As I mentioned, we are spending the season of Lent telling stories. As we wait for the light to return, as we wait for Easter, for resurrection, for new life, we’ll answer together: How did you come to the waters? and Where has the Spirit taken you since that day? Guest writers and friends will join us each week, and I hope you will too!
You may not resonate with everything you read, and that is okay, even the point. Storytelling is a window into another perspective, another way of viewing the world. Storytelling connects us to experiences we might otherwise never encounter. These stories will remind us that there are as many expressions of life with God as there are people.
That day, the water reflected January cold, cloud wisp, crowd noise, and the expectation of a new year. It was January 1st, and I jumped hand in hand with a friend to baptize ourselves with the intention of a calendar turn.
Her eyes bounced the color of the water. A few days later, I flipped through paint chips and found the shade. Pantone calls it “Deep Lake,” but it could be called “Barton Springs on January 1st at 10am” because the color of this spring, like my friend’s eyes, never stays the same. It changes moment by moment, depending on what surrounds it.
We moved across air and into water, and came up different and came up the same. Still us, but whatever stuck from last year, we washed away. Still us, but whatever life this water had to give, we let ourselves be born in it.
We stepped out of the cold spring into the colder air, and the heat of my body evaporates the water back to cloud and rain and ground and bubbling spring, endlessly cycled, moving across form but atomically unchanged.
Have you ever noticed? It’s the up-from-the-ground things, instinctual things, flesh-and-bone things, necessary-for-survival things that get ritualized in religion. We take what is physical and we make it spiritual. We take what is earthy and we make it other-worldly.
Eating and drinking into communion.
Washing your body into baptism.
Sexual expression into marriage.
In THIS overlap between body and not-body we find transformation. Baptism exists in that overlap. The interaction, the touch of body to water is what creates something new in both me and the water. I tend to erase myself from this equation, but is a work of art a pen and a piece of paper by themselves? No, it’s the interaction—the touch of pen to paper—that creates.
A version of this transformation is what brought me to the waters when I was 8 years old. I believed in a God bigger than myself, yet somehow deeply connected to myself. I believed in the realness of new life. I believed that when something dies, it doesn’t stay dead. I believed in transformation.
So I stepped the creaky stairs of an old baptismal in an older independent baptist church in a tiny Texas town steeped in pine needles and, honestly, racism. This was the kind of baptist church that walled itself off even from the Southern Baptist Church, because of what it perceived to be the threat of Black folks. Somehow this church couldn’t see it’s own resistance to its very name. Baptism is a symbol of repentance. And repentance is not about self-blame as much as it’s about self-transformation. It simply means to change your mind, to shift, to reorient. To transform. This transformation happens when we come to the waters, when we move across the waterline, when we interact and touch what’s around us.
In a sense, I come to waters daily. When I breathe in steam, when I walk through dewdrop, when I drink from the tap, when I smell a cloud, the waters create around me and the waters create within me: repeated micro-seconds of baptism on either side of an osmotic wall.
But that day we jumped in Barton Springs on January 1st, to mark the shift in seasons, my toes touched the waterline and my imagination flashed ahead to now. I thought ahead to Lent. I thought ahead to the words I’d speak as a pastor over ashy foreheads to mark the beginning of this season of preparation for new life: “From dust we come and to dust we shall return.” Yes, we come from from soil, we come from mother earth, we come from dust. And baptism reminds us: not dust only,
also water.
Catherine Johnston is a poet, pastor, and therapist-in-training living in Austin, Texas with her three kids. She writes at catherinejohnston.substack.com and serves as the teaching and creative pastor at Austin New Church.