[Note: In preparation for continuing the series, I am reposting the "final" (and very slightly revised) entry to the series of posts I'd completed in March 2004 about our journey to Antioch (as part of my Pilgrim Essays). The previous version of this series of posts--up to this entry--is available in a single html document here. I will be adding subsequent entries which will be incorporated in a future revision. The entire series of these blog posts can be found here.]
3. Orthodox Encounters June 2002 to September 2003 (Part G)
The summer of 2003 was marked by one thing and one thing alone: the anticipation of Sofie's birth, followed by its fulfillment. Of course, I still attended All Saints, this time more faithfully and regularly than before. Anna's protests were much more muted and infrequent. Our discussions about Orthodoxy, and All Saints, were much more open and honest. They were discussions, rather than the repetition of entrenched positions.
Though unsurprising, the actions of the Episcopal Church's General Convention--the ratification of the election of a divorced man in an open homosexual relationship, and the official permission to conduct same sex unions--brought into sharp focus the distinctions which the Orthodox Church offered. This was especially vital in relation to not merely the Episcopal Church but nearly all of the churches about which we had inquired or had visited.
Finally, 14 August came and Sofie was born. It was among the two or three most transformative experiences I'd been through in my entire life. Anna graciously acquiesced to my request for Father Patrick to come and say a prayer of blessing over Sofie. So, the next day, before Sofie was a full twenty-four hours old, Father Patrick and Khouria Denise arrived, with a beautiful gift of a pink dress, to pray over Sofie and share our joy.
For the next several weeks, I urged Anna to go with me to All Saints, trying to balance my desire to bring Sofie to church so as to stand before the icon of the Theotokos and offer my thanks, and trying also to not push Anna beyond where she was willing to go. I continued to go to All Saints, however, and Anna did not any longer give voice to her objections.
Then came September, the month when things turned the corner for the Healy household.
The Saturday before my birthday, the three of us had been running errands and were on the way back home. Out of nowhere, and a propos of nothing, Anna said, "We should make All Saints our regular church home." I voiced a humble agreement, but wisely refrained from saying much else.
Sunday morning came, my thirty-sixth birthday, and, silently rejoicing within, the Healy's got ready for worship, piled into the car and headed to All Saints.
I wrote about it at the time:
Today, my wife, Anna, and our daughter, Sofie, worshipped together at All Saints Orthodox Church. For Anna, it was her third worship at All Saints (her fourth Divine Liturgy all told). For Sofie, it was the first time she worshipped with her mommy and daddy at the Divine Liturgy. It was positively the best birthday present I could have ever received.Sofie slept peacefully through the first part of the service. Then during the Litany prayed with the Procession of the Bread and the Wine, she took part in the blessing of the children. It is the custom at All Saints for Father Patrick to place the Chalice over the heads of all the children, one at a time, and pray "May the Lord our God remember you in His Kingdom, always, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen." Sofie woke then, as we took her slumbering self from the car seat, so that I could hold her for Father Patrick's blessing. Anna then took her down to the nursery to feed her. Sofie continued to sleep through the rest of the service.
Then, when the parishioners went to commune the Holy Gifts, I took Sofie from Anna and headed forward to receive the blessing. It wasn't until just before I stood in front of Father Patrick that I realized Anna had slipped out of the pew and followed behind me. Anna's never done that before. So there we were, a family, each one at a time receiving from God's priest the merciful blessings of our Lord.
From that first Sunday worshipping together as a family, Anna and I began to settle, as best we could, into the parish life of All Saints, though we were still inquirers, and with no immediate intentions as a family to become Orthodox. It is a great testimony to the parish itself that we were never made to feel second-class, or somehow less Christian than anyone else there. We could not, obviously, partake of the Sacraments, but we joined in as many of the services as we could. The young women and mothers of the parish enfolded Anna into their circle and became a very important support group.
The next three years would be a mix of drawing ever closer to Orthodoxy as well as experiencing some of the most severe forms of testing we could have imagined.
[Next: 4. Encountering Living Orthodoxy, September 2003 to November 2006 (Part A)]
With a dash of romance to spice it up!
It has been almost a year and a half since I last posted on my journey to Antioch, that is to say, my journey to Orthodoxy. There are good reasons for that. When one writes a narrative, even an autobiographical one, markers are needed to advance the plot. But such markers that one can write and can be read must be in some way distinctive, markable. There needs to be a clear "before" and "after." That's hard to do when the way God normally works on hearts and lives is by invisibly small incremental steps. Those incremental steps have been happening. But they have been hard to discern even after the fact.
Tuesday night was one of those incremental steps. Lately, Anna has been asking more questions about the Orthodox Church, and Tuesday night there was a bunch of them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Being parents of a twenty-eight-month old and a four-month old, we have hit that "haven't been out on the town in ages" epoch of marriage. I seem to recall that Olivia babysat Sofie for us something like a year ago when we went to a party in the neighborhood. And one of us has stayed home with the girls while the other went out. Anna typically goes to Target to restock supplies. I recently went to a manly man gathering of several of the manly men of the parish. Well, Tuesday night Anna secured the babysitting services of Sarah and we went all of four or five blocks from home to eat at an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood.
As we hit the sidewalk I reached out my hand and said to Goodwife Healy, "If'n we're gonna be on a date 'n all, we're gonna hold hands." She laughed and replied, "That's right. We aren't holding any babies, carrying any diapers bags or pushing any strollers!" So we walked and held hands all the way to the restaurant. Very nice.
Through the meal we talked about all sorts of stuff, like, um, what was going on--or not as the case may be--with my dissertation proposal. Gulp. But we also talked quite a bit about Orthodoxy. What about prayers to the saints? What about those Christians not in the Orthodox Church? What about sponsors and godparents? How does all that work? She wanted a history of the Orthodox Church. Where did it come from, where has it been all these centuries? She is open to it all. She hasn't found any thing that would cause any real problems, but she just wants to understand it. Well, there is one problem. Formal membership in any church. Why is it necessary? If one is a Christian, why does it matter? Why isn't one a member of every church simply by virtue of being a Christian?
Understandable that. We both come from your typical branch theory/spiritual Church Protestantism. We also both come from a shared history of some pretty awful treatment by fellow Christians where we served. These are things that take time to wrestle with.
But it was a good talk. The Lord is bringing greater unity of faith in our home.
And, really, Anna is just plain a remarkable woman. God knew I needed the finest if I was ever going to be saved. I've got it. May I never ever forget it.
It's time to take stock once more of the developments of the last few months. The last entry in the series, brought things up to mid-March (although I added this mid-April post summarizing our activities during the Triduum and Pascha, since that was also a significant step along the journey toward Orthodoxy). At that point, the Healy's as a family were going regularly to Sunday Liturgy, Anna had gotten involved in the moms-and-tots group, and I was reading St. Theophan the Recluse's The Spiritual Life with some of the men of the parish.
And in the last few weeks, I've been granted some significant glimpses of Anna's journey.
In the last month, Anna and I have decided that Sunday Liturgy was not enough. I mentioned to Anna that we should also go to either the Wednesday Vespers service, or the one on Saturday, and any of the major feast days. She agreed. But while I suggested only one of the two Vespers service, she decided on her own that we should go to all the services each week. So we have done so. It's been great. Anna's been exposed to more Orthodox worship and teaching--and she gets the added bonus of deeper connections with the women of the parish.
Back on 18 May, I noted how one of the prayers of St. John the Wonder-worker for us had been answered. At the time, I had blurted out to Sofie and Anna, "See the saints do pray for us!" Anna remarked later that the thought of praying to the saints just "sort of creeped her out."
However, only a couple of weeks later, riding home from a Memorial Day gathering, we talked again about the saints and prayers. I had in the previous week made mention to Anna that I wanted to obtain an icon of St. Michael the Archangel to have blessed and put outside our front door. On the ride home from the celebrations, she asked me about how large was the icon I had in mind. I told her. She then asked me who the patron saint of fertility was. I told her I didn't know. She replied that I should find out, we should get the icon, have it blessed, and send it to our friends--themselves traditional Christians--who are trying to conceive. From "sort of creeped out" to "let's get an icon of the patron saint of fertility" in a couple of weeks.
Also recently, there have been some things I've noticed, though I've not approached Anna about them. Coming home from work one afternoon, Anna and Sofie were taking a nap, so I decided to sit down at the computer and check email. Anna had left open the browser she'd been using to surf the web. The last site she'd viewed was Traditional Byzantine Iconography. (This past week in the Liturgy, she said to me that according to what she'd read on the web, the blessing of an icon was redundant, since all sorts of holy preparations and prayers of blessing go into the making of an icon. I cocked an eyebrow and said, "Oh, well, we'll have them blessed anyway." Besides, I didn't know if this applied to reproductions of icons pasted on wood--which is the only sort of icon we have at home, and can afford, anyway.)
I also noticed that after the last moms-and-tots group, she'd come home with a Conciliar Press pamphlet on infant baptism. This was apparently something she'd wandered into the nave and over to the tract rack to pick up (though she may have gotten a copy of it from Khouria). Sofie's baptism is something we've discussed before, and something to which she is open. Though the last time we talked, she wasn't convinced of its practice. Perhaps that is changing.
This last item I am about to note, however, I did not, myself, witness, but was told it by Father when I met with him last week. That same day of the moms-and-tots meeting, he'd come into the church (to, I presume, pray the hours). He told me that he noticed Anna kneeling in prayer before the Royal Doors. She was alone, and apparently unaware that Father was there. I have no idea for what Anna was praying--healing for her brother, the ability to conceive a healthy child for our friends, adequate income to pay our bills, wisdom for us to know when to conceive our next child, the truth of Orthodoxy? And while Anna is a deeply faithful woman, she's not given to kneeling as a bodily posture for prayer.
So the Holy Trinity is working in the Healy family both in ways I can see and in unseen ways. Though part of me wants very much to talk to Anna about all these things, by the same token, given my ham-handedness in dealing with delicate matters I am holding off lest I snuff out a smouldering wick. Anna is very honest and forthright. She won't hesitate to ask me questions when she's ready. But I suspect that Khouria will be the one to help my wife with her particular journey.
Still, that image of Anna praying before the Royal Doors, much as our holy mother Hannah did in the tabernacle, is one that will live in my imagination.
Christ is risen!
The Healy's began their part of the intensive Orthodox Holy Week services with Good Friday Matins, which was celebrated Thursday evening. The Twelve Gospels are read and hymns sung for what was a liturgy lasting more than two and a half hours. During this service--in which the entire nave is dark, save for candlelight--a procession is made with the crucifix (a large cross on which the icon body of Christ is nailed) through the congregation. We slowly sing, "Today He Who hung the earth upon the waters is hung on the tree./The King of the angels is decked with a crown of thorns./He Who wraps the heavens in clouds is wrapped in the purple of mockery./He Who freed Adam in the Jordan is slapped on the face./The Bridegroom of the Church is affixed to the Cross with nails./The Son of the Virgin is pierced by a spear." I wept. Nothing spectacular, but the tears just kept coming, despite my efforts to maintain some decorum. When we venerated the crucifix at the end, the tears came again. Anna asked me, "Are you alright?" I said, "Yes," but was still on the verge of more tears on the ride home.
On Friday, we went to Good Friday Vespers at 3pm, then to Great and Holy Saturday Matins later that evening. Vespers were much less emotional, but still powerful. During the service, the burial shroud and a large icon of the burial are placed on a bier (decorated with red and white carnations and red roses), which we later venerated. Nelson asked me after service if I would be one of the men to carry the bier that evening during the Great and Holy Saturday Matins. I agreed, but inwardly I could only reflect on how unworthy I was to function as a "pall bearer" for Christ. Matins came, and I carried the bier. I was very near tears most of the time, but maintained an appropriate humility (I think). When we all went home after the service, it had been a long day. Sofie had done well, and Anna remained in good spirits. We slept the sleep of the exhausted.
On Great and Holy Saturday, we went to the Vesperal Divine Liturgy in the Morning. This was yet another moving service. One humurous point was when some of the parish young women went through the congregation and tossed out bay leaves over the worshippers. Sofie was slightly distressed by the loud rustling noise of all the leaves, but she never cried, and we held her and reassured her everything was okay. (Then spent the rest of the time trying to keep her from eating the leaves!)
The culmination of it all, however, was the Paschal Matins followed by the Paschal Divine Liturgy. Anna was somewhat incredulous about worshipping the Lord's Resurrection in the middle of the night. And truth be told, a four-hour long service, during the time she and I (and, I hasten to add, Sofie) are normally asleep, does cause one to ask certain questions. But the service was powerful. From the pitch-darkness prior to lighting the Paschal Candle and the resulting growing light as more and more of us lighted our tapers from its light passed on to us from others, to the procession around the temple as we went to the Tomb of our Lord, to the knocking on the temple doors, to St. John Chrysostom's Paschal Homily, to the joyous repetitions of the Paschal greeting, to the serving of the Great and Holy Mysteries and the blessing of the paschal baskets, to the feasting afterwards--it was one of the most joyous celebrations of the Lord's Resurrection I've ever been to. It was Sofie's first Easter. The first Easter that our family celebrated in an Orthodox Church. When Anna, Sofie and I fell asleep--exhausted and refreshed all at once--sometime between 4:30am and 5:00am, I could truthfully say, "That's how you do Easter!" Through the day yesterday, as we shared Easter greetings with our family, it was great to hear Anna tell her family about the services in tones of joy and admiraton. God is working. May His Name always be praised.
What a blessed, blessed group of days.