Shore of Sky

“In case of necessity, any person can baptize provided that he have the intention of doing that which the Church does and provided that he pours water on the candidate’s head while saying: ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’”

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 1284

1.

The Sunday after Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel called me to say that, by law, they could not keep her ashes any longer, I marched into parish office of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and demanded of the receptionist, “How does one become Catholic?” I was directed to a Filipino woman, a parishioner-catechist, who smirked at me with detached affection, just like my mother used to. She told me her name was Grace, to which I replied, “well, that’s a good sign.”

When she asked me about my age and religious and ethnic backgrounds, I answered truthfully, “My mother was Japanese, so she was Buddhist, and my father (who is white), was raised Episcopalian but is now an angry atheist. And I—I’m twenty-six, and I am nothing.”

“Your mother ‘was?’”

“She died. Last month. Cancer.”

Every Sunday after that, for six months, I took the 6 Train from the East Village to the Cathedral to prepare to be baptized. At 1:00, the father summoned “The Catechumens,” and we climbed up from the front pew onto the dais to tremble beside the choir while he blessed then dismissed us down the stairs behind the main altar into the belly of the sacristy. There, Grace and her fellow catechists tried to save me, but free curiosity held my heart back from positive acceptance of their everything. As the liturgical year unfolded, I passed over the mystery of myself without a thought. My conversion progressed like worms creeping beneath the shadow of birds' wings. 

Until, one suffocating July afternoon, in between readings on how pride changed angels into devils, I received an invitation to a weekend in the Gunks from a bunch of yogis.

2.

Friday came, and I climbed into the yogi's van. They were all my age. Except for me, they were all blonde and had all taken Sanskrit “yogi” names. We drove away into the Catskills towards Sky Lake, which hangs two hours north of Manhattan, like we were falling out in this world. “If we get enlightened enough this weekend, the mountain might show us an oread,” said the head yogi, a Californian. This inspired the others to talk of transcendence. They passed around granola and green juice, chattering eagerly about the “oneness” of all world religions. One, from Greenwich, said: “Religion is wrong because it creates separation. How many wars have been fought in the name of religion?” To which another, who’d studied creative writing at Kenyon, replied, “Totally. Moses and Uddalaka and Mohammed and Christ and Buddha are all saying the same thing: we are destroying the planet because we are sick with ego, not sin;” then, another, a young analyst at Goldman Sachs: “Yes! Wisdom, is the only remedy for avidyā. That’s why we reincarnate and reincarnate until we get it right.” For miles, the vegans sniggered at the ignorance of meat-eaters whom they perceived to be “believers,” that is, their parents.

Somewhere near Nyack, in a small voice, I found myself in the unlikely position of Defendress of the Faith, “But,” I ventured, “what about Grace?”

The yogis twisted their flexible necks, glared at me with their blue eyes, and charged, “You don’t believe Jesus is the only one who saves souls, do you?”

“Well, I am in the process of converting to Catholicism...”

“What are you converting from?” one blonde yogini demanded, rattling her mala at me.

“Nothing, well, Buddhism, sort of, I guess.”

The yogini, who’d been brought up Born Again, looked incredulous. “Why?”

“You were just saying how all religions are the same, so what difference does it make?”

“Because if you’re wrong and you devote your life to being wrong then you’ll have to come back and do it all over again. That’s suffering. That’s ignorance.”  

“I didn’t say I don’t believe in reincarnation. My mom’s family is Japanese, so I get it. I just said that I also believe in Christ.”

“You can’t be two contradictory religions just because you’re from two different cultures.”

“All I know I know from my own experience, which is contradictory.”

“So what is it, then, that you think you know?”

“I know that death is real, which prompts many questions that no religion can satisfactorily answer. I know that Muslims believe in an essential, eternal abiding self, The Soul, while Buddhists do not. I know that Christians also believe that, in order to save it, this soul must receive certain sacraments while embodied, while Hindus say that any soul must receive multiple bodies in order to attain liberation. So, it seems to me that ‘rebirth’ in the sense of reincarnation no more negates the spiritual reality of baptism any more than baptism negates the spiritual reality of reincarnation.”

The yogini turned around, feigning exasperation, then pulled her heels into full-lotus and stared out the window practicing japa. As the van turned left onto Keator, crossed the bridge, and levitated down Mountain Road, I found myself exiled and reviled, wondering, as I did most Sunday afternoons, if anything I ever said would ever make any sense to anybody at all.

3.

The next morning, peace dewed upon the surface of Sky Lake, a spring-fed pond which pervaded a tranquility of order. Inside the cabin of loosely felled logs glowing brightly among tall cedars and white pines on the northern crest of the Shawangunk Mountains, we stood on our heads and exhaled sharply from our diaphragms. Then, we straightened spines, folded legs, and set intelligence's watch on breath's course. Following the sun, we chased our thoughts towards suffering's zenith, hastening towards a point where neither we, nor the Gunks, nor the summer existed anymore. Being so turned inwards, I felt refreshed and resolved to admire the jagged mountain peaks, wade in wide river tides, and meditate upon circuitous stars; but night fell without us doing any of those things. We lit a bonfire and fed it with pieces of paper inscribed with ideas we no longer needed. The furnace chaffed and smoked. Into the pit went my part: “What do I love when I love my God?”

While I watched the eternal goal melting into flame, suddenly, the years felt but sighs. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I looked forward to what lay ahead of me. Eventually, all our thoughts, even thoughts of our beloved dead, turned to ashes. The blonde yogini noticed my tears, forgave me my ignorance, and bade me a silent goodnight.

The next morning was Sunday. We awoke and saluted it on the shore of Sky Lake, then headed into an emerald wood, following a ribbon of river to a naked nape of cliff. From the highest peak, the yogis pointed down at the water's falling, which they described as “curiosity's free-range flux channeled by Nature's discipline.” They exalted, cajoling from on high, "Let us love! Let us jump!” Then, one by one, jump they did, falling like syllables in a sentence.

Soon, I stood alone on the edge. The waterfall flashed and shone. Weary with worry of offending oreads or sacred fires, I hesitated, my faint heart fearing more loss. But then, I glanced down: where the water met the sun on its rushing up-and-over was a rainbow. Since I still believed in signs the way I believed in nymphs and pearls, I thought I recognized reassurance in those mysterious, luminous waters. I drew breath in and panted it out. Then, I leapt. For as long as it takes an atom to split, I was inside. Then, the Law of Gravity, which the philosopher-mystic Simone Weil says controls all the natural movements of the soul, kicked in: and I fell. It is "moral gravity," she says, that makes mankind “fall towards the heights." Grace is “the law of the descending movement.”[1] Even St. Augustine agrees: Pondus meum amor meus (my weight is my love).[2]

All at once, I crashed heavily back into my body; every fissured cell fused, then submerged. To exist beneath that rainbow was to let Gravity take me down, all the way down past Tantalus, thirsty with water up to his neck. Down and down obliterating the world of magic and of myth until my feet brushed the slippery rocks of Tartarus’ very bottom. At this base, it made no material difference what ills were suffered, only what kind of mind suffered them. I kicked towards the surface, desperate to get away from that cursed House of Atreus, hauled myself onto a rock in the middle of the river, and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When I awoke, a naiad was sunning herself on the rock beside me.

“Congratulations mermaid,” she said with a smile, “the Om of the River has baptized you.”

4.

Simone Weil, a French Jew, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time,” openly loved Christ and the Catholic faith, but repeatedly declined the Sacraments of Initiation. She writes, “When I imagine baptism as the next concrete act toward my entry into the Church, no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers.”[3] For those for whom the lived experience of charity, compassion, and kindness unfolds as a kind of endless horizon, a sea with no shore, initiation in any tradition often only initiates little more than a kind of irresolution of the soteriological “necessity” of that faith: or, the Doctrine of Doubt.

I took my questions to St. Patrick’s basement. My Catechists were waiting with homemade cupcakes and answers: "Baptism imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual sign, the character, which consecrates the baptized person only for Christian worship.”[4]

As I had with the blonde yogini, I felt compelled to refute: “But the Catechism describes Jesus’ baptism by John as a ‘manifestation of his self-emptying’[5] which reminds me of Śūnyatā, ‘Emptiness,’ in Buddhism. And when St. Justin writes, ‘This bath is called enlightenment, because those who receive this instruction are enlightened in their understanding,’[6] it’s kind of like when Buddha says, ‘Just like a deep lake, clear and undisturbed, the wise grow peaceful on hearing Dharma teachings.’[7] Don’t you think that there is a glaring contrast in the way Catholics think literally about the rebirth of Christ’s crucified body but only symbolically about the ‘rebirth’ of the Catechumen’s soul in Christ’s ‘mystical body?’ For instance, if we take up the metaphysics of ‘rebirth in Christ’ in the Hindu context, where literal ‘rebirth’ is possible, it’s highly probable that most souls embodied on earth today have, at some point in the last two thousand years, submerged at least one of the heads on one of their bodies in a bit of holy water. Which means that, if the baptismal ‘character’ is in ‘reality’ spiritually ‘indelible,’ a soul baptized in the infant body of a Renaissance courtier, then again at Spanish sword point in the body of an Incan teenager, and then again in the body of a twenty-six-year-old converting from Buddhism in 21st century New York City is receiving the Sacrament redundantly.”

The Catechists shuddered. Grace insisted I have another cupcake and suggested that I stop reading Origen. All together, they reiterated how the Catechism was clear: “The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude.”

5.

Good Friday finally came. I sat in the middle-back of the Cathedral during Tenebrae and watched the men in white robes put out the seven lights on the altar. Then, I returned home and pressed my own white robes and hung them up from the mirror of my dead mother's vanity. I laid out her pearls and went to bed without a prayer.

I dreamed that I was alone in a cave. The stone rolled away, revealing an orange dawn. When I looked closer, I saw that it was no sunrise, but a semicircle of saffron-robed Buddhist monks. Instead of Om, they chanted Hallelujah. The other souls trapped in the darkness with me got up, glided out into the daybreak, boarded a golden boat, and sailed away into the sunshine hymning. But I stayed. An ageless Japanese monk, black-robed, appeared beside me in half-lotus on the cave floor. The stone door started to roll back. Fear returned, and I wanted to stand and go with the others, but the monk stayed me with a glance. So, I stayed, and the stone rolled back. Once more, I was in darkness. Except, I was no longer alone.

6.

During the Easter Vigil Mass, the dim vault smelled of burning palms. I sat in a pew at the middle-back wearing a dress black as the stone wall behind the waterfall, wet with water, moss, and shadow. I left the white robes of salvation hanging on my dead mother's mirror. I wore her pearls, though. One by one, I watched my fellow catechumens bow before the local news cameras to the Cardinal for deliverance. At one point, I wanted to stand and go, but the memory of that dream-monk stayed me, like some weight unseen but not unfelt. And that’s when I understood: amor meus pondus meum. Ever since that day by the River Jordan when the Spiritus Sanctus came down, Baptism’s form has been empty. Perhaps Emptiness, then, could also be understood as the Holy Spirit’s “form.” What Weil and countless mystics before her have understood that orthodoxy cannot is that, to fall by “Grace into Gravity” is to take weight, which is birth; to stay, which is life; and to love, which is death. Take a human birth, and you are baptized. Put someone else’s needs before your own and you are baptized. Love one another and you are baptized. Go to the cathedral and get baptized and you are baptized. The desire for spiritual awakening is spiritual awakening, and the realization thereof is the sacrament we call “Baptism.” Water sprinkled on the skull is secondary and ceremoniously redundant if it is like John’s external baptism of water without Jesus’ internal baptism of fire. For all the canonical complexity, it is the Catholic Church’s Catechism that actually states it plainest: “Baptism is the sacrament of faith,” [8] that is, holy doubt.

The Om of the River had baptized me with the weight of my own doubt. The Sacrament was no longer necessary.

7.

Summer returned. Mother was still dead, but I was no longer a catechumen in the Catholic Church; nor did I claim to believe in Origen and oreads anymore.

One suffocating July afternoon, I flew to Asheville, North Carolina, for a Sesshin, a Zen Buddhist meditation retreat. The venue was an old lakeside summer camp run by Episcopalians for Episcopalians. No yogis or millennials attended. Only the middle-aged seeking a middle way, somewhat fearful of their broken psyches and the second coming of cancer.

In the evening, we lit no bonfires. Neither palm leaves, nor forgotten prayers—for once, nothing burned. Every day, after lunch, I would break from the group, walk the jetty planked out upon the mossy lake, and wonder what it might be like to hijack one of the canoes and make for the middle. At night, I slept alone in a log cabin on a bottom bunk beside a green painted door whose hinges swung loudly. The screens on the windows kept out the wings, but not the hymns of the crickets and frogs who crawled around nearby. My meditation, meanwhile, was getting nowhere. Each morning at dawn, when the teacher made us stand on the lake’s shore, point our faces East, and not move a muscle until our noses tickled with sunrise, I caught my watcher watching out once more for signs. 

On the last day, we took a break from meditating in the ecumenical cavern to hike to a waterfall nearby. When I reached the top, I thought of that afternoon in the Gunks. The trauma of the previous summer's grace seemed to cling about the current summer’s waters like residual sin at the bottom of the baptismal font.

For a moment, I stood on the edge and fretted that the Paulists were right, and everyone else was wrong: Original Sin is upon us! Creation is a straight line to a pearly gate manned by fishermen from Galilee checking diocesan documents like customs agents at JFK! There is no redemption in this life! I chastised myself for not sticking to the old diet of locusts and honey, but I did not jump again. Instead, I climbed down from the waterfall’s sanctum sanctorum and waded out into the foaming pool below. My calves seized the cold of snows sighing away their season while unpolished pebbles pumiced the bottom of my feet. Soon, I could stand no more. I hauled myself onto a rock in the middle of the river and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When I awoke, a naiad was sunning herself on the rock beside me. “And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” she said to me with smile.[9]

-K.E. Knox

K.E. Knox writes fiction and creative non-fiction. She lives with her Pomeranian in New York City.

Sources:

[1] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace. (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p.4.

[2] Aug. Conf. 13.9.10.

[3] Simone Weil. Waiting for God. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 1257.

[5] Ibid, 1224.

[6] St. Justin, Apol. 1.61.12.

[7] Valerie J. Roebuck. The Dhammapada. (London: Penguin, 2010) p. 18.

[8] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 1253.

[9] Matt. 28:18-20