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Made in the Image of Humans
How can an infinitesimal part of the universe understand the whole? We are drops of water trying to understand the sea.
--Will Durant
The phone call came late, and every pastor knows what that means. The voice at the other end was both frantic and forlorn. I recognized my parishioner immediately, calling me with news about her niece.
“She’s lost another baby,” she said.
“A miscarriage?” I replied, fearing something even worse.
“No, the little boy is dead in her womb. She is six months along. They will induce labor in the morning, and she wants you to baptize the baby.” She gave me the room number, and I repeated it back, because by then she had started to cry.
It was the mother’s second stillbirth--both boys. I had performed a kind of funeral service for the first one, an early miscarriage, and then she had had two healthy girls. Now a second boy had died in her womb, this one a viable fetus. Apparently, in some rare instances, the presence of a Y chromosome causes the mother’s body to reject the fetus as it would a foreign object. Who knows why? Who ever knows why? But as I put on my shoes and walked out to my car, I knew that was exactly what the mother would ask me. Why?
I’m a preacher. I don’t often find myself at a loss for words, but there are some important things they don’t teach you in seminary. For starters, no one taught me to how to baptize a dead baby. To be honest, no one taught me how to baptize a living one either, but you figure these things out. You dip your fingers in the font, make the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead, and recite the baptismal formula. Then you do the most important thing. You pose for family photos. Chances are no one remembers what you said anyway, but one thing is certain: It is a joyful occasion.
I have always taken the infant in my arms and spoken to the child, letting the parents and the congregation overhear. But on this day, there would be no adoring congregation, no flowers, and no sunlight streaming into the sanctuary. Nothing I had said before would work. This mother was about to deliver a tiny corpse. She would never nurse it or rock it to sleep, never hold its warm and scented head against her cheek. What was I supposed to say when I walked into the room? Got any ideas, Reverend? Remember, you represent a God of love and justice.
The mother asked that I come after the delivery, so that a photographer could take pictures of her dead son to share on Facebook. I was having a hard time imagining this, but it is not my job to judge what brings comfort, only to bring more. I rehearsed some lines in the hospital elevator, but they all sounded hollow. Will she want a baptismal certificate? I wondered. Of course she will, and you forgot to bring one. I made a note to fill it out later, using the full given name of the deceased.
At least I remembered to bring the chalice to hold the water. It was the same silver bowl that I have used for all the baptisms I have performed over thirty-five years serving the same church. It was also the same chalice I had used to baptize the mother. When I opened the door, she looked up and recognized it immediately.
“Oh good, you brought the chalice.”
I stepped into the room and looked into a tiny crib next to her bed. There he was--smaller than a doll and dark purple, the color of eggplant. He looked like a tiny wax figure, dressed in a tiny baptismal outfit with a tiny crocheted stocking cap on his head.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” she said. “Isn’t he perfect?”
I decided that silence was the best response, but that silence became unbearable for the mother’s father. Standing near the foot of the bed, he made a crude political joke about Hillary Clinton. I did not laugh. Why is it that human beings have so much trouble with silence? I wondered. Isn’t that the only response to such a moment? The baby’s father was also in the room, his head cupped in his hands. A second stillborn son. In his mind, he had already signed the boy up for Little League.
At that point, I did something I had never done before. I picked up the chalice and asked for the full given name of a dead baby. In unison, Mom and Dad spoke his first, middle, and last names. I dipped my fingers into the chalice, filled out of habit with warm water (because that’s what living babies prefer). I then pushed up the tiny stocking cap and placed my fingers on the baby’s cold, lifeless forehead.
My fingers traced the sign of the cross on inert flesh. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
When I looked up, I saw the grandfather crying. This was no joke.
The God Problem
I left the room full of sadness and questions that wouldn’t go away. If the ritual brought comfort to the family, then wasn’t that reason enough to baptize a dead baby? My gut said yes--but infant baptism is a covenant between the living and the future. The parents promise that they will practice unconditional love in the way we are told God loves us. So what does it mean to baptize a baby whom no one will raise? Surely no God worthy of worship would wait on such a ritual to decide the baby’s fate. I could not bring the child back to life, so from what was he being cleansed, and to what was he being restored?
I walked out of the hospital and into the light of a perfect September morning. It was Indian summer in Oklahoma. My car was parked in the spot reserved for clergy, because in this deeply evangelical state, we still enjoy special privileges. But in my mind, the God questions would not stop. I know countless clergy who ask these questions in the privacy of their minds but never admit it to anyone. What had I just done, and why had I done it?
It is not uncommon for ministers to say something like this to a mother who has lost her child: “I know you are devastated, but believe me, God had a plan for your little one. Maybe God wanted her in heaven early, to be with the angels.” Really? Who could say such a thing? Those who believe in original sin would explain that even a stillborn baby needs forgiveness. If I believed this, I would immediately turn in my ministerial credentials and get a real job. It gives new meaning to the idea that we would be better off without religion.
I attended a funeral once that included a “viewing” at the end of the service. This is the peculiar and very expensive ritual that makes a dead person look alive--sleeping, perhaps. “So natural,” the mourners say. As the family passed by the open casket, the minister was asked to say a few words of comfort. He looked at the widow and said, “Aren’t you glad that your husband has gone to be with Jesus?” Without hesitation, she looked up and made eye contact so intense it resembled a laser. Then she said, “No. No, Reverend, I’m not glad. I would much prefer that he was still here, with me and the girls. Is Jesus going to pay the rent?”
In Oklahoma, we watch the sky for tornadoes, and when they drop down like ropes of death, they are truly terrifying. In the town of Moore, where tornadoes occur so frequently that the town could be mistaken for a kind of bowling alley for twisters, most people do not have basements. So when the sirens wail, and that roar “like a freight train” is heard, terrified parents will crawl into the bathtub with their children and pull a mattress over them--holding the straps as tightly as they can while their house explodes around them. Recently, the news media reported something too painful to imagine. During one such tornado, an infant was sucked from her mother’s arms because she could not hold on to her baby tightly enough. The little girl was found a quarter mile away, wrapped in a tree like so much storm debris. Later, when a preacher dropped by to comfort the mother, he said what he thought he was supposed to say, instead of just saying nothing. It was yet another version of this twisted idea that God calls some people home early and they are now in a “better place.”
I do not know how the mother responded, but if someone said that to me, I would need to be physically restrained. If clergy are going to continue such theological malpractice, they should probably be accompanied by law enforcement.
As I near the end of my career as a parish minister, I can’t help but think of what it means to be ordained and charged with speaking truth to power in America at a time like this. Our God language has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, even as the world has changed dramatically around us. In sermon after sermon, we speak of God’s love for us as constant and unconditional, but then try to explain tragedy in ways that make God seem utterly capricious, even incomprehensibly cruel. A man confessed to me once that as a child he loved to sing, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
“It was enormously comforting,” he said, thinking of God holding the world in his cupped hands. “Until I got old enough to discover that he frequently drops it.”
