By Ashley Makar

I was late to my Egyptian baptism. Over twenty-four years and ten minutes late. It might have been my second rebirth by water. My dad—a Coptic Orthodox Christian by blood, a cut-throat pragmatic physician at heart—doesn’t recall if I was baptized as a baby. All grown up, I helped myself to the blessings of water and oil.

The priests and deacons were already standing around the baptismal font, chanting prayers in low, quiet voices, when my dad and I entered the St. George sanctuary—the Eastern Orthodox church in Birmingham, Alabama. We joined them, though I didn’t know if we were supposed to, or where I should stand. I moved in next to the priest I’d asked to baptize me. He whispered, “Get a chair for your father.”

My dad was just beginning to be able to stand up, after months of hardly moving, between a hospital bed and a wheelchair. The mass doses of cortisone he took after a kidney transplant weakened his muscles—from his eyes to his quads, making it hard for him to read or lift himself up from a chair. He was afraid he was nursing-home bound. I couldn’t imagine him walking again.

An infant must be immersed in holy water as soon after birth as possible, I learned from a book on Orthodox baptism, so the Holy Spirit can protect the child from Satan. When one of my dad’s Egyptian friends had her baby dunked in a Coptic-American church, days after she left the natal ward, on a cold January morning, he told me how ridiculous that was: The child could have died of hypothermia.

My father doesn’t ask the saints for help anymore, or pray to pictures, or make confession. He says he doesn’t have anything to confess. And he never believed the Virgin Mary appears every August in Assiut, the Upper Egyptian village where he grew up, or that her icon eyes cry holy oil that heals people. Or that faith, the size of a mustard seed, can move a mountain. He has no use for the piece of Coptic “history” my Cairo cousins taught me: How an Ottoman sultan challenged the pope of Alexandria to show the power of Christ; how Egypt’s Christians flocked to a mountain, fasted and prayed until God moved it, thanks to their steadfast leader, Saint Simeon the One-Eyed Tanner. (He’d plucked the other one out, the story goes, after looking with lust at a woman.) My dad left Egypt to study ophthalmology in London and hardly looked back. He married a gorgeous Protestant he wanted at first sight, a green-eyed brunette he spied across the nurses’ station, making rounds as a medical resident in Alabama…

Continue reading “Wayward Sheep,” by Ashley Makar, at Killing the Buddha.