Baptism

Today I am fifteen years old. It seems like so long ago, that Saturday afternoon when I was baptized, and I can hardly imagine what I was thinking or what my sense of what was going on might have been at that time.

It's a funny thing. In some ways time gives me more clarity about my conversion to Christianity. In other ways, whatever it was that happened to me becomes more cloudy and obscure. The more time that goes by, the further back I have to start the conversion story. When I was first baptized, the story I told myself (and others) only went back a couple of years. Later I was able to see how God was working going back five or six years. Now I can trace it back almost to pre-school.

On the other hand, when people ask me how it was I came to be a Catholic Christian, I'm often at a loss to give a satisfying or simple answer. It's somewhat mysterious to me, and has become increasingly so over time.

I guess all of this is the sometimes wonderful and sometimes searingly confusing dynamic of trying to be a prayerful person. We grow more confident in our faith in the faithfulness of God, but at the same time place ourselves in a kind of vertigo of mystery that is sometimes quite disorienting and even frightening.