Learning to Swim in Holiness

In the movie Brooklyn, based on a story by Colm Toibin, a young Irish teen, Ellis Lacey, takes the risk of leaving all the world she has ever known, a small town in Ireland, to come to the US, to Brooklyn. She has never travelled, never been asea, never spoken to anyone from beyond her village, never encountered the strange and exotic, and scary, world that unfolds around her in Brooklyn.

She has taken this tremendous risk because she has, in Brooklyn, more chances for life than Ireland can offer her. Economically. But also socially.  And especially spiritually.

Brooklyn offers her all the promises of Advent:  hope; love, joy, peace. And every one of them requires that she risk a form of death to reach the promise. She must change her looks to work. And then her well-trained self-effacing style must change, if she is to keep her job as a store clerk who must engage customers with friendly banter. And then there is a chance of love, which requires entering the world of a young Italian-American man, whose food and family behavior are a world away from her own. And then she must make her peace with her mother, and with Ireland, as the past and not her future, cutting her ties with them in order to claim America. Brooklyn is a baptism for Ellis Lacey, and it is not a splash, it is a long learning to swim in strange waters.

Everything wonderful blessing is dangerous in some way. And we, immersed in holiness, like Ellis, experience mingled desire and fear.

In the wilderness around the Jordan, the throngs who came to John the Baptist risked their lives entering that water, in an era when bathing in the sea was not a pastime, and hardly anyone knew how to swim.

Immersion was more than getting wet, it required a brush with death and placing your trust in the hands of the one who baptized you, who would hold on and raise you up, wet and blessed in the newness of survival.

For Ellis Lacey, there were many hands, many arms involved in her American baptism, and she was afraid of them all, and she found the courage to trust them anyway. The matron of her boarding house. The other women who lived there. Her supervisor at the store, and Tony, her Italian American beau. Her sister, who bought her ticket to America, knowing she was dying and keeping that a secret so that Ellis would not get trapped in servitude to her widowed mother.

Of all the arms reaching out to be part of her baptism, the hardest to enter were the arms of the dead and dying – the ghost of her sister, who died a year or so later, but also the zombie-like men who came to the soup kitchen at her church in Brooklyn, men who, like her, had come to Brooklyn from Ireland full of hope, and whose fortunes had failed, leaving them broken and lonely and homeless in both worlds.

Ellis Lacey must enter and leave all the arms that carry her through baptism, and she must choose which arms offer her the life she longs for.

The truth is, there is hardly any concensus among Christians about what baptism means, or does. John emphasized cleansing from sin, warning the crowds about unquenchable, all-consuming fire. Yet he also raised them up as brothers and sisters, newly minted, freshly washed, and ready to pose for a family portrait as God’s beloved. Does falling into the water prevent you from being consumed by the fire? The men in the soup kitchen seem indeed to have fallen into both, to have died twice. And what about those who stayed in Ireland?

In some Christian traditions baptism is wreathed in layers of holiness, as water is applied on the head and oil over the heart, as white linen vestments are wrapped around and another set of parents, god-parents are acquired.

In other traditions baptism is a symbolic death and a promise of resurrection, tying the baptized to a certain future beyond this world;  in still others, baptism confirms a testimony of faith discovered. And in many baptism joins children to the generations around them and all those who have gone before, in belonging to the family of God.

Becoming baptized requires learning to balance yourself in the waters of this world, which offers both death and holiness. Becoming baptized requires learning how to use our own bodies’ water and air to buoy ourselves in the ocean-crossing journeys that take us from childhood to adulthood. And within the journeys will be a myriad of waves and tides, all of which we will have to ride, even in storms, till we come to safer harbor.

Water, which lies innocently in baby baths, has carved the Grand Canyon, reminding those whose penchant for strength is rock-ribbed, that nothing can stand in water’s way. And water, which survives temperatures that can kill by transforming itself, to ice, to steam, to mist, to cloud, to rain, will always, always return, as it has done since the beginning of planetary time.

For Jesus, there was an extra dimension in that water, those heaven-shouted words, My Beloved, which he opens to all of us, to carry with him in all their burden and joy. And to all of us comes the invitation of the Spirit, if we do wish to know hope, love, peace and joy.that we must leave our familiar ways, all of them, and risk our own transformation,  And there is also the promise:  there will be arms to lean on everywhere; for you are not alone.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Illustrations:
1. Brooklyn, film poster.
2. Brooklyn, still of Saorise Ronan
3. Baptism in the Jordan, Israel, 2011 photo.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.
4. Baptism of Jesus, mid 12th century mosaic, Cappella Palatina di Palermo, Palermo, Italy. Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.