• A family driving home after a holiday weekend starts debating a touchy issue. Within minutes, accusations are flying back and forth inside their little car. Quietly, a teenager in the back seat asks, "Has anybody thought about praying?" Everyone agrees (a little sheepishly) to listen to God for a few minutes. Afterward, there are soft looks all around, apologies, and healing.

• A young couple are dating and very much in love. They plan to be married someday. But in the meantime, it sometimes seems awfully hard not to show their love in physical ways, ways they both want to save till after they're married. So they ask God to help them wash their love clean—to help them build a more spiritual, more "forever" kind of love. And their prayers are answered.

• A senior citizen wakes up every morning with pain and other strange sensations. He's afraid to play golf or even do his yardwork. So he starts to pray. And he asks a Christian Science practitioner to pray with him. From morning until evening, he immerses himself in learning more of God and His Christ, through ideas he finds in the Bible and in Mary Baker Eddy's writings. Gradually, his whole life is bathed in new light and purpose. And soon, he's healed.

What do these real-life snapshots have in common? Prayer to God and healing, of course. But there's something more. All three instances also involve an ongoing event in every Christian's forward spiritual momentum—an event called baptism.

And just what is baptism? Most dictionaries define it as a sacrament, or religious rite, that initiates people in the Christian faith and washes away their sins. Dictionaries say, too, that the word baptism comes from a root meaning "to dip" or "to wash." This kind of cleansing is what John the Baptist practiced when he called on the Jews to turn away from their sins and live a better life. As a symbol of this type of repentance, John literally dipped people—even Jesus himself—in water.

But John always made it clear that Jesus would bring a more Spirit-oriented baptism to the world. "I indeed have baptized you with water," he told his disciples, "but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost" (Mark 1:8). John was right. The baptism Jesus offered to his disciples was entirely spiritual. It wasn't a thing he conferred on his disciples. Instead, it was a compelling request that they join in his Christly commitment to heal and save the world, to "be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with" (Matt. 20:22).

What does this baptism mean for us today? For one thing, it invites us to have full faith in Christ as exemplified by Jesus—faith like the Ethiopian eunuch had in the book of Acts. When Jesus' disciple Philip preached the gospel to him, the eunuch wanted to be baptized. Philip told him, "If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest." Immediately, the eunuch declared, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" (Acts 8:37). And with that, Philip baptized him.

Another thing baptism asks of Christians is to be willing. Willing to move forward spiritually in every way possible—through prayer, through striving to be pure and holy, maybe even through taking on a whole new way of life.

This willingness to move ahead will undoubtedly mean leaving behind some old ways. It may even mean leaving behind friends who are less than delighted to see our hearts reaching Godward. Or it may mean being conspicuously absent from situations that steal away our spiritual energy—absent from a body-based or material view of ourselves, for instance, or from such a view of our health or business or home or church.

Mrs. Eddy emphasizes this willingness to advance spiritually, and to leave behind what's not spiritual, in her definition of baptism in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as "purification by Spirit; submergence in Spirit." To these ideas she adds this: "We are 'willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord'" (Science and Health, p. 581).

The Christ, the divine, saving influence in human thought, is continuously calling each of us, and challenging us really, to join together in Christian baptism—just as Jesus asked his disciples to join in his baptism almost two thousand years ago. The call to spiritual baptism may come directly to our own heart. Or it may come through someone else who's stepped into the baptismal waters before us. The important thing is that we respond by plunging even our most cherished ideals and desires and practices into the cleansing, redeeming waters of Spirit.

We'll never lose anything real or eternal by immersing our lives in Spirit. All we'll wash away will be the sense-illusions that clog our progress and darken our outlook.

And what are we left with after our baptism? To the degree that our thought is purified, we're left with the majesty of our real, Godlike selfhood—bathed in glory. Mrs. Eddy describes the eternal afterglow of our ultimate, final immersion in Spirit this way: "The encumbering mortal molecules, called man, vanish as a dream; but man born of the great Forever, lives on, God-crowned and blest" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 205).

So baptism in Spirit isn't something to avoid. It's not a mystical procedure that will put us out of touch with love or happiness. Actually, baptism will unite us with all good by revealing that we were never separate from Spirit or in conflict with any of our brothers and sisters, God's children. There's only one baptism because there's only one Spirit. This one spiritual baptism folds us all together in the bosom of the one great Shepherd.

The Apostle Paul describes this baptismal fellowship with each other in these words: "For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit" (I Cor. 12:13).

Spiritual baptism can satisfy any mortal thirst, cleanse any sin, heal any ill, bring home any lost sheep. You might even say it's a divine answer to Mrs. Eddy's prayer for all humanity: "White as wool, ere they depart,/Shepherd, wash them clean" (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 305). It's the way the Shepherd gathers us together, washes us clean, and leads us home.

Mary Metzner Trammell