December 21, 2014
Sunday

I attended a baptism last night, at Tree of Life Lutheran Church, the congregation I have been a member of for some twenty years. The parish is led by a married couple, who are each the child of an ordained ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) pastor. The baptismal child is the daughter of their son, who himself has recently been approved for ordination in the denomination. He is also one of my daughter’s oldest friends. They went from grade school through high school together, and attended each other’s weddings, held just a week apart. I was on track to love this child before her parents even met.

Choosing a baby gift that avoids cliché is, I think, hard enough. Infant wear (or even a size T-2 dress and bloomers, with shoes, by Vera Bradley) didn’t seem durable nor meaningful enough to be something that would remind her of me for years to come.

A book is always appropriate, but given that this was also a baptismal gift for a child who will spend most of her life being read to by half a dozen or so ordained clergy, I wanted to avoid offering one more volume of children’s prayers or Bible stories retold with puppets, or stick figures, or Mr. Potato Head.

I settled on two books that are intended for slightly older children: a beginning reader’s book about a dog that writes stories (aided by a sweet yellow bird), and Robert Frost’s familiar poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” illustrated by Susan Jeffers. I have the copy of the Frost/Jeffers that I used with Lynn downstairs, on the shelf with all the other books she declined to send on to our library’s used book collections. It’s waiting for new little ears to hears its cadences, new little fingers to touch the spots of color in the winter scenes.

Our 5:00 vigil service is quiet, intimate, and attended by only a small group of worshipers, even when a member of the extended church family is being baptized. The service is the same as for Sunday morning, same Word, same Sacrament, same sermon, but it is much more contemplative. One might think that would appeal to me, the introvert, but for some reason, in this congregation, at this time in my life, it does not.

Nevertheless, I took my accustomed place, north side of the nave, near the front. I opened the bulletin, intending to read the announcements and other business and social items. But my eye fell on a single line in the first reading:

Nathan said to the king, “Go, do all that you have in mind, for the Lord is with you.” — 2 Samuel 7:3

I felt as if I had been tapped on the shoulder and a paper with that text alone thrust into my hands. Go, do all that you have in mind, for the Lord is with you.

I’ve been depressed for a year, I said in early September, a low-grade depression that was quiet, insidious. It kept me from making progress on the things I wanted to do, it kept me scattered and confused so that I really didn’t even know what it was I wanted to do. Melanie, my Black Bitch, I’ve called the imagined embodiment of it, seen as a black Labrador retriever that looks friendly enough but really isn’t. In November she stopped being subtle about her presence, and the more I struggled to accommodate her, the more I became mired in the morass of things I have left undone, things that it’s too late to do, things that I should never have endeavored to do in the first place. I’d been questioning every action of the past year — the gifts I gave, or didn’t, the people I paid attention to, or didn’t, the things I wrote, or (mostly) didn’t. And I’d been feeling like a failure.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no shadow of turning.” So says the Letter of James. I’d arrived at a little girl’s initiation into baptismal life bearing a gift, thinking that by doing so I was fulfilling my duty as a witness to the event. Instead, I was the one who came away gifted, and profoundly so.

I am ready for 2015, when I shall do all that I have in mind.