interesting times they are achanging

It was Lazarus Saturday.

Standing in the area adjoining the Nave, the incense smell reminded me of shops we used to stop at on summer vacation, traveling down the coast to California in Aunt Janie and Uncle Larry’s brown, paneled station wagon. We kids would surge into souvenir places in the towns near our campgrounds, trailing up aisles of curios, sniffing incense from back rooms where a black light illuminated expensive T-shirts.

Victoria, my daughter, never got to go on such extended vacations. We didn’t even take our kids to Disneyland. She has found a place of belonging each time she sets foot inside the door of this building, beneath minarets bluer than her father’s eyes. The people are becoming her family, and I am releasing her to them.

I’m given a precious gift of seeing that her choice of them is no rejection of me, of us (though her brother struggles with her going and worshiping in a different community, and I guess I still do, too, some days).

They care for her. The women arriving, the Lazarus Saturday morning of her baptism, were dressed in various stages of femininity. I clutched Victoria’s blue scarf along with my red knit hat that a dear friend made for me winter before last. The scarf felt like wadded tissue next to the soft hat yarn. We females put on our head coverings before entering the Nave for the liturgy’s beginning.

Later, in a metal tub in the yard behind St. John’s, water steamed. The catacumens gathered. Victoria and Hannah earlier had compared their neon-bright flip-flops. The youngest boy, a toddler, had squirmed and become noisier throughout the liturgy. In chill air his earnest wails rose. All continued matter-of-factly, gently. The boy was dunked in his mother’s arms as she knelt and bowed forward, three times. Victoria came into the water. She received her baptismal name, Nina (for St. Nina of Georgia – no, not the state). She bowed and went under three times before Father David, to whom she has given allegiance as she gazes beyond him to the Almighty Father, the maker of heaven and earth.

The little boy, as he’d come out of the water, had been immediately covered round about by a blue towel. Above us white clouds had continued parting all morning, letting sunshine through. The boy, Michael, ceased his wailing and beneath dripping curls, in mild perplexment, gazed skyward, his face alight.

Cameras flashed. I’d forgotten mine.

We went back into the Nave. The liturgy resumed.

On top of Spencer Butte the next morning at 6:32, the clouds hung gray to the east, a blanket pulled lengthwise and not allowing one peep at purples and oranges of an extinguished sunrise. I took pictures.

Unvanquished, we six among the wet rocks sipped water, coffee, and cocoa and sang Christ the Lord is Risen Today. Climbing down afterward Tim and I observed the litany of the graveled pathways between slippery stones. Lower down, we paused for a doe, allowing her passage across the trail ahead.

We went sleepy to church – to grace that is greater than all my sin – to a teacher (Father only to his children) who led communion from his own translation/interpretation of the Greek.

Nina wore a white robe to liturgy at St. John’s.