Present Over Perfect

to take into my future is more like the nineteen-year-old
than the person I’ve slipped into, the identities I tried on in
more recent years.
I feel a longing to be outside, one I haven’t felt for years,
but one that feels familiar. For many years, there were so
many structures that mattered so much to me—churches and
colleges, publishing houses and gyms and malls. But now I
find my heart is drawn so entirely to only two places: the
table and the water. Our home and the edge of the big water,
the two most sacred places I’ve ever known.
One way to look at it: communion and baptism. I’m a
table person, a bread and wine person. And I’m a water
person, profoundly. All my life, I’ve felt most deeply myself
around the table and on the shore, the bread and the wine
and the water.
We went to a friend’s church yesterday, and they were
baptizing a baby girl named Anna and a little boy named
Knowles. In the children’s gathering concurrent with the
service, the teacher, Debby, taught the children about
baptism, showing them the water, the shell the priest uses to
scoop it, the way the water falls gently onto a doll’s head.
She explained each part of it, and then she invited each
child to practice on the doll, with the shell, bowl, water,
towel. It was sweet and beautiful, and now as I sit watching
this water, so deeply connected to my own past, I can’t stop
thinking how the water washes us, makes us clean, brings
new life, quenches our thirst.
When I think about my life now, I think about Pigpen