Fill this Canyon with Water, for I'm Diving In: Why the Baptized Wants a Baptism

Do you see that six-year-old girl, two older brothers on each side, marveling at the Grand Canyon?

That's me, Queena Joy Yoder-now Mast. Such a strange thing, to see a photo, and then to close one's eyes and see the whole scene again, not as an outsider, but from the inside, from my young mind's memories. What that young girl thought and willed and did now matter so much to me.

My 41 year-old self was at a baptism two months ago, and I thought a brand-new thought. I stood next to my son's friend as he was pulled up, soaked and smiling, and thought "I want to go all the way under... I want that so badly." I haven't stopped wishing for this, and now I'm signed up for our church's January 26th baptism and I find myself staring gratefully at the photograph of this earnest, sincere little girl, who is and who was me. What decision was I thinking about during that time of my life?

The artist in me must have already been active then; images and movies moved me deeply. (My wicked uncles rewound 'Charlotte's Web' over and and over when they realized the spider's death would make little Queena's eyes overflow every. single. time. Can you believe they did that?!) During a Sunday evening service we watched a movie called 'Dangerous Journey;' after the lights were turned on I went and tucked myself behind the pulpit at the front of the church where there was cross on the wall. I knelt, and it was as if I was actually the main character in the story, the feelings of the pilgrim all my own. 

Where are the places and what are the physical actions where you feel like heaven and earth meet? Kneeling still matters to me, and in the past year, praying by a window has also become a significant habit. I'm always looking for God's gifts that unite the kingdom of the sky and the kingdom of this world. Christianity has so much potential to be an 'embodied faith'--The body participates in taking the bread and wine, the mystery of marriage, in baptism, in 'laying on of hands,' anointing the sick and there are more examples, for sure.  I don’t know that I’m doing everything theologically perfect by revisiting a sacrament that I consider to have fully participated in when I was six years old. I do know that I have followed Jesus from an early age, and it seems to me he is asking me to pick up this well-known picture of baptism again.

My baptism 1989:

 My people are Mennonite--and if you peel back the layers, I am too, though the core of my faith isn't a certain denominational flavor. At the center of this complexity of deep belief and theology, upbringing and even uncertain wonder is a simple wish to know and be known, to submit myself to the triune God, to Christ and his kingdom come. 

However, at the age of six and having had this "at the cross" experience, I wanted to be baptized, and if you know anything about the Anabaptist tradition I had been born into, you know 'Believer's baptism' is a really important tenet of the denomination. My young age would have been an issue for many, but fortunately my parents respected and honored the sincerity of my desire.  

I was so young! And yet I can still clearly remember glass pitcher that sometimes held our family's Sunday-dinner gravy, my dad's hands cupped over my head, releasing the water three times after the accompanying minister's ablutions. It was a thrill, the water pouring down from the top of my newly veiled head, drenching my shoulders. The child in me found joy and a giggle at this mess in a church setting while there was a serious response as well, a sense of the sacred. 

My Baptism: 2025

Physical symbols have become more and more dear to me, and my first attraction to joining in this Sunday's baptism is because going all the way under the water expresses death so well. However, the long pour has also been a much-loved symbol. I remember how any bible story containing 'oil running down the head' after my baptism brought back a tangible, tactile memory. There is a great podcast that says, (essentially): there is a rich paradigm to being baptized–it's not like you are just dying to self and being brought back to life. You are also being rescued from the chaos waters, from oppression, danger and slavery. There are so many biblical narratives that can be brought to mind when baptism happens.

Maybe the best explanation for what I expect and for my 'why' comes from this unfinished painting. I have paintings that I spend years on, and this one I started when I was 38. I dashed more paint on it at 40, and I finally finished this week.

The richness of my interior life, the deepening layers of desire, the wish to be a brush-well-dipped, well, this is why I want to be baptized. Time allows us to grow and learn and pick up a painting we need to keep working on. I want to look back at this point in my life and have a tangible, physical reminder that as I looked to an unknown future, I trusted him completely to take me through whatever chaos and whatever challenges I had ahead. I am 'all in.'

There is another baptism image, and it's not water--Christ said "I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it was already burning." His words remind me of this image from my sketchbook, where I am a small figure hidden in the burning bush. The coals that drop from unquenchable branches seem dangerous, but they drop like a surgeon's knife on the dead flesh, burning away the false self, the one I wish to bury, so that my true self can sit, or stand...

at the edge of any danger, whole, safe and at peace.

postscript—after the service:

I’m so glad, so happy. There is a certain vulnerability to baptism for anyone, and as I talked to people today I felt  pride creeping in, and one point thinking: “Do they know deep moral failure or backsliding wasn’t the impetus that lead me to chose to be baptized?” Hmm, why do we humans want to look as tidy as possible? I have already communicated my motives above, but let me say—while I was under the water God did remind me of things he wanted to leave in the water!

I have lived my whole life with high expectations (doesn’t that sound so nice). It was the word ‘critical’ that filled my mind while I was under. My hair is now dry, and I am thinking about how ‘joy’ was the word that gripped me as I wiped the water from my eyes. Can that long-standing critical spirit really just stay under the water and rot away like a neglected ill-grown fruit, replaced by joy?

Why yes, I believe it can, and will.

A Painted Prayer

A painted prayer

A star, fallen,

But still twinkling…

Trembles on a stalk, her former grand fire shattered

Into a blooming death. 

Why did she pass from the kingdom of the skies to

The kingdom of the meadow?

Strange dark flower—

Are you an angel of royal blue and yellow

Now grounded in the soil of suffering?

My art–this habit of giving too much importance to small and unremarkable things–

Proclaims (to you this day) the year of wrung-out Jubilee.

You who stand outside this canvas, 

Touch my quiet garden of glory, cultivated with thick, frantic rows of pain and paint.

Come inside to pluck the obliging star; use her petals to sooth like salve

Your self-mutilated ear. 

Lost stars that lend their shapes

To the grass of the field,

And the wicked ones that blinked their lights on and then off

Might one day be judged by forgiving artists as mere lightening bugs. 

Would that the path that moves the damned away from Gehina 

Be lit up by their bright butts. 

Someone unknown at Ignite (a monthly Hickory Ridge worship service) painted a bold black star on a canvas and then threw it away. I picked it up out of the trash and tried to turn the  star into a flower and copied a little of Van Gogh’s ‘Les Iris’ around the star/flower. At some point I wrote a few words on the back of the canvas, and then months later I painted some more, and thought of resident whose walls seemed to be asking for it. After I gave it to her on Thursday I finished the poem. It makes me happy, so I give it to you too.

Merry Christmas from a Gingerbread Window Sill

 

I think all the time about thin spaces.

What is a thin space? Picture a familiar window and the child that might be playing on the other side. She sees you watching her, and like the kid on “The Christmas Story,” she comes close and presses her snotty nose and face against the glass to make you smile. 

I sometimes stand at my kitchen window and think about what angels might be out there-or picture the face of someone who is gone. I reach my hand out and almost feel that I have touched the face on the other side, but cannot deny the pane that is there, keeping me from that which is beyond. 

Of late I have sat with many who are perched on this windowsill. This week alone I have said goodbye to four elderly people I have loved and cared for. They are now, I believe, in a reality that is sharper and clearer, brighter and more colorful than the one I now know. They have entered a space where the grass would hurt our feet because of how much more real and solid it is than our own.* It is the place I tried to draw in this mural with my daughters, where our world is chalked in black, white and gray, but the other is full of joy, light, color…and gumdrops! 

This faith does not change the fact that I can no longer joke around with those four residents, or give them supper, or touch their wrinkled skin. But in this environment of loving and losing so many, I take comfort in the story of Christmas! I know that in Bethlehem of Judah the window was opened. The barriers around our small reality were invaded by God’s greater, all encompassing reality, and in a miracle our minds can barely fathom, the DNA of a righteous teenage girl joined with God himself in an immaculate scandal of cosmic love.

Where is your thin space? Whether it’s the church altar, the chair by the dying, or the woods at Abbots Pond, I’m committed to run toward what I can now know in part, and I want to invite everyone I know to join me as I press my face into the dark glass.

*C.S Lewis, the great divorce 

Learning to Linger-a response to a Japanese Woodblock Print

Tsuchiya Koitsu: Ryuhashi at Night, Yanagibashi

Learning to Linger 

by Queena Mast

Poets know how to linger in the world between

dreaming

and this consciousness we share.

By sharing it we feel safe to call this space

“Awake.”

Awake oh sleeper, and

Rise to the truth that artists and poets, 

priests and prophets try to learn– 

try to teach.

That Death is not real,

though your life might be, in fact, death.

Rise up from the dead.

    Learn 

the power of an interior life

    the wisdom of action born in love

    The eternity wrapped into this moment of goodness.

Who are you to say that Koitsu’s action of building homes on paper,

brush constructing brick,

mind moving toward some distant vanishing point

heart highlighting 

the yellow of warm homes

peopled by gray shadows

        under red Chinese Lanterns…

Who are you to say that, in time, his night won’t matter? 

Does meaning fade like memories,

into the fog beyond this reality,

beyond his death and mine

and yours?

I say 

your action of simply noticing

a world drawn by an artist

will wake up that which is sleeping in you.

   

    You are the man rowing through a river of time, carrying a single lantern of light…

Soon you will join Tsuchiya and myself in that small houseboat. You will hang up your 

light with ours and we will talk and paint, drink green tea and sake, and write poetry 

together for 3, 456 years of friendship. How glad you must be that you paused, in this now, 

between reading a Facebook post and your work emails, to meander into this poem.

Degas's Tangles: Why to write poetry, even if you aren't any good at it.

Degas https://g.co/arts/DDMyuU3B5CMESWdt5

 So, you want to write poetry? Know this first. Writing poetry is a full-contact sport. Blood is involved--and terror--mixed with a bit of bravery and not a small amount of stupidity. 

I admit, the bruises of football or boxing could be too strong a metaphor for what poets do. However. Know this. You can, at the very least, expect to feel the pang of tangles combed out of your hair when you attempt pull out the poetry which is hidden under the surface of your self. 

So why do you even want to go to these raw places and offer yourself up? You will become a living sacrifice, and who wants that? There is no holding back, no halfsies, no secrets. A poet looks for the bright shining pinnacle of beauty pared down to bare primal forms. Once you begin to write poetry you time-travel back to the nakedness of the Garden. However, in this garden of your creation, you don't need to be ashamed, but you could be very, very afraid. Your words might never bunch themselves together in an acceptable bouquet of meaning. You are likely to be left holding your dead darlings in a handful of rotting frippery or worse, plastic chintz. How will you face that special kind of embarrassment when your deepest thoughts and emotions wave at the world on stems of laughable, sterile, forget-me-nots? 

And yet you still want to write poetry?

Of course you do!

And you should...because dead flowers are more lovely than non-existent ones. Also, should you fail, at least chintz reminds us of our grandmothers. Go toward that raw and fearful place. Write your little poems, expose some skin, share your imperfections. Post them, write them out by hand on scraps of paper, tuck them like tracts into the stalls of a few gas-station bathrooms. Send them to a lover. Or a stranger. Or your grandmother. 

Or me. 

Degas https://g.co/arts/eiSyp4cykqcCqRqv6

The idea of "Full Contact" comes from p7 Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Poetry like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse. HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.

On May 19th, 1:00-2:30 I will be holding a class on poetry appreciation at the Greenwood Library. There might be some time given to share poetry you have written, should you join us. The library and I will be providing materials to create poetry/art notebooks, a practice I have enjoyed since I was about 20 years old. I don't feel qualified to teach a poetry writing experience, but I do know that reading and enjoying other writer's poems is the first step toward writing your own, and I can certainly share how much I like poetry. I would love to have you join me. Register here: https://fb.me/e/34F66gm0e

PS. I just need to temper the angst--Sometimes my favorite poems don't touch this raw and fearful places. For example the Sir John Suckling poem that I memorized this way (click here for more accurate quote ):

"Love is the fart of every heart

for when held in it pains the host,

but when released, pains others most"