This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Fatherhood Chronicles XXV: The Liturgy of Bedtime

We are not unique among parents. It is my suspicion that the Liturgy of Bedtime has been enacted since first Adam and Eve laid Cain down for the night. It spans cultures, geographies and histories. More than routine, it is a ritual which binds, bonds and bears the souls of mothers and fathers and their sons and daughters.

The Liturgy of Bedtime assumes various shapes, I'm sure. In our home it's relatively short and simple. We begin with a few minutes of massage. Head to toe, we envelope Sofie in the gentle scented glistening of oil and touch. She has come to expect this. Certain markers of the night and of our actions alert her to this fact: She will be held and caressed. From the first, then, Sofie has learned in a most tangible way, something about the Mystery of Our Lord's Incarnation. In the very first movements of our Liturgy, we have asserted a Christocentric shape.

After assuring her of our love and tenderness, she's given clean, new clothes: a dry and clean diaper; a soft footed sleeper or sleep dress and socks. She fusses a bit on getting dressed. I guess all babies like being naked.

Once she's dressed, she nurses. Not only is she assured of our love and tenderness, we have promised her, as we do each time we feed her, that she will have all her needs met. This, too, is an affirmation of Christ. It is the quintessential vanquishing of the Enemy in the desert.

While she feeds, her dad reads her a story. The tales and pictures speak of cinder-eyed cats, and colorful dinosaurs. We say goodnight to the moon and the socks in the corner. We guess how much we love one another. Sofie isn't too attentive to the stories. She's feeding after all. But we envelope her with words she does not yet understand. This, too, is a promise. For in invisible, not-yet-seen ways, these words will etch themselves in the grooves in her brain. She will, one day, as if by a miracle, for no one can really say how it happens, begin to say back to us all the thousands of words we have poured forth into her hearing.

And it is here, at this point, that in our home this Liturgy of the Bedtime asserts an ever more obvious Christocentric shape. For it is through these very words with which we speak to Sofie of cinder-eyed cats, of love as big as the moon, in these words she will come to know of the Word. God made flesh. Her Savior.

For the stories end, as they always do in our home, with prayer. Since it is Advent, we have begun to pray the anticipatory prayers of the promised Messiah, the hymns of Incarnate Love. We invoke the intercessions of our co-laborers in the faith, the Theotokos and all the Saints. In our Liturgy of the Bedtime, those in attendence are not merely us three, but there with us are three angels who watch over us and guard us, and with them all the heavenly host. There is St Benedict, and St Seraphim of Platina. There, of course, is Our Lady, the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. But most of all, there is the All-Holy and Life-giving Trinity.

And we know this through faith and the tangible blessing of the water in which our Savior was baptized, the water which gives us life and is our life. This water was that in which Sofie was enveloped for nine months. It is the water which suffuses the very core of her cells. And it is the water from which she will be reborn. Christ's baptism sanctifies all the waters of the world. And this water, too, is blessed, overtly, publicly, in the Theophanic Eucharist. This water is signed like a Cross on Sofie's forehead. And all the hosts of spiritual darkness are vanquished.

The Liturgy of Bedtime has concluded. An apocalyptic battle has been fought and won. And all because a little girl must be given the peace and time to rest and grow. So that one day, she, too, will come to know the Savior who gives her life, and whose myriad minions watch over her in sleep.

Heaven in the bedroom. The Liturgy of Bedtime.

Posted by Clifton at November 17, 2003 05:00 AM | TrackBack