Baptismal Ecclesiology Revisited

Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, by Susan Gregg Gilmore

The title's of course a throwback to Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes. But seeing as how this book is about a small town in north Georgia where the only place for kids to go is Dairy Queen, and I live in a smaller town in south Georgia where Dairy Queen had no competition until last fall when we were blessed with a Taco Bell, I had to give it a try. The critics got this one wrong. It's more like a rough draft than a stellar literary debut.

The story you might have guessed. Girl grows up knowing no better foretaste of heaven than Dilly Bars at the DQ, though she lives for the day she can escape nowheresville and head off to Atlanta. Family circumstances mandate her return, and wouldn't you know she has an epiphany after the soda jerk at DQ explains what she's been missing in life.

In such a town one is expected to accept Jesus and be saved, then take part in a river baptism. Our heroine is pushed under the waves by her preacher father whom she suspects of complicity in her mother's drowning some years before. She acts out and acts up and winds up restricted from the DQ for the rest of the summer. All the way to heaven is anything but heaven.

The insistent voices who tell us that our spiritual lives are built upon the holiness of baptism and the community that rite engenders don't live in a small Georgia town trying to emerge from drowning in maudlin sentimentality. As one friend now a cathedral dean observes, "if that water's so great then why is the preacher wearing duck waders?" Baptism's an ordeal that everybody has to go through. When grace does happen, where it happens is Dairy Queen.