Jesus Saves

Lucidly drunk. On battery beach.

We have arrived here, shining and shimmering from a party in the handsome modernist building that used to house the Natal Mounted Rifles, and which gives its acronym to the stretch of road between it and the city. The sun is still hidden from us as the earth rolls towards it with subtle but relentless momentum. The dark is broken not by light but by the promise of light. The sky is the colour of pewter, turning unpolished silver as the moments pass. The day is starting to begin, beginning to breath. Slowly, quietly at first.

There are five of us, sitting at the top of the beach, twenty metres or so from the parking lot, fifty metres from the waterline. On our left is a damaged dune system, a corrugation of wind and sand inconsistently inhabited by the succulent plants that are supposed to keep the dunes in place. On our right is the city of Durban, a glistening and gritty agglomeration of concrete stories and glass hearts, people and cars, endings and beginnings and false starts. All held together by the fecund greenness that surrounds it. And by history.

As the clouds become lined not with silver but with gold, my concentration is broken by two figures writhing in the water. I leap up from my haunches, spraying damp sand in my wake as I fly down the dunes. Brendan follows me, more cold shivers of sand cascading through the air.

I sprint along the sand, fuelled by the physicality of the crisp air and the grains on my feet, tiny fragments of rock and shell impregnating themselves into my soles before being shed and replaced by each subsequent stride. As the morning races towards me, I see more clearly the thing that disturbed me. Someone is not drowning. They are being drowned.

Lucidity gives way to confusion.

The ocean is calm up to the shore-break where the water churns threateningly, although only up to knee level. The water here is generous and dangerous and often deceptive. And it is warm. You can body-surf for hours on carefree end or you can be swept away to your end in waist-deep waters.

I nearly drowned on this beach. A stoned, stormy day had me swimming too far out many years ago and suddenly the billowing ocean had taken me. I remember vividly the unbelieving panic, then, even more vividly, the sense of release, of giving in to the demands of the water. At which point that same water, in the form of a huge wave, returned me to shore, the lifeguards and the relieved arms of my friends.

As Brendan and I reach the drowning man, we do another double-take. The man and his drowner are both clothed in blue and white robes. They are being watched by a small circle of similarly dressed people. We immediately recognise the signifiers of religion and ritual. But this buys us no respite from the man thrashing around in the water, screaming and gasping as if in the throes of death, as he is held under the salty water by human hands. Our unease is only partially appeased by the fact that he’s not actually drowning. Possibilities skip through the back of my slow-motion mind. But we hold our positions.

And gradually it dawns on me that this man is being baptised, although in a more visceral manner than I had ever witnessed in the small Anglican church I attended with intermittent reluctance as a child.

This was my introduction to africanised religion. It was the very early nineties and the colonial city of Durban had only just begun to merge with the land of eThekwini. The multicultural reality that now defines the city had yet to crystalise, and Durban was still outwardly a place of mostly uninterrupted whiteness and Englishness.

Now, in this 21st century you see Shembe and Zionist devotees all over the city. As if from another time and place – another reality, a Durban before or after so much whiteness – they gather on traffic islands and other liminal spaces where they find their buildingless temples and their infinite god. An enduring and moving testament to faith that resounds more with the words of Christ than anything the Church of England ever coughed up. And despite factions and fractiousness, these invisible churches represent the country’s largest social movements.

Lucid once more, and no longer drunk, we walked back up to the top of battery beach, rays from beyond the horizon refracting through the atmosphere and reaching our tired eyes. We watched as everyone in the circle below took their turn to come close to death. And, in this particular baptism, that was very clearly the idea, although I have witnessed many far more gentle ceremonies since.

And then, with a perfectness of timing that still puzzles me, the circle dissolved and reformed in a line parallel to the water’s edge. The devotees knelt on the sand, then prostrated themselves before the sky and their god. And slowly, in perfect synchronicity and unison, they rose with the sun.

This final element of the baptism ritual may or may not have calmed the bodies that had been so thoroughly immersed in the water. But I do know that, watching them rise, my own body became filled with an unmistakable sense of peace. And that few mornings have ever felt as new, as shiny, as full of possibility.

And as we sat there in stillness and golden light, the freshly baptised devotees gathered their belongings and walked slowly up the Sunday sand. We waved at them, and they returned the gesture, different worlds glancing against each other for the briefest of moments.