Baptism Statement: Aurora Kuelbs

Tell us your faith story. 

When I was little, my largely agnostic mother and Catholic father decided not to baptize my siblings and me when we were little, and that we could make that decision as we pleased when we had grown up. We only went to church on Christmas when we visited my paternal grandmother in California, and for the most part, organized religious institutions played a minimal role in my life. Church was essentially something for other people. I volunteered in them sometimes, but more because I wanted to volunteer than because I wanted to connect with religion. Life continued that way for a long time. At times, I was agnostic like my mom; at other times, I was an atheist.

The primary exposure I had to faith and religion growing up in rural Minnesota was talking about it with my mom, like how we talked about most everything else. Conversations about the existence or nonexistence of a higher power were fair game at the dinner table or over coffee in the morning before school. Many of the thoughts I have on religion can probably still be traced back to those somewhat philosophical discussions on God from my childhood. Though I recall my mom advising me not to make my agnostic-bordering-on-atheist beliefs public knowledge (I assume she feared my rejection from a small community), in high school, those conversations inevitably moved from the dinner table to the lunch table. I recall one time, once I had a car, that I arrived back home past 1:00 AM because I’d been having a long conversation in the school parking lot after a club event with a close friend about our place in the universe and how she saw that informed by her relationship with God. In some ways, I think it was these conversations that drew me towards “trying out” religion and spirituality. So when I got a postcard from Pres House in the mail my senior year, I thought, Why not give it a chance?

Since then, Pres House has been a supportive community for me throughout college. I’ve discovered a lot about myself and about how I think about God and religion, and I’ve surprised most of my family, who never would have bet that I would be religious in any respect. I’ve lost a great deal of the fear that I used to have surrounding churches and the people that attend them, and I’ve learned a lot about how to approach faith, and by extension God, in ways that feel more comfortable and familiar. Most of how I’ve learned has been through the conversations I have had with the many people I’ve been in community with at Pres House, and I hope to continue to have intentional conversations about faith and spirituality in the future. In many ways, I think that my experience of religion has been communal and accessible, and I’d like to continue to refine my current understanding of faith as I move through the next year and my life.

Why have you chosen to be baptized? 

Baptism, for me, is a next step in my journey. I’ve chosen to be baptized because I feel that I’ve largely been trying to explore faith from an outside perspective. I have become so accustomed to being the outsider looking in, unfamiliar with the concept of spirituality, that it has become a hindrance to my understanding of faith as someone in community. I’m not entirely sure what comes next after baptism, and I’m still a little shaky on what baptism really means, but what I do know is that I feel assured in my choice. Like everything else I’ve experienced in my history with faith, baptism feels like something that is communal, and unlike many of my other experiences, I think it can serve as a commitment to intentionality. I think I had been searching for ways to seek deeper connection with faith and create potential for a future where I remain in spiritual community past college, and baptism feels like a way to do that.

Christians use a variety of images and metaphors to describe the sacrament of baptism. Which is most meaningful to you, and why?

A couple of the metaphors we talked about as a group that are most meaningful to me have been “accepting an invitation” and “potentiality.” Baptism feels like looking at that postcard I got from Pres House in the mail three years ago and suspending my disbelief; it feels like accepting an invitation to community with other people and with God. It also feels like creating potential for the future and opening a door to new experiences within faith communities. In many ways, baptism feels like the sort of “maybe” that I think has led a lot of my explorations of spirituality. Baptism is a lot of things to me, but I think the idea that it is an invitation to community is most resonant with my previous experiences and is most meaningful to my future understanding of faith.

Aurora Kuelbs (she/her) is a junior studying biochemistry and neurobiology, with a certificate in Biocore.