From the Ashes

A Latter-day Saint child is buried at eight years old.

Dressed in white, they step down into the font, a priesthood holder lowers them under the water, and for a second or two they’re gone. Then they come up, dripping, and their family is smiling. Paul put it plainly: “we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Joseph Smith taught the same thing: coming up out of the water is “in the likeness of the resurrection of the dead in coming forth out of their graves” (D&C 128:12).

Nearly every member learns that baptism symbolizes death, burial and rebirth. Very few look past the surface of that symbol.

I want to. Rebirth is one of the oldest stories humans tell, and once you see its shape you’ll see it everywhere: in scripture, in the movies your kids watch, and in your own life. My claim is simple. Real change in a person requires that something in them die first. I call that transcendent death.

There’s a puzzle at the center of it that I’ll come back to: we yearn to change, and we are paradoxically terrified of it. Why both?

Three days in the belly of the fish

Start with Jonah.

God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and one of Israel’s enemies, and call it to repentance. Jonah runs the other way and boards a ship. A storm comes. Jonah tells the sailors to throw him overboard, and they do. Then “the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17).

Listen to how Jonah describes it: “out of the belly of hell cried I.” “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul.” “I went down to the bottoms of the mountains” (Jonah 2). That’s the language of the grave.

When I read it now, I think something died inside Jonah down there. His pride, his resistance, the part of him that would rather drown than go to Nineveh. Only after that does the fish put him back on dry land, and he goes.

Jesus himself picked up the image: “as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). The Book of Mormon has its own version. Alma the Younger lies helpless for two days and two nights, then stands up and says, “I have repented of my sins, and have been redeemed of the Lord; behold I am born of the Spirit” (Mosiah 27:24).

Jonah’s story is also a story of conversion: a deep change in belief, attitude and action. Hold onto that. It matters later.

The same story, over and over

Once you know the shape, you find it everywhere.

Simba runs from his father’s death and his own guilt, and lives an easy life with no responsibilities. Then his father’s voice comes out of the night sky and cuts him down to nothing: “Remember who you are.” In that moment of complete defeat, the carefree cub dies and the king is born.

Scrooge is shown his own grave. The old Scrooge dies that night, and a new one wakes up on Christmas morning.

The Beast’s arrogance is only broken when he is defeated and nearly killed. Doctor Strange loses the hands that were his whole identity, and only then becomes something larger than a brilliant, arrogant surgeon. Moana reaches her lowest point, alone and ready to quit, before she finds out who she is.

Notice what dies in each of them. It’s almost always some form of immaturity: impulsiveness, selfishness, dodging responsibility, needing to be the center of attention, refusing to change. And notice what’s born. Each hero turns toward taking responsibility, carrying burdens, forming an identity and thinking long term.

None of them could be transformed without first being reduced to nothing. Over and over, it seems that a transcendent death is a prerequisite for meaningful transformation.

Classical rebirth requires death. Human rebirth follows the death of parts of us.

How transcendent death comes

In stories, the death is often literal, or nearly so. In real life it’s usually a part of us that dies: an identity, a certainty, a way of seeing.

Sometimes it’s forced on us. Defeat, humiliation, injury, sickness, the loss of something we were sure we couldn’t lose. Most of the heroes above didn’t ask for their destruction. It was thrust on them.

But it can also be chosen. Love can do it. So can compassion, learning something new, honest self-reflection, a relationship that changes you, or watching someone you love be reborn.

That’s why I named this essay after the phoenix. The heroes are mostly dragged into the fire. In the legend as it’s usually told, the phoenix walks into the fire on purpose and rises out of its own ashes. It shows that rebirth can be negotiated willingly, even sacredly.

Nature tells the same story more quietly. The caterpillar surrenders to the chrysalis and comes out as something else. Winter comes before spring. Every day ends in darkness before the next one starts.

Why we’re terrified of it

Now back to the puzzle. If rebirth is so universal and so hopeful, why do we fight it so hard?

Because rebirth requires death, and we fear death. For all the impulse in us to grow, there’s an equally strong, sometimes stronger, impulse to cling to the familiar. The known path is comfortable. The old self, even a cramped one, is the only self we’ve ever been. Letting it die feels like dying.

This is where I want to speak to both of my audiences at once.

To a believer, a convert going down into the water is a beautiful rebirth, and someone leaving the church is a loss. To many who leave, it’s exactly the opposite. But I’ve come to think every deconversion is a conversion at the same time, just seen from a different angle. Both people went into the belly of the fish. Both had something die there. Both came up different.

I’m not asking you to celebrate every change someone you love goes through. I’m asking you to recognize the shape of it. The pain you see in them may be the pain of something dying. It may also be the start of something being born.

Back to the water

That eight-year-old in white came up out of the font and was told they were a new person. It was a lovely thing to tell a child.

What I believe now is that the ritual was pointing at something real, and bigger than one ordinance. The seeds of divinity are in us. We are made with the capacity to transform, to metamorphose, again and again, long after we’ve dried off from our baptisms.

All we have to do is learn to let go.

If you want to know why stories like these grip us so hard, read Archetypes next. And if you want to know what was waiting for me after one of those deaths, it’s in Meaningness.