's some explanation for all this violence. David may be a man after God's heart, but he's not doing so well with mine.

Unknown said...

Dang it. Now to find something to do until the conclusion.