Its On!!!

Much goodness and joy. After the kick off meal of crab, shrimp, brussels sprouts, San Pelegrino, and a 2006 Parducci sauvignon blanc(my fave non-bubbly white wine at the moment) we gathered around the icons, sang O Heavenly King" and read Genesis 3:1-15. And then we talked about what it meant.

I asked Anslem Samuel some questions about the facts of the story, a story he has heard hundreds of times, and he answered them. Then I began to explain what it meant. When I asked him what Gen. 3:15 meant he said he didn't know so Iexplained it to him. This prompted his mother to say "Every day I feel like we are getting closer and closer to having to talk about the birds and bees, and I'm not ready for that." I thought that was very funny.

One thing I noticed tonight, and I am a little suprised I hadn't noticed it before now, is that the very day Adam and Eve sinned he showed up to help them and give them the promise of a redeemer. Isn't that just like God?

Anyway, it is very important to me that the boys not grow up thinking that we do all the stuff we do just because we are Orthodox and that is what Orthodox do. I want them to know why we hold our hands the way we do when we make the sign of the Cross, why that bottom cross bar is tilted, why only clergy touch the altar, why the eggs are dyed red, and why we fast before the feast of the Nativity. So tonight I said this...

"For thousands and thousands and thousands of years we waited in darkness for that Seed, Jesus to be born. And we fast every year before Christmas to remind oursleves of that waiting. It is our way of reliving that long wait. Just as the Feast of the Nativity is our way of remembering that Jesus was born, the Nativity Fast is our way of remembering that long wait."

After that it was a zip up to San Francisco (traffic was horrible!) to receive the Holy Mystery of Confession and then home. (Anselm Samuel is sick so Athanasia stayed at home with the boys.)

While driving home I was tinking about Gen.3:15 and how in those years between that day and the birth of Jesus, and how God, like a horticulturist breeding the perfect plant, had tended the bloodlines that produced Mary, the one who would be His own Mother. And I wrote a poem. Forgive me, it isn't very good, and seems a little limricky. Maybe, when I'm done with school I'll take the idea and try to shape it into better meter and rhyme.

Wild plants, vines without stakes
Fiberous, crooked, and tough
A gardner chose hard labor
He pruned and croseed and watched
And after many years
The gardener crossed two plants
From that pair a flower grew
From that flower, alone, The Seed.