Water. Warm marble.  More water.  Bubbles…lots of bubbles.  And laughter.  Lots of laughter.  That was my Easter worship this year — a most amazing remembrance of my own baptism.  I have,in fact, never been so clean.  Easter day began in a hamami in Istanbul.

I have for many years been a member of an institutional church of some kind, and so involved in that community that I would never have dreamed of missing Easter worship.  Right now, though, everything is different,

This year, I was travelling — this year, I was cruising through the Aegean and the Adriatic, bringing closure to a three year journey of healing.   But as is so often the case, what we think is the end of one thing is just a beginning again.  I traveled this Easter by accident — when we booked the tour, we really didn’t notice the date on the calendar, there were so many other factors involved in the choice of trip.  And yet, apparently I did not really travel this Easter by accident, it seems — I was ready to reclaim lost things and begin again.

And so there I was, in the Aiya Sofia Hamami in Istanbul, participating in an ancient purification ritual that dates well back to the time of Jesus (yes, the Turks adopted this practice from the Romans).  The night before, I had passed my time of waiting (Easter Vigil) at a Sufi Sema ritual, with the Mevlevi Whirling Dervishes.  The Dervishes are a mystical order, and the dance is not really a dance–it is a movement towards and then away from the divine presence.

The purpose of the dance is to spin and spin until you become one with God.  That is something that even a Christian mystic like myself understands, but the Sema takes that union with God yet

one step further.  You see, after your experience of oneness with the Love of all Creation, the Sema returns you to the world with the injunction to bring all that you have learned to those around you, not to teach or preach, but to show in your life what you have learned through the spinning.

And spinning was the perfect preparation for the water that awaited the next day.  I have a love-hate relationship with water…I love to be near it, I hate to be in it, so no one was more surprised than I was when I joyfully agreed to go for a visit at the Hamam.

From the moment that the attendant began to pour the warm, clean, water over my head, I was back at the moment of my baptism.  It was, after all, Easter morning.  And I was, after all in the middle of a ritual bath.  But Christian baptism rituals do not include bubbles.  And the bubbles, well, the bubbles were the best part of this new baptism.  Because my eyes were closed, I could not see the way in which they made the bubbles…but once we were washed, we took our places on the giant marble warming stone and the bubbles began.  There was the great, long, high-pitched zipping sound and then — bubbles made from pure, olive oil soap, everywhere on your body.  And this went on for many, many minutes…maybe 20…until the tone rang to tell the attendants to move on to the next stage in the bath.  I have never felt so clean — and even more than after my last baptism, I had never felt so newly made.

You see, I have been aware these last three years that, while I gained a new lease on life from my surgery, I had truly lost touch with something essential in my living. And I had no idea what was missing.  Those around me could see it, but they could not name it.  It took bubbles and a trip in which I had the chance to visit places on this planet that I longed to see to give me the answer — I had lost my sense of curiosity.  Not my ability to question — that has lived on and perhaps become even more intense — but my natural sense of curiosity, that thing that grabs my attention and won’t let it go until it is fully satisfied.  Curiosity is the character of my soul that led me to study archaeology because of an article in a National Geographic, that led me to pursue a life in music because of a Jessye Norman concert, and has taken me to seminary because of my desire to be one with God.

If I am honest, I now realize that I believed that the surgery was a punishment for that spirit of curiosity.  After all, I became aware of the congenital problem while pursuing something with all the curiousness I could muster — I was traveling in Israel.  Somehow, my mother’s voice, repeating over and over again, “Curiosity killed the cat,” replaced God’s voice, a voice that continually said to me, “yes, but what about this…”  I have come to understand that curiosity was not a little thing in my life, it is a major expression of my true self, that self we come into this world with and that self which we struggle our whole lives to remember.

It took whirling dervishes, a lot of water and bubbles, and the chance to experience long-cherished places like Troy, Ephesus, Santorini and Dubrovnik to set that voice free again. But thanks to the bubbles, the ears of my soul are open again, renewed and alert, and ready to, well, explore. Thanks be to God.