A PERFECT BAPTISMAL RECORD [NOT] 2-18-22

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I love babies. If I had started as a Baptist preacher, I would have had to go over to the Methodists so that I could baptize babies.

I loved baptizing babies. I would hold the baby in my arms while I put the water on its head and “said the words” over it. Then I would walk up and down the aisles with the newly baptized baby, so that all in the congregation could see it up close, and I would say: “This is the newest member of the Body of Christ. This child is now our responsibility. When it doubts, we must help it trust again. When it is sad, we must help it laugh again. As it grows, we must push it forward, but if we see it going to close to the edge, we must pull it back to safety. This child is baptized. This child is our child.” [1

Sometimes I thought about just going on out the back door. Just leave all those other people back there in the church while the baby and I had a good time. Then I would remember that a diaper change would be coming up, so I handed it back to its parents.

I baptized babies over a span of forty years. I wish I had kept a record of those baptisms. Each one is recorded in the records of the congregation I was pastoring at the time, but I have no record of my own.

Except a general observation, that went by gender, which I recognized early, and which remained consistent all that time. In those forty years, there was never a girl baby who gave me any trouble. They never cried or fussed or objected to the water. They were little angels who were happy to be there. On the other hand, there was never a boy baby who did not give me trouble. They cried, they kicked, they pulled my beard. They were little heathens who did not want to be in the Body of Christ.

I joked that those little boys knew that I was the father of daughters and so distrusted them. Despite the joking, it bothered me. This was my type of person. I thought I had a special connection with babies. I would often take a fussing baby in some sort of social setting and it would immediately calm down. Some parents threatened to call me to come to their house at two a.m.

It wasn’t that boy babies were unhappy with me the rest of the time. [This was before I had a grandson, so that doesn’t count.] They sat on my lap and chortled when we played “Trotty Horse” or “This is the way the farmer rides.” But when baptism came…

Except my last month before retirement. I had two baby baptisms, a girl, and a boy. The girl was a hellion who would not stop screaming. The boy was a placid spirit who cooed the whole time.

My perfect record was destroyed!

I did not realize how much pleasure I took from the perfection of that baptismal record, that sprinkled consistency of heavenly girls and hellish boys. I could no longer entertain at parties of clergy types by telling of my strange watery baptismal perfection. I was emotionally devastated. It was the only consistency in my long career, and it had been demolished by two tabulas rasa.

It's been 25 years since those two infants destroyed my perfect record. I’ve had time to ruminate. I think I’m wiser. Such a much better story with those last two little outliers in it.

Sometimes it is the imperfections that make perfection.

John Robert McFarland

[1] I did not do this as impersonally as it sounds, saying “it.” I used the baby’s name, and the pronouns of “she” or “he.”