On the day after JFK Jr.’s plane disappeared, I got on a ferry in Wood’s Hole and rode the forty five or so minute trip over to Martha’s Vineyard. The island was mobbed with what I came to know was the normal tourist influx rather than Kennedy watchers. Most folks might head to Edgartown, Oak Bluffs or the greater metropolitan Tisbury / Vineyard Haven area. I was destined for the outskirts of Chillmark, in an area referred to as “West Tis” by the abbreviation-happy New England Preppies whom I would be shepherding over the next two weeks. Another of their catchy abbreviations was “mones” and in the testimonial that each camper was to deliver at one point or another during the fortnight. One of the admonitions was to restrict the use of insider language, “Christian slang,” so that one’s testimonial would be accessible to someone not terribly familiar with the faith. “Washed in the blood of the Lamb,” we decided, was Christian slang. To this and other phrases the boys would call out, “Christian slang! Keep it out of the ‘mones!”
I thought of this phrase and the boys of West Tis as I prepared to help lead some tweens from the Great Temple in a discussion of Jesus’ baptism. The topic brings up a plethora of interesting questions like why do people get baptized and why did Jesus get baptized and did he really need to and so forth and so on. When I think about my getting baptized at the age of 13 or whatever in the Harpeth Valley FPC, it does not seem to mean much. I kind of did it because that is what you did, unless it had already been done to you as a kid. I have no sense of that moment being one in which I was washed in the blood of the Lamb. (Sorry, need to keep that out of the ‘mones.)
I talked with the Sub-dude about this around a year ago, expressing a desire to get some real dunkin’ going on. These moment of enthusiasm for spiritual drama will hit me from time to time, often when the substance of spiritual living seems to be elusive. The Sub-dude kindly suggested that, whatever my baptism was, it was a part of my story. Maybe I could use a ritual re-dedication, maybe not, but those particular waters were ones through which I had already passed. The course of the conversation reminded me that my spiritual experience has mostly been of the variety William James describes as “educational.”
I’d love to say that I have been to the mountain top. I would love to sit with the lamas in golden robes, throat singing and being sought out for my wisdom. My ego is big enough to desire religious rock star status. For that, I need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, have a tremendous story of the moment I was saved, and profess an unassailable confidence in my eternal destination. Oh, that it were so. Instead, I have to continually re-cover the material. Spiritual lessons, like Civil War generals, are not things I learn once and remember forever. Instead I have to read it and hear it and see it and screw it up and try it again and then, maybe, have some understanding of the general idea of the principle, if not the whole thing. This is how the educational variety of spiritual experience seems to work for me.
“Disciple” as in “Jesus’ disciples” comes from the same Latin word as “student.” For all I know, they are the same word. As much as I would love to tell the man in the copy shop or the producer of the direct mail epistle that I have been saved, anointed by the Holy Spirit, and assured of a place in Heaven, it just does not seem to fit. To say that I have would only be a use of Christian slang as a password to a select community. What I can say is that I am a disciple, a student, somewhat willing to learn, and hoping in the grace of the phrase, “Cs get degrees.”