Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Final Step

  You go your entire life without thinking about something—and then suddenly you can’t get away from it. Without any prompting from you, it crops up in every conversation, every television commercial, every magazine article you’re flipping through while you’re waiting for your manicure to dry.

  That’s how it was for me, with baptism.

  Before I joined our church, I’d never thought about baptism. When I joined Water of Life, I didn’t even know what it was. I thought it was something that could only happen when you were a baby. There wasn’t a lot of talk about it at church, either; our church doesn’t push baptism at all. It’s something they feel you should come to of your own volition, and I profoundly agree with this, because of the way I saw it happen for me. Baptism wasn’t a natural next step, but something I had to work for—something I had to research, and learn about, and come to desire with all my heart.

  I believe that you hear about the things you need to hear about right when you need to hear about them—and there’s no question in my mind that God was putting the idea of baptism in my path. Because, about a year after the retreat in the mountains, I found the topic coming up constantly.

  I’d been going to church for a year or so, and I’d learned more about baptism than I ever knew growing up. The first occasion I had to wrestle with the concept of baptism came one morning during my Bible reading. I ran across this passage:

  So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. (Galatians 3:26–27, NIV)

  Clothed with Christ. That metaphor made instant sense to me. In fact, I ran my highlighter over the passage so many times I thought I’d wear straight through the page. I called my mom to read it to her because I knew she’d understand: This quote was just the way I felt since I’d taken Christ into my heart.

  But as my mom’s line was ringing, I reread the quote and realized that, in my enthusiasm, I’d skipped something important my first read through—I hadn’t been baptized. As close to Him as I felt, there was still a crucial step missing, a step pointed to in the passage itself: I couldn’t be clothed with Christ because I hadn’t been baptized into Him. I slowly put down the phone, before my mom had even picked up.

  That morning was the beginning of a journey for me. I started to investigate baptism, what it meant and why people of faith did it. And the more I learned, the more I started to feel the importance of this missing step.

  One of the things that appealed to me about baptism was the public nature of the commitment. Maybe it was because I’m such a private person, but I knew how important it can be to make a public declaration of your intention. Standing up and admitting that I was an addict had been a powerful step in my recovery. Telling my group in rehab about the rape had been an essential step in beginning to shed my own shame around what had happened to me and had played a huge part in my being able to move on. It had been deeply meaningful to me to stand up and proclaim my faith at that retreat in the mountains. This wasn’t just a revelation I was having in the privacy of my own living room; it meant something to say it out loud, to people I knew and to strangers.

  The same thing applied to baptism. Jesus had been baptized in the river Jordan, in front of everyone. I felt ready to go public, too. I wanted to proclaim my faith; I wanted to join the larger family of God. And the more I came to value my church community at Water of Life, the more I wanted to profess my faith there, so that I could be formally accepted into the fold.

  Mostly, though, I wanted to celebrate and make official the internal change in me. As I became more and more excited about the changes my faith was making possible in my life, the more I wanted to celebrate it. I wanted to “put on” Christ, to be united with Him through baptism. I’d been dipping my toe—wasn’t it time to take the plunge?

  After about a year of asking questions and reading everything I could get my hands on, I came to a realization: I wanted to be baptized. But there was a tether holding me back, and it was a strong one: my relationship with my father.

  My newfound faith hadn’t been easy for my dad to accept. Although he doesn’t actively practice his Judaism, he does feel strongly, ethnically Jewish. His own grandfather was a survivor of the concentration camps, as the number tattooed on his wrist reminded him every day.

  Nor is my father’s faith totally dormant. He doesn’t read the Bible or go to temple or celebrate Jewish holidays. But, unbeknownst to me, he had turned to a rabbi for comfort, support, and counseling during the worst parts of the two trials. Their conversations had given him some relief when he’d felt deeply vulnerable and isolated.

  So it had nearly broken his heart to see me walk away from his family’s culture. He felt his Judaism was going to end with him, and that was deeply painful for him. My growing faith also caused a lot of tension between him and my mother, because she’d been such an integral part of me discovering who I was as a Christian.

  My dad never came right out and told me how miserable it made him to see me going to church. Obviously, he felt very conflicted. You’d have to be blind not to see how good it had been for me to find faith. I was clean, strong, and healthy. I was living on my own, holding down a good job, and back at school. All of these things would have seemed completely out of the realm of possibility a few years before. Maybe most importantly, I laughed easily again.

  So my father could see exactly how much stronger and happier my faith had made me, but he couldn’t give the credit where it was due. He’d say, “Alisa, I’m so proud that you’ve been able to turn your life around. But that was you! You did that—because you’re a fighter, because you’re strong, because you refused to give up.”

  All I could do was shake my head. Couldn’t he see that it had also been “just me” using meth in a house where kids were living? Or relapsing and lying about it to everyone, even myself? I’d love to take all the credit for my miraculous recovery. But I knew all too well that, alone, I hadn’t been able to turn my life around—not until I’d asked for the right kind of help.

  The tension building in our family over the issue of my faith generally simmered under the surface, but I knew that if I told my dad I wanted to be baptized, it would blow the issue wide open.

  And I wasn’t at all sure that I could handle that. Most of us want to make our parents happy, especially if we had a happy childhood. Because of my circumstances, though, I felt more strongly motivated than most. My dad has been there for me, every step of the way. He was there, riding his bike next to me while I was training for my cross-​country races, feeding me jokes and the inspiration I needed to keep going. He gave me nothing but strength and support during the aftermath of my rape and during the trials, and I can never repay him for the constancy of his love when I was struggling with my meth addiction. I still felt very guilty about how much stress I had brought into my parents’ lives and marriage between the trials and my drug use.

  Now that I was healthy and back on track, I wanted more than anything to be a source of pride and love and fun for my parents, the way it always should have been. And in the years that followed my getting off drugs, that dream had seemed possible. Being able to share my spiritual life with my mother had proven to be more richly rewarding than I could have imagined. Every time we went to church together or held hands in prayer, I felt like I was applying a healing salve to a relationship that had been damaged almost beyond repair.

  But now that same agent of healing seemed to be driving a painful wedge between me and my father. I just couldn’t believe that the wedge was God and church—without question, the most positive things in my life! And yet, as my faith deepened and my commitment grew, I couldn’t avoid the truth: My belief was becoming a wedge.

  I’d always loved the long philosophical discussions I’d had with my dad. We’d ramble over every topic under the sun, from music to movies to politics, laughing and quarreling. But as my
thinking became more influenced by what I was reading in the Bible and what I was hearing during the sermon on Sunday mornings, I was finding that our conversations didn’t flow as easily anymore. As soon as I mentioned anything to do with Christianity, my dad would shut down. If he came over to my condo to fix a leaky tap or to drop some clothes off from my mom, I could see how hard he had to work to ignore the angels in my bedroom and the Bible quotes on my walls. It was as if he took them personally, a targeted insult directed at him and at his heritage.

  Mostly, we didn’t talk about it all that much. But we did butt heads, particularly around the idea of forgiveness.

  My dad and I argue all the time—that’s what happens when two bullheaded, stubborn lunatics end up in the same family. We’ll quarrel about the best route to avoid traffic, the right place to park, what we should pick up for dinner, the best James Bond. But we can usually appreciate the other person’s position—even when we’re both completely convinced that the other person is totally, completely, unbelievably wrong.

  That had been true my whole life, and it was still true—except when we were talking about forgiveness. On this one topic, we were missing each other completely, fundamentally unable to relate to one another, as if we were speaking different languages.

  Our conversations always went the same way.

  “How can you even begin to think about forgiving those animals?” my dad would ask me, incredulous. And no matter how many times I explained to him what living in a constant state of unresolved anger had been doing to me and how much more free I’d felt since I’d started to work toward something different, he couldn’t move off the X. I could see that he wasn’t just being a pain about it—he genuinely didn’t understand. He’d look at me as if I’d been brainwashed.

  He wasn’t the only one who was freaked out by the other person’s position. The level of anger and hate my dad still held in his heart began to make me deeply uncomfortable. I could see what that kind of rage looked like in a way that I hadn’t understood before, and how toxic an effect it had on the person holding it. Lewis B. Smedes, who wrote a great book about forgiveness called Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, says, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” It seemed to me my dad was serving life without parole.

  “Why stop with the guys?” I asked him once, when we were debating the issue. I was trying to push him, so he could see how absurd his attitude was. “Why not go ahead and hate all the lawyers, and the private investigators, and the friends who deserted me, and all the people who lined up outside the courtroom so they could call me a slut, and everyone who said I deserved what happened to me in the comments section of every random newspaper article about the trials?”

  He stared at me as if I were an alien.

  “But I do,” he said simply.

  That really frightened me. I’d been exaggerating so he could see how crazy it was to hold that level of hatred in his heart. Clearly, I’d misunderstood the parameters of his rage.

  It made me feel so sad for him. Where would that fury end? And how could there be any room for anything more positive and healing in his heart when it was filled to the brim with poison? Forgiveness might not be a done deal for me, but working toward it had opened my life right up. I could laugh easily again. I was taking responsibility for my own life. Now that I’d seen how the world could be when I greeted it with more compassion and less anger, I wanted a sweeter, happier worldview for my dad, too.

  In fairness, I didn’t ever feel that my faith was threatened by my father’s refusal to get on board with it. But the growing rift between us wounded me deeply.

  My relationship with him meant everything to me. The idea that I could disappoint him in such a huge way made me feel physically sick—especially because the defining factor of our relationship as I saw it was that he’d never, ever let me down. At the same time, I knew that I had found my own truth, a truth that supported my sobriety and was key to living the life I wanted to live. And I wished, for his sake, that he could find some of the peace and comfort that I’d found from my faith.

  I’d hit an impasse. With all my heart, I wanted to pursue baptism, and yet I knew that to do so would break my father’s heart.

  The tension became unbearable. The more committed I felt to God and the church, the more my sense of urgency around the issue of my baptism grew. As far as I understand it, baptism is the final step in opening your life to Him, the signal that your acceptance of Him is complete. The more I learned and read, the more sure I became that it was something I desperately wanted to do.

  This was especially true because of what had happened to me. Baptism has a special resonance for trauma survivors. In Romans it says,

  Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. (Romans 6:3–4, NIV)

  Those words were so powerful to me. I thought of myself as someone celebrating a brand-new life. I had been forgiven, and so much had changed. As part of my new life, I wanted to bury the old one, to be able to say without qualification that I had turned away from sin and the poor decisions born out of my trauma and from living away from God. I wanted to live a Christian life, a life I didn’t have to be ashamed of. I wanted to be washed of my sins, as Peter wrote I would be, and to start my new life walking with Him.

  I sat with the baptism decision for almost two years. I talked to other Christians whose families did not fully understand their devotion. That helped me. And I prayed on it, a lot.

  Over that time, I found myself thinking about all the occasions on which the darker path had beckoned me. For instance, some months after the retreat in the mountains, when I was cleaning out some drawers in my childhood bedroom so my parents could use the room, I came upon a baggie of meth that I’d hidden there when I was still using. I held that bag in my hands, and the compulsion to do it was stronger than almost any feeling I had ever had. It would have been so easy to lay out a line and fall again into that blessed oblivion. But then I heard someone start to scream. It was a terrible, high-pitched scream, as if someone were being murdered, but I had no idea where it was coming from. My parents rushed into the room. They grabbed me and held me, but all I could do was hold the bag of meth out in front of me, pushing it into my dad’s hands. “Hush, hush,” my mom said, holding me tight. It was then that I realized that the screaming was coming from me. Thinking about that story later, I knew that God and Satan had both been in that room. It had been my faith that had saved me.

  A couple of months after that, a friend from my drug days called me. I hadn’t heard from him for years, but I could tell as soon as I heard his voice that he was high. Apparently, he was also a fugitive: He’d been arrested and hadn’t checked in for his court date. This was someone who had been important to me when I was using. We’d been very close, and when he begged me to let him crash at my condo, I strongly felt the urge to help. What could it hurt? I wasn’t going to use. Maybe I could help him to get clean. Then I heard the truth, as if someone—God again—had spoken it aloud. My friend wasn’t anywhere close to being ready to get clean, and my sobriety, as secure as it may have been, would not have benefited from the drama of having an active drug user living in my home. “I love you,” I said, “and I want to help. But I can’t have drugs around me, and I can’t harbor a fugitive in my home. When you’re ready to get clean, give me a call.” It was the right thing to do and a reminder that if I listen to Him, He’ll always point the way.

  The more I read and learned, the more baptism started to feel less like a choice and more like an imperative. Jesus gave us the sacraments to remind us of his death and resurrection, and they aren’t presented as suggestions, but as commands. Baptism is a surrender, a sign of our obedience to God. I put this quote from Proverbs on my wall:


  Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5–7, NIV)

  Over and over, I had seen the wisdom of those words proven to me. Leaning on my own understanding had led me astray, time and time again. Whenever I felt hopeless about how much less I knew than people who had been raised in the church, all I had to do was read that quote, and I could breathe again. The passage was clear: All I needed to do was submit.

  But what if submitting meant devastating one of the people closest to me?

  It took lots of prayer, but ultimately I knew what I had to do. I came to realize that I couldn’t play both sides of the field anymore. I wanted to commit myself fully to God.

  To do that, I would have to take a stand.

  It helped me to know, through prayer, that my motives were true. My decision to get baptized wasn’t a childish rebellion against my dad, a way to thumb my nose at his values, but an affirmation of everything that had been positively and powerfully transformative in my life. I would ask for his blessing. If he gave it to me, it would be the happiest day of my life. If not, though, I would go ahead anyway. It wasn’t a personal attack against him. I needed to do this for me.

  I asked my dad to meet me for lunch, as I often did. We went to an Italian restaurant near my work. I was so nervous, I could hardly concentrate on the menu. Finally, I blurted it out.

  “Daddy, I’ve got news to tell you. I’m going to get baptized.”

  There was an alarmingly long pause, and then he said, “Obviously, I don’t agree with the decision. But it’s your choice, and you’ve chosen.”