Growing up I didn’t think baptism was going to be something I would do. I didn’t think Church would be a part of life either. My parents had been raised in religious homes, both attending Catholic schools, but by adulthood had both become disillusioned with the “big C” Church. I was not baptized and the only reason we ever went to a church was for weddings and funeral services. Religion was not part of my life but all the same I had a sense, a feeling, of spirituality that followed me.

And the sense of a vast, all encompassing something, the feeling of interconnectedness in a group, the universal importance of love and kindness, the feeling of laying on your back watching the stars and suddenly becoming aware of the vast Earth below you rotating through the greater vastness of space. And the feeling of being a part of that vastness, however small, but still miraculously here.

Studying to become an engineer did not clarify my conviction of if God is or not but only deepened my sense of wonder and mystery. The closer you look at the universe with a scientific lens the more strange and incomprehensible it becomes. There are no easy answers to be found. But there is always the feeling: vast and everywhere, inside you, inside me, the leaves on the trees, the moss on the bark, the warmth of the sun, the love we feel, it is there defying description.

At this time in college, I had this conception but I was not ready to call that God. For me God had become an almost tainted word, uttered usually in quick succession with why I was going to hell for one thing or another. I was once in a church and heard a sermon about why people like myself, agnostic or not willing to call themselves religious, were far worse and untrustworthy than even the most sinful member of the congregation.

It is still one the most awkward experiences of my life but also about what I had come to expect from “big C” Church. “We have our way of doing things and that way of doing things is what’s important.” It almost feels like a bad HOA, wound up in the details of the bylaws about lawn length and visibility of trash cans instead of looking at the bigger picture of what the members and wider community actually needs.

Besides feeling unwelcoming, I also think this kind of church makes God seem small. If God is defined by all the details preached with desperately righteous certainty then there is no room left for faith and wonder. God is so much more than these human fixations on details. What I hold certain is that God wants us to Love and Love broadly.

By now you’re probably wondering: “So Nick, it sounds like you didn’t want to come to Church. How did you end up here?” Well I’ll tell you friends: my wife has always been very religious with her own complicated relationship with Church and churches. When we settled in Salem she wanted to find a church to attend because that had been an important part of her life. That search, that we did together, brought us one summer day to a joint Morningside and First UMC potluck. It was one of the most spiritually beautiful and nourishing experiences of my life. I found a place where there was enough space for the God and God’s Love I had always felt and been afraid to name as God lest people thought I meant the classical “angry bearded man in the sky”. I found a place of curiosity, wonder, and love. A place with space to breath and grow.

Then COVID and a bunch of life stuff got in the way for a few years but I never forgot this experience. Coming, semi-regularly, to Morningside over the last year has rekindled that feeling. Every Sunday that we are able to attend I feel at peace and energized for whatever the week has for me.

It gives me hope to be a part of a larger whole that is doing good in the community and promoting love, kindness, and grace in a world consumed by fear and hatred. I’ve decided that I want this church to be a part of me because I realized that it has always been a part of me.

In a way like meeting my wife, I found the piece that fits and completes a part of my soul. And most importantly, empowered by the knowledge that I am not alone I am finally comfortable naming my spirituality and wonder with the universe as faith in and being with God. Inspired by the sermon a few weeks ago about baptism I decided there was no better way of expressing this than to take the plunge, so to speak, and finally be baptized myself.