Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [36]
Every now and then I would forget to eat breakfast so that the loudest of all these sounds was the gaseous racket of my stomach. This may be the real reason many of us fear silence in church—because anyone sitting near us may hear the hissing, rumbling, wheezing sounds of a living human being, which do not match up with the attractive countenances that we work so hard to present to one another. Since these are the sounds of being human, I even learned to love hearing them while sitting quietly in church. For real hunger, for twisted guts, and for our inability to conceal them, let us pray to the Lord.
I like to think that silence was not only one of the best gifts we had to offer our young ones but also one of the signs that the Holy Spirit had come among us. On what turned out to be the noisiest morning of my tenure at Grace-Calvary, I had decided to baptize a whole crowd of babies at the same service. I did this both because I wanted the parents and godparents to know one another and because I wanted the infants to have company. The decision was not popular. Most of the families would have preferred being the only honorees, which is understandable. Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children.
By baptizing a crowd, I hoped to give those only children some metaphysical brothers and sisters. Even if they did not remember one thing about the day, maybe they would grow up with a mystical link to one another. Even if they entirely lost track of one another, maybe one day they would gaze at a picture taken of them at their baptisms and wonder who all those other babies had turned out to be. At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
While my logic may have been good, the logistics were awful. Grace-Calvary is a small church. Divide the square footage by five crying babies, and you get one crying baby per sixteen seats, not counting the anxious parents who only make things worse by trying to make the babies hush. The babies cried through the first hymn, picked up steam through the second, and were going so strong during the reading of the gospel that I decided to ditch my sermon altogether. I folded my manuscript in half and tucked it inside the lectern. I walked to altar rail, where I said something funny about the crying and something straightforward about the baptism. Then I poured the water into the font, led the congregation through the prayers, and called the first family forward to present the first child.
Because remembering is often better than being there, I can no longer say for sure when the howling turned to whimpering and the whimpering to snuffling, but by the time I had the last baby in my arms, the whole place was quiet. The Holy Spirit had spread her wings, and all the babies had settled down underneath them. The child I was about to baptize looked up at me with wet, clear eyes. When I poured water on his head, he beat his fists together and kept looking at me without so much as a hiccup. As the water dripped from his fragrant head back into the font, the ripples of silence spread from there over the heads of the other babies cooing in their parents’ arms to the visitors sitting in the last pew. As the silence bounced off the back wall of the church and headed back toward the altar again, a collective sigh went up from close to a hundred people. Some of us still talk about what happened that day.
It was a version of what had happened