Essays
My Big Wet Orthodox Baptism
The eXile
By Carl Schreck
We were about 10 minutes into the ceremony in the dank church basement near Red Square when I got the order to strip naked.
"Now take off your underwear," Father Vladimir instructed me, authoritatively but not unkindly.
When I agreed to convert to Russian Orthodox last month, I reasonably assumed I wouldn't have to go full frontal during my baptism. After all, it's fine for a baby to be nude while having his original sin washed away, but there's something creepy about a grown man being forced to flash his unit to a corpulent, long-bearded guy wearing a strange outfit, dumping holy water over him.
Father Vladimir had already swabbed me with oil at various strategic locations on my body that I assumed coincided with Jesus' wounds, though I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't take a nail to the forehead. The Catholic kids in high school would always show up with a grey splotch on their foreheads for Ash Wednesday, however, so there must be something to this. The crown of thorns, I'm guessing.
Father Vladimir had also taught me how to cross myself Orthodox style. After pressing the tip of your right thumb against the tips of your forefinger and middle finger, the cross pattern goes as follows: forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder. There's something counterintuitive about this pattern for a Presbyterian boy like myself who grew up imitating touchdown celebrations by God-conscious NFL players, who crossed themselves left to right. To do the Orthodox way correctly, I actually had to concentrate a bit, like when you try to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.
Father Vladimir stood in front of me dressed in a long, red robe reeling off a series of chants while wafting some smoke intermittently, and before I stripped off my boxers, he asked me if I reject "Satan and all his ways." He then surreptitiously told me the correct answer, as if to keep our little cheating scheme from God.
"Say, 'I reject,'" he whispered.
At that point, all I could think about was the scene in Ed Wood when Bill Murray's flamingly gay character gets baptized to help secure financing from some hardcore Christians for one of the Plan 9 From Outer Space director's film projects.
"Sure," Murray replies when asked if he rejects the Devil.
I thought I could skirt this whole conversion thing by convincing a priest to allow my Russian fiancee and me to get married in an Orthodox on the grounds I was a good, upstanding Christian, albeit a Protestant. For weeks I had daydreamed about trumping the old codger with airtight religious arguments cribbed from one semester of theology and two years of biblical anthropology at college.
The three priests I talked to subjected me to various degrees of shame for my naivete.
"You two HAVE to be of the same faith," one red-nosed priest, clearly tipsy after celebrating the baptism of a Kremlin-affiliated baby at the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square, told me, barely holding back a guffaw.
So I had to get baptized. My fiancee and I ruled out a ZAGS wedding from the moment we got engaged, and a Russian Orthodox ceremony is actually a budget option compared to organizing your own wedding. At most you'll blow 6,000 rubles for a one- to two-hour ceremony, choir included, that's sure to please the Orthodox relatives.
So with my boxers off and my cock-and-balls dangling but retreating toward the warmth of my body, I stepped into the metal basin half-filled with water next to Father Vladimir's podium and prepared to become Kirill: the new Orthodox name I chose as a prerequisite for joining the faith.
I was relieved when the water felt warm on my feet, assuming the water would feel equally pleasant when he used a ladle to dump in over my head. I was wrong, of course. I began wincing and jerking like a vampire as the freezing holy water cascaded down over my flesh.
The rest went by pretty fast. After drying off with one of the church's house towels (the skimpy hand-towel I had brought was much to small for baptism purposes), I put on my clothes, including my holy baptism T-shirt, a Hanes V-neck I had picked up in the States and that Father Vladimir depressingly informed me I would be buried in.
"Keep it in a safe place," he said, adding that I should try not to remove the gaudy, 150-ruble silver cross I had picked up in the church store 30 minutes earlier. It was disconcerting the way he kept making a point to address me by my Orthodox name.
"You're not going to switch back to being a Protestant, are you Kirill?" he asked.
After that, Vladimir led me up to the cathedral's main room, where I had to try out my new crossing technique, and walk around an ark three times. After he spoon-fed some wine-soaked bread from a golden goblet ("He's a foreigner," Father Vladimir said apologetically to another priest when I didn't open my mouth immediately), I kissed two icons, and got a piece of hard bread in the shape of a mushroom that Father Vladimir said I had to eat first thing the next morning on an empty stomach. I'm guessing the bread represents Jesus' body, though I didn't utochnit that question. And that was that. I was now officially Kirill.
My fiancee was waiting for me near the entrance of the main hall, and we went downstairs to get my little certificate confirming I had been baptized. At some point, however, we lost Father Vladimir, a nice enough guy who we wanted to perform our wedding.
I went down to the church basement to track him down. The dezhurny there said Father Vladimir was eating lunch. I told him it was rather urgent: We wanted to get the wedding date set. So the dezhurny walked out of the building and returned 10 minutes later with Father Vladimir, already dressed in civvies, in tow.
"What can I do for you, Kirill?" he asked.
I explained we had already made all of the arrangements to get married on August 13, and that we wanted him to marry us.
"August 13? That's a Sunday, right?" he said, flipping through his pocket church calendar.
When he finally found the correct page, a small frown crept over his face.
"That won't work. There's a fasting period that begins the next day, and we don't do weddings the day before a fast. There's not a single church in this city that will marry you on that day."