Family is Formed

On a bright Sunday morning in February, shivering in a T-shirt and running shorts, I stepped into…the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York to catch my breath and warm up. Since I had not been in church for a long time, I was startled by my response to the worship in progress…the soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation, and the priest, a woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming the prayers in a clear resonant voice. As I stood watching, a thought came to me: Here is a family that knows how to face death.

Two days before, a team of doctors at Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, had performed a routine check up on our son, Mark, (age two and a half) a year and six months after his successful open-heart surgery. The physicians were shocked to find evidence of a rare lung disease. …they finally called us in to say that Mark had…an invariably fatal disease. How much time? I asked. "We don't know; a few months, a few years."

Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child. And here was a…community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope, perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable.

I was acutely aware that we met there driven by need and desire, yet sometimes I dared hope that such communion has the potential to transform us.

From the beginning (of the church's history) what attracted outsiders who walked into a gathering of Christians, as I did on that February morning was the presence of a group joined by spiritual power into an extended family.

By placing the drama of Jesus' death at the center of their sacred meal, his followers transformed what others would see as a total catastrophe…into religious paradox: 
In the depths of human defeat they claimed to find the victory of God.

     Elaine Pagels
     Beyond Belief