It all started with my mother.

In a long distance telephone call last spring, I just happened to mention that I’d never been baptized. To my surprise, my mother was aghast. “That ruins any chance of your ever getting into heaven,” she told me.

I responded that I hadn’t been worried about that because I believed my getting into heaven depended much more on what kind of person I’d been than on whether I’d ever been baptized. I would be judged on whether I’d tried to help alleviate pain and make the world a better place - or whether I’d just lived for myself, not caring about others.

Mom said she agreed that living right is extremely important and she wasn’t absolutely sure that getting baptized was necessary. But doing it, she thought, is like taking out an insurance policy: You do it “just in case.”

Mom went on to explain that the main thing was that in getting baptized, I would accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and my personal savior. I voiced my concern that, while I definitely considered myself a Christian, in accepting Christ in this formal way, I would be trashing all other deities and belief systems since I don’t view Christianity as the only valid way of looking at “God” and all that He/She/It/They created. But Mom assured me that making this commitment wouldn’t mean I was disparaging other beliefs.

Well, my mother was undergoing chemotherapy and, in a few months, would be turning 80. I love my mom and the last thing I wanted was to cause her worry. Getting baptized seemed like such a small thing to do to help ensure her peace of mind. And after all, if one wants to get into heaven, isn’t kindness to one’s mother right up there as a value to strive for? Besides, I didn’t have any real objection to getting baptized. It was just that it hadn’t been done for me when I was young, and I never saw any point in doing it myself later on.

A Non-Religious Background

You see, even though I grew up more or less in the Bible Belt (Kansas City, Missouri), my father was a lapsed Roman Catholic and my mother was ashamed of her family’s Pentecostal roots in the Assembly of God - or, as my father mockingly called them, the “Holy Rollers.” The atmosphere in our home was decidedly non- if not outright anti-religious.

Even so, as a child I braved my father’s derision and briefly sampled various churches, like the Baptists, Methodists and even the Roman Catholic Church. Looking back on it, I think it must have seemed pretty odd for this little girl to just show up on Sunday, sans parents, stating that she was there to attend the worship service. People were always very nice to me though, and usually sent me off to Sunday School. One church even gave me a Bible. It was white leather with a zipper. I took good care of it, even polishing it with my white shoe polish.

However, none of it stuck. Even though I had no idea what I was looking for, I didn’t feel I was finding it in church. Soon I stopped trying. After leaving home at the age of 17 and moving to New York City, organized religion played an even smaller part in my life. To make a long story short, in the late 1960s I spent a few lost, painful and very confused years “self medicating” with drugs and mired in the many negative things that can go with that lifestyle. Fortunately, before it was too late, I was able to leave behind what I knew was a slow suicide and get my life onto a better track, going in the direction of social activism and progressive thought. That stuck.

In terms of religion and spirituality, however, I was again predominantly associated with people who had very little use for religion and saw it as beside the point when it came to the “more important” secular work at hand.

Nonetheless, in the privacy of my own heart, I believed God had spared my life because there was something He intended me to do on this earth. I saw myself as committed to a spiritually driven life just as surely as if I had taken vows. But in my circumstances, I was embarrassed to even admit to these feelings, and it never even crossed my mind to join a church, let alone get baptized.

Continue to Part II: “A Change Begins”