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“Remember your baptism, and be thankful.”
meditations on the many images and experiences of baptism
I remember my baptism.
I was nine or ten years old and the minister was a fellow by the name of Frankie Hodges at Marie Baptist Church in Dublin, Georgia. This was a Southern Baptist church so we had a baptismal pool behind the pulpit. There were these two swinging doors that looked a lot like shutters on a house. These shutters would swing out whenever the minister and the person to be baptized were in their places, like a drama that was being acted and re-enacted.
The water was cold, really cold. But in I waded … with Rev. Hodges … to be dunked like all good Baptists would be.
Whenever I was baptized, it really did feel like a show that was being put on for an audience. Those shutters I mentioned were like curtains to be pulled back so that the spectators could see the event. The only people that really had anything to do were myself and Rev. Hodges.
It almost made you nervous. I mean I had seen people snort and cough as they came up out of the water and you hear stories about skinny little…
