Baptism

Yesterday morning (July 2), I breakfasted at a coffee shop where big lettering on the wall behind the front counter proclaims, "Tasting coffee, not only is a taste of the enjoyment, it is a physical and psychological baptism."

I'm pretty sure that if drinking coffee is a physical baptism for you, you're doing it wrong. Psychological, though? It can be. I vividly remember that one of the first things I did after resigning from the CJCLDS on February 14, 2002, was drink my first ever cup of coffee, doing it for no other reason than that it had been forbidden -- like Gibreel Farishta stuffing his face with dead pigs in The Satanic Verses, I thought at the time, noting the date -- and I did think of it explicitly as an "anti-baptism," as a ceremonial rite of passage into the ranks of the no-longer-Mormon.

I mailed in my resignation letter to church headquarters that day, but then when they wanted me to jump through some more hoops to finalize the thing -- meeting with the local bishop and whatnot -- I didn't bother. To this day I'm not sure whether they still consider me to be technically a member or not. Am I a "dry Mormon" -- a person who is Mormon-like in their general lifestyle and outlook but is not a member ("dry" meaning not baptized) -- or a "Jack Mormon" -- a church member who doesn't attend services or live the approved lifestyle (the equivalent of a "lapsed Catholic")? Possibly, as suggested by that "Jack dry" message, both to some degree.

As I ate my sandwich and sipped the devil's brew, I read a bit of Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I've been reading for sync-prompted reasons. Two of the female character, while physically in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, enter a visionary state in which they have an audience with the goddess Isis. The goddess accepts one of the two as "my daughter, who pleases me" (clearly alluding to the language used at Jesus' baptism), and the other, who has previously been fighting to obtain the daughter-of-Isis role for herself, renounces that claim and vows to be a true friend to the one the goddess has chosen. Immediately after this,

An idea was conveyed then, something like bathe, or cleanse or be baptize, and [there] appeared a clear picture of a vast lake behind an enormous man-made dam.

Nothing like a physical baptism occurs at that time, but the two women shortly find themselves back in Caesar's Palace, discovering that during the visionary encounter they had physically been sitting at the bar drinking quinine water which they had no memory of ordering -- suggesting that, as in the inscription at the coffee shop, their baptism somehow took the form of drinking a liquid rather than being immersed in or sprinkled with it. The second woman then proceeds to order a hamburger and a beer -- things she had abstained from before in order to qualify herself for the role of "queen" and daughter of Isis -- and explains to her at first uncomprehending friend that this is a way of cementing her vow of friendship:

I just now ate red meat, probably cooked on an iron grill, and I drank alcohol! I've unfitted myself for the queenhood! I've totally pledged my allegiance to you now . . . .

So as with my own "un-baptism" on which I had just been reflecting, we have the consumption of what was formerly forbidden, precisely because it was formerly forbidden, in a way that is almost ceremonial and serves as a way of formally enacting a spiritual decision.

"So, dry Jack," I thought to myself, "when are you going to get yourself baptized?"

The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could be baptized again by one of the churches -- the CJCLDS or the Catholics or, hell, even the True Jesus Church or something -- but the sentence immediately came to mind with great clarity: "That is not the way." This was followed by the mental voice of Greg Carlwood saying, as he often does at the beginning of his podcast, "This is the way, Higherside Chatters!"

At first I took this as an indication that recent episodes of that podcast might hold some synchronistic clues about the form my baptism should take, but that quickly proved to be a dead end. Instead I decided to search the Book of Mormon for the exact phrase "this is the way." It occurs exactly once, at the end of 2 Nephi 31. As it happens, this chapter has a lot to say about baptism, and specifically about the need "to be baptized, yea, even by water!" (v. 5). Baptism means baptism, immersion in actual water, not some other act of vaguely equivalent symbolism.

That night, I found myself wondering whether Lady Issit, the murdered mother of one of the characters in Last Call was a real person from history, like Bugsy Siegel. To check, I ran a web search for "issit" "bugsy" -- and the first results were etexts of The Satanic Verses, the very novel I had just referenced in connection with my coffee un-baptism. As it happens, there's a passing reference to a sitcom featuring, among many other alien characters, "Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula"; and then elsewhere in the novel, one of the characters, stuttering, says "iss iss issit" for "sit." A pretty strange coincidence.

This morning (July 3), I finished Last Call. The two women do in the end get "baptized" by bathing in Lake Mead. Supernatural beings try to prevent them from doing so, but they fight them off with, of all things, a chip. This is a poker chip from the Moulin Rouge (the short-lived Vegas casino, not its famous Parisian namesake), which was given to them by supernatural means after the meeting with Isis. The women first use the chip as a sword and finally end up eating it. (Yeah, it's kind of a strange novel.)

What does Moulin Rouge mean, anyway? I looked it up. "Red windmill."

After my morning classes, I had several hours of free time, and I began to feel an urgent need to get baptized immediately. On the road, I passed an irrigation canal with a sign that said, in English as well as Chinese, "Beware of deep water. Swimming prohibited." Beware is a word closely associated with the Ides of March, which is the date I was baptized, on my eighth birthday. And earlier I had been thinking of "baptism"-like acts consisting of doing the prohibited because it is prohibited. So while the sign looked on the surface like a warning not to get baptized, I interpreted it as the opposite. "Just follow my yellow light," I thought, quoting lyrics from Of Monsters and Men, "and ignore all those big warning signs." The coffee shop with the baptism inscription is the same place that has the Emily Dickinson lines I posted about in "Golden light, and going 'overseas'."

A few minutes later, I saw an advertisement for "Golden Ratio potato chips." The combination of golden and chips seemed potentially meaningful.

Then I passed someone wearing a blue-green T-shirt that said "Don't follow the wave" -- could be interpreted lots of ways -- and then another T-shirt on which was written, inside a big blue-green circle, "No place like Earth. No time like the present." In other words, it's now or never.

Not in an irrigation canal, though, obviously. I changed into shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and slides and had Google Maps take me to the nearest beach. As I approached I could see wind turbines up ahead and thought it was a pity they were all gray instead of red. No moulins rouges. Then, as I turned a corner and had almost arrived at my destination, I found myself facing one that, unlike the others, did have some red on its blades:

Un moulin en partie rouge after all.

I parked, walked down a long stretch of wet sand and barnacled rocks, and waded out into the warm olive-colored waters of the Taiwan Strait. The place was completely deserted, except for a few little egrets in the shallows and some terns or something overhead.

"You're crazy. This is a crazy thing to do," an inner voice helpfully informed me. Yeah, well, not-being-crazy is pretty low on my list of priorities these days.

The water deepened very gradually, and I had to wade pretty far out just to get waist deep. "Am I actually going to do this?" I thought. "I am. Effunde spiritum tuum, Domine, super servum tuum, ut opus hoc faciat in sanctitate cordis." I sank to my knees on the soft sand, held my breath and, pushing against my natural buoyancy in the heavy brine to get my whole body underwater, kowtowed.

Then I rose, waded slowly back to the beach, and left. In the heat of the Taiwan summer, I was mostly dry by the time I got home. I took a quick shower to rinse off the salt, changed into work clothes, and had time for an extremely late lunch before my 4:00 class.

Later I remembered that 2 Nephi 31 associates baptism with the word strait.

Does what I did today really count as "baptism" in any meaningful sense? I don't know. I'm not even sure I know what that question means. I do think it was some kind of test, though, and that I passed it by demonstrating my willingness to take physical action in response to a spiritual prompting, at a moment's notice, even though it involved doing something kind of weird. I have a very strong sense that if I had hesitated or delayed at all, if I had failed to take action immediately, some sort of opportunity would have been permanently lost. As for what exactly that means, we'll just have to see what happens. Your move, angels, ministers of grace, and sync fairies. Your -- you know what word Greg Carlwood would add here -- move.