Special Features The Tower Founded on The Word; continued from page 44 the people and everything and everybody who went before us, or even the children who’ll come after us.” Allie said, “Somebody found out I could read music and pretty soon I got drafted to sing in the choir. That’s where I really got to know Nina. She sang alto. I sang soprano. I listened, and I watched, and I learned. She was the church to me and she helped me find my place in the church.” The tower which you see building is myself, the Church. Allie saw the older woman participate in all the Church prescribed: Baptisms, Chrismations, Confession, Eucharistic preparation, the Fasts and Feasts, the life of the Liturgy, kindness to others, forgiveness, hospitality, struggling to live like she really believed and hoped in the life of the world to come. Nina told Allie, “I got one foot in this world, and I ain’t in a hurry, but I am curious to see where the other one ends up.” One day after Liturgy the priest talked with Allie about Baptism. He suggested Nina be her Godmother. “When Nina agreed,” Allie said, “I knew I had made the right decision. I wanted to honor her and by asking her, I also sort of wanted to say, ‘This community. These people. This church. This is where I want my home to be.’” Those square white stones which fitted exactly into each other, are apostles, bishops, teachers, and deacons, who have lived in Godly purity, and have acted as bishops and teachers and deacons chastely and reverently to the elect of God. Some of them have fallen asleep, and some still remain alive. And they have always agreed with each other, and been at
peace among themselves, and listened to each other. On account of this, they join exactly into the building of the tower. In uniting herself to the faith of the Church, Allie knew she had united herself to the faith of all those gone before: apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and all the saints she had heard mentioned by the priest in the prayers of the Liturgy. She sought God and through Nina and the people of faith, He had made it her faith too.
Fall 2018
“Nina stood with me.” Allie said. “The priest stood us at the door of the church facing the street and she spat on the devil with me. She held on to me real tight as we said the Creed. I was sort of shouting in defiance and crying at the same time. My voice wobbled all over the place. The priest poured oil into her hands and anointed me with it. And when it was all done, me and her were part of the same Eucharistic assembly. The same cup.” For the tower was founded on the Word of the Almighty and glorious Name and it is kept together by the invisible power of the Lord. Nina had a Prosphora stamp, a seal for imprinting the Holy Bread. Her family gave it to Allie when Nina died. “I started baking Holy Bread because of her.” Allie said. “I loved the way she used to talk about it. She used to say that when she kneaded the dough for it, she saw her mother’s hands. When I make it, I see hers.” Quotes from The Shepherd of Hermas, a Christian work of the late 1st or mid-2nd century, considered canonical Scripture by some of the early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus.
Glory and Mercy; continued from page 42 Translation: Edmund Hill, trans., The Works of Saint Augustine, part 3, vol. 9 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1994), p. 266.
2
Translation: Martha Vinson, trans., St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Select Orations (Washington, DC: The Catholic Unviersity of America Press, 2003), p. 42.
3
4
Translation: Vinson, Select Orations, p. 45.
5
Translation: Vinson, Select Orations, p. 59.
6
Translation: Vinson, Select Orations, p. 68.
Page 43
