During his vision of God after King Uzziah dies, Isaiah laments the fact that he’s not worthy. In a moment reminiscent of Wayne and Garth meeting Alice Cooper, he cries, “I am a man of unclean lips!”
Then, an angel flies toward him with a hot coal between tongs. Isaiah writes, “With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’”8
The hot coal is the metaphor for mercy, or the antidote to “We’re not worthy!” These days, it’s baptism that represents atonement for sin. It’s the normative point of entry into Christianity. Sprinkled, poured, or dunked: whatever the method, a person must be washed in water during the sacrament of baptism, symbolizing that they have died and then been raised to a new life in Christ.
Vice President Vance, the same one who wants to say who gets to be an American and who doesn’t, was baptized in the Catholic church in 2019 after a lifetime meandering between evangelical Christianity and atheism. Some of his writing recounts his shift: “I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of [my grandmother’s] kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.”9 Unless, I guess, those meek and poor are Haitian refugees in Ohio. Those people, he said, eat cats.
For Vance, the conversion to Catholicism happened incrementally, without an “ah-ha” moment. Book by book, encounter by encounter, he became convinced that he needed “to become Catholic, not merely to think about it.”10
People often make citizenship decisions in these same slow ways. One of my first cousins married a Filipino man who eventually obtained citizenship because of the depressing reality that he’d be paid more as an American. My cousin also encouraged him because she wanted them to both have an irrevocable right to live together in the same country.
Another cousin married a Honduran woman who obtained citizenship after eighteen years in the States. She did it because she’d had an H1 Visa for years and already felt like a citizen, and because she wanted to vote, and because it made traveling easier. She did it because she fell in love with my cousin and had a green card through their marriage, because she loves this nation, and because, she says, it was God’s plan.
Art was next in line. It happened incrementally. News story by news story, fear by fear, he became convinced that a green card was not sufficient to protect him in America 2025. He needed, in other words, to become an American, not merely to think about it.
Vance became a Catholic in a private ceremony, probably much like the one we held when Art wanted to baptize H as an infant. Just friends and family, a priest, and a sacrament. Our hillbillly Vice President probably received a certificate just as our daughter did. I don’t know what these types of papers mean. Oh, I know what they symbolize. But I don’t really know what they really are. Who is official, who is not? Who is legal, real, legitimate? What is irrevocable? Who belongs?
Vance writes that he worried a bit about the choice to convert. He worried until the voice of his dead grandmother rang in his ears, saying, eloquently, “Time to shit or get off the pot.”
Art worried, too. My mother offered to accompany him to the ceremony. He declined. “I want to be there by myself,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m doing it. The whole thing just makes me sad.”
On the drive to the hospital in the early morning, when I was thinking about King Uzziah and adenoids, H and I had been at a stoplight downtown, heading onto the parkway, and I saw a male pigeon mount a female pigeon. He was puffed up; she seemed annoyed. He stood atop her back, talons on her head, as she squished down onto the sidewalk. The whole act was over in seconds. I don’t know more than the average person about pigeon reproduction, but it looked like she was submitting begrudgingly, at best. Rolling her eyes at this forced ritual. I laughed, because her face made me think of Art.
The first 36 or so hours after the surgery, my daughter seemed sleepy and pain-free, but late the second day, the pain kicked in, and nobody was laughing. Sore throat, headache, earaches. The symptoms were especially bad in the mornings, when she would wake up and croak at me, “It hurts.” She was crying giant tears on the third day post-surgery. “Why did I have to do this? I wish I didn’t have to do this.”
The condition of her adenoids was not life-threatening, but I wanted to focus on why we chose to do it, rather than the fact that she didn’t really have to. “You’ll breathe so much better,” I told her. “You’ll sleep better. You won’t be congested so often.”
“But it hurts!” she sobbed.
“Sometimes we have to do hard things for a short time to make things better for a long time.” I compared it to flu shots and my own recent knee replacement. I did not compare it to becoming an American citizen. Regardless, she cried.
8 Isaiah 6:1-7 NIV
9 https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance
10 ibid.
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