Oliver Boch is The Lantern’s Arts & Life video producer. His writings reflect on an experience fraught with uncertainty, employing simple lines of narration, which are often direct and clean.
Below, you can read “Devoted,” a short piece on belief and love.
Devoted
I was only truly religious the year I turned 14. I went to church on and off my whole life until then, but I was there because I was supposed to be. I think my mother was lonely and my father was looking for easy redemption. We were bargain brand Christians. Both churches I went to didn’t subscribe to any particular sect; they were more the “love thy neighbor, preach God’s name” generic Christian.
During that summer, I travelled with the youth group to Kentucky. I think they went because there was some Christian organization there. I think maybe they sent missionaries around the world, but all we did was help fix up their property. I didn’t really care, but it seemed overtly Christian to me.
I spent three days in Kentucky washing gazebos, trimming brush from the property, and sleeping sardined in a giant metal barn. When it stormed, the rain on the roof drowned out everything else, and if you closed your eyes you forgot where you were. I woke up in the middle of the night and stood underneath the black, looking over every inch of the pastures and silhouetted stables. It was God in the stars that night, and in the magnificence of the moon, and the shuttered eyes of every other kid whose purpose was mightier than mine.
Sunday morning, we started the drive home and stopped on the way for service at a megachurch. I don’t know who started the idea of megachurches, or why one was built in the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky, but this also seemed overtly Christian to me. The inside felt like an arena, or an airport. Christian bookstores, cafes, and the actual church – if you can call it that – had two balcony sections, a dozen screens and speakers, and a full light show. I reveled in that more than Jesus that day.
The first concert I went to was a religious experience called Winter Jam. It was actually a string of concerts, a tour of Christian music, and that year my best friend loved Skillet, which is a funny name for a band if you think about it because my mother had a cast iron one that she loved to cook in. I didn’t know until then that they were Christian rock because they didn’t sound like every other Christian rock band. I went not because I particularly wanted to, but she didn’t have a church, and isn’t my job to introduce her to mine through something not blatantly religious? That’s how they get you.
It was the first time we were left unattended away from home and we took advantage of it. Winter Jam was held in the Cleveland State University arena, and when everything was set up, all I could think of was that megachurch in Kentucky. It was starting to look, to me, like this was what Christianity was all about.
It took me a while after the music and lights started to feel the Spirit. I didn’t feel like I belonged there, like I was infiltrating a sacred space. The screens above the stage had the lyrics to every song so that the crowd could sing along in a fit of holy fervor. The crowd was swaying around me, and I, standing still there like a statue in the ocean, looked up to the lights and cables bolted to the ceiling. I reached my hands up above my head and found myself mouthing along to the band, words that I didn’t quite know.
But it wasn’t God that I saw in the rafters of that arena. I saw God in everyone else’s vision of God. An entire stadium of people all devoted to the idea of unconditional love and redemption, and despite every problem I have with modern Christianity, I truly believed that night that they were all there for those reasons alone.
I’ve never entirely grasped the purpose of being rebaptized. I’m sure I was dunked as a baby in a pool of stagnant holy filth, but I think it’s a way to reaffirm your faith once you can fully understand what you’re devoting yourself to. My mother’s best friend started deep-diving into the Christian life, scattering her home with bible verses, running vacation bible school, and hosting bible study, of which my mother was a part, but I think it was because she didn’t want to lose the one person she could drop her guard around. I think she was baptized in her friend’s name.
My sister and I joined her. It was really something to be baptized as a family. We were the talk of the church for a day. It happened at the end of the sermon. We changed into clothes we brought, very little ceremony. The baptistry that I didn’t know was even there waited calmly behind the sanctuary, dowsed in light filtered through a stained-glass window. We came out of the changing room from which we could hear the choir sing God’s praises.
As I stepped into the warmed water of the tub, the pastor put his hand on my shoulder blade and didn’t look me in the eyes. I don’t remember what the words were, but I repeated them while everyone watched, some blankly, some with admiration. I was 14, and unlike most 14-year-olds, I was pledging myself to God. As soon as the last words slipped out of my mouth, the pastor slapped his palm to my forehead and pushed me backwards into the water.
It happened fast enough that I didn’t hold my breath. I sucked water into my nose and my eyes held open, fixed on his in which I saw power, and I think in mine he saw fear.
He yanked me up out of the water into a full embrace while the church burst with applause and a few rogue praises. The choir started up again in the same songs you’ve heard a thousand times if you’ve ever been to church, and the door closed on us in the next room, the now-holy water in our ears muffling silence. We changed quietly, like ghosts only none of them holy.
We stood at the door with the greeters and smiled dutifully as every member of the church passed by, sometimes shaking our hands, sometimes hugging us.
I think baptism is supposed to signify your readiness to commit to the church, to devote your extra time to them and to participate in their world outside of the designated Sundays. For us, though, I think it signified the last desperate attempt to hold onto something steady and unchanging. Church was the same no matter which Sunday you attended, a routine, reliable.
I think my mother discovered something in herself after that day. She tried to find anything to fill a void that she couldn’t shake, but I think she realized that whatever it was, God wasn’t reciprocating. I saw God in the way my mother discovered herself, the way she wrestled with single motherhood and came out the other side satisfied and proud of her children.
When I say I was truly religious, I don’t mean that I really worshipped God, even believed in him. I think I was looking for something that year. I looked like a good Christian kid, not at all troubled, wanted by something outside of those that signed up to want me. It wasn’t God I was looking for. That year I found a space inside of myself that was full of love, and although so many years after I would lose that space over and over again, it always came back to me in the birth of Spring, a perfectly rainy day, and the spontaneous voicemail from my mother now again:
“Just thinking about you. I love you.”