Elizabeth, floating
Wonderings:
I wonder what your first thought its—your gut reaction—to the idea of reciting a creed (We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, …and in Jesus Christ his only Son,…and in the Holy Spirit…)
If you know how to swim—I wonder who taught you? I wonder what it felt like to float for the first time?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the feast of the Baptism of our Lord.
Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Matthew 3:13-17
Let us speak and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God.
Elizabeth was afraid of the water. Every summer, her extended family gathered for a week at her grandparent’s house on an Adirondack lake. Elizabeth’s cousins would leap from the dock, splash around, race to the buoy and back. Something had happened—no one knew what, exactly—but the summer she was 5 Elizabeth wouldn’t even dip a toe in. The summer she was 6, same thing. The summer she was 7, her parents tried everything they could think of to help her get in and enjoy the cool water in the middle of the hot summer. But Elizabeth wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t say why; she couldn’t say what would help; the water terrified her.
So the summer that Elizabeth was 8, a few weeks before their Adirondack trip, her mother signed her up for private swim lessons at the local community center. The swim teachers were mostly college kids, scraping together money for rent and beer. At least that’s what I was doing there that summer. Showing 4-year olds how to blow bubbles out of their noses, resolving conflict over the best orange noodle, playing sharks and minnows.
Elizabeth and I had 5 30-minute sessions. On Monday, Elizabeth wouldn’t even get in the water. She sat cross-legged on the side of the pool in her swimsuit, while I sat on the best orange noodle and tried to draw her out by asking questions about her cat, who she adored. Mrs. something-or-other. Calico. Large. Female. Very long, delicate whiskers.
On Tuesday, Elizabeth stood in the shallow end for about 10 minutes at the end of the lesson. On Wednesday she put her face in the water 3 times. We spent Thursday trying for a backfloat. She would lay back across my forearms, and I would slowly drop them, and she’d panic and tense up, and she’d go under. And by then I knew Elizabeth was not going to learn to swim this week.
On Friday, Elizabeth did indeed not learn to swim. But she and I each experienced…an epiphany.
Epiphany means “to shine upon, to appear to.” An epiphany reorganizes our landscape, it opens up a new horizon. It might be a Eureka moment when our minds grasp a new concept. Or it might be an experience of something that our rational minds can’t quite believe, but which our bodies are willing to trust: there is an embodied, intuitive sense that something is right.
And while epiphanies can never be scripted or called up on demand, I do think we open ourselves up to epiphanies when we put our bodies into different postures, when we put our whole selves in new situations, in new relationships. New ideas become thinkable. The legend has it that Archimedes cried “Eureka” when he realized that objects have a particular buoyancy, equal to their volume times their density. That was an epiphany. And it happened not when he was hunched over his desk, crunching the numbers, but when he was getting into the bathtub. Just getting into the water.
We have just entered into the season of Epiphany. It’s the season when we pay special attention to the moments when God reveals Godself to us, and Oh….huh. If it’s like that, then that means…huh. [chuckle] Well isn’t that the darnedest thing. In the season of Epiphany we tell the stories about times long past when God shined upon us new ways, as the star guided the magi—the three wise men—to the baby Jesus.
They offered their gifts; they bowed low; they returned to their homes in far away, strange lands, shaking their heads, slowly piecing it together: we saw God, we just knew it was God…that little baby in the middle of nowhere. If it’s like that, then that means...God is with us, and not at all far away. God is…wherever birth is happening, wherever a heart is beating. God is even in this heart, my heart. It was an epiphany. They couldn’t believe it. But they could trust it.
In our Gospel lesson we hear that Jesus had an epiphany in the Jordan River. He goes to be baptized by John the Baptist. And we’ll talk more about this next week, but John’s theory of baptism was that the people of Israel, suffering under Roman occupation, needed a ritual of cleansing and repentance, a way to get right with a disapproving God. John’s theory was that God would not help God’s people until they had made themselves worthy of help.
But Jesus does not experience a God who runs on disapproval, who is waiting for us to fulfill the right conditions before God deigns to share our life. The heavens open and declare God’s delight: “this is my child, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” And could it be that God looks upon us, like God looks on Jesus? With pleasure? With the delight of a parent, with the compassion of a parent who feels their child’s pain in their own gut? Could it be that God looks at us and sees God’s beloved?
On Friday, in the community center pool, Elizabeth jumped in the water right away. She showed up motivated: she wanted to float on her back, she was determined to get it right. And she laid back across my forearms, and lifted her hips and her chin like I told her, and I slowly dropped my arms…and every time, all her instincts told her not to trust the water. It’s the most natural thing in the world to try to get your head up out of the water, but that pushes your hips down, and every time—it’s just physics—she’d sink, and go under, and come up sputtering.
And I’ve got one eye on the clock, and I’m trying to deal with my own disappointment and planning my pep talk that will help Elizabeth leave, feeling encouraged to keep trying to float when she gets to the lake. Because I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t believe it’s possible.
And then—this is the part I don’t get, the part I don’t have words for, the part that makes me tear up sometimes when I tell this story. I’m looking at the clock, and I feel something shift in Elizabeth, as she lays there across my arms. I feel her muscles relax; I feel her whole body soften. She takes a leap of faith; she lets the water take her. And the impossible has become possible, the unbelievable is still unbelievable; but something clicks and she can feel that the water was never trying to drag her down. She can trust that the water is trying to cradle her, has been trying to hold her up, the whole time.
Elizabeth had an epiphany. And it remains one of the peak experiences of my life, that I was there to witness it.
It was some kind of epiphany for me, too—even though I’m still sorting out what exactly was revealed. All I know is that I can’t hear the story of Jesus baptized in the Jordan River without thinking of what it must have felt like for Jesus, to feel the light and love of his father sweeping him up—did it feel like floating?
***
If you read this week’s email newsletter, you know that in this season of Epiphany we are going to pay special attention to the question of “belief.” When we talk about “believing in God”—what are we talking about?
What could “believing” mean? We won’t arrive at a singular answer that everyone needs to swallow whole. Instead, we will explore some different possibilities together—some different dispositions. And we’ll practice those different possibilities on Sundays when we say the Creed together. (The Creed, which goes, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty…and in Jesus Christ, God’s Son, …and in the Holy Spirit,” etc.)
As we explored a bit in the wondering, we all have our own relationship to the Creed—to these “belief statements”—including none at all. I first encountered the idea of a creed at 12 or 13, when I was going through confirmation: it felt like I needed to agree to all these statements in order to pass the class, and to be received as a full member of the church I had been going to my entire life. It felt like I needed to say these things and really believe them to be true in order to belong there. And if I couldn’t say them and believe them, then I didn’t belong there anymore; maybe I never had.
In other words, I learned to say the Creed in an emotional context of anxiety: anxiety about the approval of the authority figures around me, anxiety about belonging.
But as we enter into this season of considering “believing” from different angles, we’re invited to start here, by saying the creed in the context of renewing the promises made in our Baptism—or perhaps by trying those promises on for the first time.
And so the invitation is to say these words, not as a response to anxiety about approval or belonging. Because the love of God has no conditions. The presence of God in our lives is not dependent on us being worthy.
The invitation is to say these words, imagining ourselves as Elizabeth, discovering that the water can be trusted—that if we allow ourselves to be held, that the water will hold us up.
The invitation is to say these words as a response to the experience of God’s delight in us, a response to being called “Beloved.” The invitation is to trust that these words will hold us up, that the story these words tells is worth trusting, and will carry us on its current toward justice and joy, if we allow ourselves to be held.
We believe…
