Good News from North Haven

by Michael L. Lindvall

  I went in to kiss our seven-year-old Christopher good night. He was only half asleep, and pulled me down beside him with little arms and big love.

  I crawled into his bed as he fell into child sleep. I could hear his breathing, his mouth open, and feel his heart beating, his chest pulled tight against my side. He might not have been, but he is.

  And lying there all fell into place: the early snow and the lost crops, my flu and the near-disaster in church that morning—all of this is as nothing when set next to the gratuitous gift of life here and now. This is indeed the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

  – 18 –

  Christmas Baptism

  Annie and the kids and I have come at last to be at home in this little town once unknown and unimaginable to us. Even so, that honeymoon between the pastor and the congregation is long since past as witnessed by events that began to unfold the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

  In coffee hour after the worship service, the taciturn, silver-haired pillar of the congregation Angus MacDowell informed me that his son, Larry, and Larry’s wife, Sherry, who live in Spokane, Washington, would be visiting for the Thanksgiving weekend. Sherry, who must be in her mid-forties, it seems, had just presented the MacDowell clan with yet another child, a son named, believe it or not, Angus Larry. However, Angus informed me, they were planning on calling him Skip, which name Skip’s grandfather spat disdainfully out of his mouth. Since they were going to be in town and since Sherry’s folks just live in Mankato and since this was going to be a big reunion, they wanted me to “do the baby,” as Angus put it, next Sunday.

  I got Angus out of coffee hour and into my study for an informal discussion about the integrity of the sacrament of baptism, which is what I assumed he meant by “doing the baby.” I asked Angus about Larry and Sherry’s church affiliation in Spokane, explaining that it was best for a child to be baptized in the church where he would be raised. It seems, though, that they had not yet settled on a church that they liked, though they’d been there nine years. I talked about the importance of the parents’ commitment to the faith and the fact that they are asked to make some rather sweeping and deep promises in the course of it all. Angus soon caught my drift: Larry and Sherry ought to find a church home out in Spokane and have Skip baptized there.

  Angus listened to all this in a rather dignified and formal silence. He offered no response, much less argument. He simply rose without a word, shook my hand, and thanked me for my time. Fool that I was, I thought that the matter was settled. Angus is an elder of the church and one of that dwindling breed of courtly, gentle, but inflexibly stiff patriarchs of the church.

  In my experience, they seem to wear nothing but dark blue serge suits, a sort of uniform identifying them as members of an army in defense of the status quo. I remember encountering a whole flock of these blue-suited elders some twenty-five years ago on the day I was set before the church board to be examined for my confirmation. They were seated around a long, dark mahogany table in the church board room, eight or ten of them, all in their dark blue suits and me, a skinny little thirteen-year-old in a corduroy jacket with sleeves three inches too short. They welcomed me, and then one of them, the one with wire-rimmed glasses, asked me my prearranged question from the catechism: “What is effectual calling?” I had been practicing the answer, which I can still recite, for three months, but something about his look and the way he emphasized the word “effectual” threw me off balance. I almost wet my pants. I believe I then gave the answer for the question “What is predestination?” They confirmed me anyway, not out of mercy, but because I was thirteen and when you were thirteen and from a Presbyterian family, you were confirmed. They were hardly going to permit my fogginess on predestination and effectual calling to alter tradition. Serge-suited elders are a resolute and determined lot.

  True to his type, after Angus left my office, he simply spoke with all the members of the board about a special meeting to approve the baptism of Angus Larry. They had the meeting, asked me to please stop by, and voted 9– 0 in favor of the baptism. So on the morning of the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we “did” little Angus Larry. This congregation has an odd little baptismal custom: the pastor, I was gently informed when we first came here, always asks, “Who stands with this child?” and then the whole extended family of the little one rises and remains standing for the ceremony. So, Angus Larry in my arms, I asked, “Who stands with this child?” and up stood Angus in his blue serge suit and his wife, Minnie, and Sherry’s folks from Mankato and a couple of cousins.

  After church, everybody rushed home to turkey leftovers and I went back into the sanctuary to turn off the lights. A middle-aged woman, dressed Salvation Army style, was sitting in the front pew with a black plastic purse in her lap. I knew her as someone who always sat in the very last pew, as close to a door as possible, but I did not know her name. She seemed at a loss for words and was hesitant about looking at me for very long. She finally said her name was Mildred Cory and commented as to how lovely the baptism was. After another long pause she said that her daughter, Tina, had just had a baby and, well, the baby ought to be baptized, shouldn’t it?

  I suggested that Tina and her husband should call me and we would discuss the appropriateness of baptism. Mildred hesitated again, and then catching and holding my eyes for the first time, said, “Tina’s got no husband; Tina’s just eighteen and she was confirmed in this church four years ago. She used to come out for the Senior High Fellowship, but then she had started to see this older boy out of high school.” She hesitated for a moment, gathered her courage, and let the rest of the story tumble out fearlessly: “Then she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby and she wants to have it baptized here in her own church, but she’s nervous to come and talk to you, Reverend. She’s named the baby James,” she said, “Jimmy.” I said that I would bring the request to the church board for approval.

  When the matter came up at the meeting, there was a moot question or two about why in the world Tina Cory was keeping the baby. I had started to explain what everybody already knew, namely, that Tina was a member of the church, an unwed mother, and that I didn’t know who the father was. They all knew who the father was, of course. This is a small town. The father was young Jimmy Hawthorne, who had recently chosen a career in his nation’s armed forces and was now completing basic training at Fort Bragg. A few questions were asked as to whether we could be certain that Tina would stick to the commitment she was making in having her child baptized. The Angus Larry affair had set me in a feisty mood and I remarked that she and little Jimmy were, after all, right here in town where we could give them support. I did not have to say, “and not in Spokane”; they all thought it.

  The real problem was the picture of the baptism that we all had in our heads: Tina, pimples on her chin, little Jimmy in her arms, big Jimmy long fled to North Carolina, and Mildred Cory the only one who would stand when the question was asked. It hurt to think of it, but they approved it, of course. The baptism was scheduled for the last Sunday in Advent.

  The church was full, as it always is the Sunday before Christmas. The rumored snow had not yet come, though the sky was heavy with it. After the sermon, the elder who was to assist me in the baptism stood up beside me at the baptismal font and read the words I had written out on a three-by-five card: “Tina Cory presents her son for baptism.” He kept looking at the card and not at Tina, who was rising to come forward, as if there was some further point he wished to make.

  Down the aisle she came, nervously, briskly, smiling at me only, shaking slightly with month-old Jimmy in her arms, a blue pacifier stuck in his mouth. The scene hurt, all right, every bit as much as we all knew it would. So young this mother was, and so alone. One could not help but remember another baby boy born long ago to a young and unwed mother in difficult circumstances.

  I read the opening part of the service, noting Mildred Cory sitting strangely out of place in a front pew. Then I asked, “Who stands with this
child?” I nodded at Mildred slightly to coax her to her feet. She rose slowly, looking to either side, and then returned my smile.

  My eyes went back to my service book. I was just about to ask Tina the parents’ questions of commitment when I became aware of movement in the pews. Angus MacDowell had stood up in his blue serge suit, Minnie beside him. Then a couple of other elders stood up, then the sixth-grade Sunday school teacher stood up, then a new young couple in church, and soon, before my incredulous eyes, the whole church was standing up with little Jimmy. Tina was crying, of course, and Mildred Cory was holding on to the pew in front of her as though she was standing on the deck of a ship rolling in a great wind, which, in a way, she was.

  The unexpectedness of this departure from the routine at first disquieted but then quieted us all, even little Jimmy, who had been wiggling and squeaking as though he might be preparing to screech. As the water touched his forehead, he seemed almost to focus his infant senses. The water rolled back into the thin wisps of baby hair, down the bridge of his nose, and onto his cheek. His eyes looked to the side as though he were concentrating on something. Every eye was on the child, who was for a moment everybody’s baby. I broke my gaze and looked up to the congregation to let them know I was about to offer the baptismal prayer. I noticed Angus straining to see Jimmy from three pews back. The old man was looking into the infant face with an open-mouthed smile that surely remembered his own baby, now a grown man with a baby of his own.

  The Scripture reading that morning had been some verses from 1 John: “See what great love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God.… No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us … there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” In that baptism, those old words came alive. They were clothed in flesh and everybody saw it.

  About the Author

  Michael Lindvall was born in 1947 in Minnesota into a tradition of what he likes to call “straightbacked Scandinavian piety.” His family moved from town to town over the entire state and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, settling in such places as Pierz, Red Lake Falls, Willmar, White Bear Lake, and Manistique—all of which he calls “wonderfully sane little communities that love to tell and retell good stories.” He then went on to study at the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan and decided along the way to become a minister. After finishing at Princeton Theological Seminary, he worked as an associate pastor of a church in Detroit and then as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Northport, Long Island. His congregations have heard many of these stories before as Michael Lindvall’s sermons at a Sunday service. Reverend Lindvall currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church.

  About the Publisher

  “The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life.”

  —Proverbs 13:14a

  At Crossroad Carlisle Books we will explore and celebrate the broad range of expressions of faith within the Christian tradition. Our books will cover a wide spectrum of topics including spiritual memoir, contemplative life, peace and justice issues, classic spiritual disciplines, biography and autobiography, spirituality for living, and fiction. We aim to produce wise, literate, and accessible books for thoughtful seekers. We are committed to honoring the writer’s role by nurturing the felicitous use of language and the creative expression of thought and feeling.