Do Dogs Get Baptized?
On Sundays before church, Leila and I stop by the greenmarket for a sticky bun or a cookie. Although she hasn’t complained much about going to mass, I feel it’s better to sweeten the deal with something she likes to do beforehand. When I was growing up there was never any question, nor any bribe. My Catholic upbringing was reinforced by 13 years of parochial school, but with my own public-schooled, mixed-faith-raised child, I haven’t been very good about explaining why we go to mass (and why I sometimes go to yoga instead), let alone unpacked the trinity, the immaculate conception, and transubstantiation. Somehow I hoped she’d learn by osmosis and didn’t realize how the acoustics of the church would foil that plan. It probably doesn’t help that sometimes it’s so loud Leila says she has to hold her ears, nor that it’s usually spoken half in Italian.
Still, curious about how badly I’ve done, I ask her why she thinks people go.
“To get backtized,” she says matter of factly, oblivious to the presence of a funeral home on our route or the wedding venue a few blocks away. Rain or shine, Sundays seem to be the dump-your-old-stuff-in-front-of-your-house day, and as we weave past discarded chairs, halves of checkerboard games, old shoes, Cheerio-crusted bouncy seats, mismatched dishes, and yet another copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I try to make it into a lesson about wastefulness or up-cycling. People’s castoffs tell so much about who they were and no longer want to be, and while it’s hard for Leila not to treat the walk like a trip through the toy store, Josh has taught her to give abandoned couches and mattresses a wide berth. If I pass by too closely, I hear her yelling “Bug Beds, Mama,” and feel her tugging me away. How funny that this lesson sticks, not the one about what not to put in your mouth. (Not the back of a wood chair! Not the corner of an iPhone! I can’t believe I’m still saying things like this.) On we walk to our sober task, passing people out smoking, watering plants, reading the paper, jogging, and walking their dogs, which spurs the question she must have been pondering for the last block.
“Do dogs get backtized?”
I explain that they don’t, but people of all ages can if they belong to that kind of religion, and she’s shocked not by the idea of choice or difference but by the vision of a grownup being held aloft while someone pours water over his or her head.
“They have to be really strong,” she says.
Fresh in her mind is the frustration of not being able to get a clear view of last week’s baby from our pew as it was presented, screaming, to the congregation. Being an only child, Leila is fascinated by babies and always straps her own “baby” (one, or two, and sometimes three-- pink rabbits) into a polka dot stroller she parks in the aisle, and which the priests very kindly skirt as they process towards the altar.
Sacred Heart St. Stephen’s is a blue-and-white-ceilinged structure, full of stained glass windows paid for by the mostly Italian families of long-dead residents, and as with most Catholic churches these days, is never more than a quarter filled except at Christmas and Easter. Those, Leila knows, are the only days her father comes with us, in the deal we struck soon after getting married. (It’s lonely to go by yourself during the holidays.) Josh may not be religious, but he found this place for me while eavesdropping on some ladies at a bar who were talking about their “disco church”--so called not for its music but its neon green steeple, which is lit so brightly at night that you can see it from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. In this borough of churches, I feel lucky to have found it. Father M, the pastor, is a wry man with a distaste for people who call themselves religious, and a serious political bone to pick ever since the November election. His homilies suit my liberal, we-all-believe-in-the-same-God stance, and when I once confessed to him how we duck out after communion (you are supposed to stay till the end) because there’s only so much Leila can stand, he said, “I agree with her!”
That said, in a year’s time, she will likely start some version of “Sunday School,” and I will have to turn her over to the ladies in the chapel. On the one Palm Sunday I observed them, they kept the kids busy during mass in a room to one side of the altar, where the children could color in little pictures of rugs and place them on the floor in lieu of palms, “like a red carpet at the Oscars for Christ.” OK. I can appreciate the Jesus Christ Superstar way of bringing this down to their level, but I’m not really sure how I feel about the question they posed to them, related to the day’s readings: “Do you want to be the kind of person who would crucify Christ?” It felt like an S&M version of me asking, “Do you want to be on Santa’s naughty list?” Right now Leila spends this time combing her babies’ fur and writing out the alphabet. Her two religious acts are to put money into the basket for the poor and light a candle for a friend or relative, and I think the thrill of that is getting to press a little button and watch a fake flame spring to life.
In a year she will ask, as these first graders did while she was busy coloring in her rug, “Did Jesus have a pet?” “How did he die?” “What does execute mean?” “Where was Jesus’ mother when it happened?” And if I want to raise her in this faith, I will have to let them answer her that Mary was right at his feet and couldn’t do a damn thing—the first of many times she will realize that no one’s parents are invincible—not even God’s. You see the trend in my parenting, this reluctance to enlighten her innocence. To say people die, they do terrible things, they burn down buildings, they drive cars into crowds, they lie and cheat and steal; and then there are the natural disasters and the church’s own monstrous abuse scandal, forgiveness for which Father M. petitions the congregation every week. Blameless as I’m sure he and the staff of this parish are, the continuing revelations make us more than a little nervous about the prospect of handing Leila over—even if CCD classes now include the mandatory New York Diocese VIRTUS training that teaches children to shout “No!” if someone tries to touch them inappropriately, and then to “go and tell an adult they trust.” So much is wrong with that last statement, not least of all that they should ever get to that point! And don’t get me started on whom they should trust.
Because the health education curriculum for kindergarteners doesn’t cover child abuse and exploitation prevention (instead they receive five HIV/AIDS lectures that explain “how people get sick and how to get better,”) Josh and I institute our own clumsy lesson that includes a secret password in case we need to ask a stranger to pick Leila up from school; instructions to run and scream if anyone tries to offer her candy or take her somewhere to get a puppy; and a warning that no one should ever touch her anywhere she’d normally be covered by a bathing suit. Strangely enough, when we occasionally quiz her, she parrots back everything but those last instructions, whose significance escapes her. That her body should need to be covered and protected must be a mystery to her, considering that only a few years ago no one seemed to care much even if she ran outside naked.
“Now that school has started again, let’s go over what we told you about never letting anyone touch you near your bathing suit area,” we persist. “This means your teachers as well as your friends.”
“Mommy, we don’t get to go swimming in school until the second grade,” she corrects me, grabbing a zippered pencil case from the table and turning it into a set of jaws she opens and closes at her father.
“See, it’s smiling!”
“Leila, this is serious.”
“Well, Tom’s mother pats him on the butt all the time,” she points out of her Aunt Sue and—having poked a hole in my theory—skips into another room to play.
It’s the threat of immediate danger that makes me push this topic over others that can be considered more historical. How are we supposed to raise a child in today’s world when the grown-ups we thought of as trustworthy may be anything but? That’s something Leila needs to know, whereas I can and do hold off on the crucifixion talk. My views of humanity, already Hobbesian when I think about the violation of innocent children, plummet even further at the thought of explaining how a nail can be hammered through flesh. For God’s sake, she’s five! At the moment even a visit from the tooth fairy is scary. What hope can religion give me now but that, even after learning all this, Leila might yet turn out like the boy who kept leaping up in the middle of that Palm Sunday lesson to pull the rope on the ceiling-high sacristy bell as he announced, “Jesus is everywhere. Can’t you see him swinging from the rafters?”
Give me one more year, please. That’s all I pray for lately. As for what I believe, I guess I’ll have to tell her that sometimes the only thing I’m sure about is that I want to believe.
