Vesture

 Make radiant the vesture of my soul. –Greek Orthodox Holy Monday Service

On Palm Sunday, also American Easter, the day started with my three year old grandson throwing up a blue peep all over my shirt. It continued with my knocking my cell phone into the tub while trying to clean up everybody who had been affected by the earlier incident–a cell phone that was already on the brink of dying because it had been chucked too many times in angry outbursts by one of our children. The day ended on the floor of my 12-year-old son’s room, holding him while he raged, wept over trauma that will never leave his soul.

On Holy Monday, I couldn’t find my Holy Week book, one of my prized possessions, a gift from my church when I was about 14. It has been years since I was able to experience Greek Orthodox Holy Week in person. I live three hours away from the closest Greek Orthodox church, and besides that, I left the church when I came out, and sealed the deal by marrying a woman.   Nevertheless, I return each year for Holy Week, and do my best to practice over a screen. 

So after everyone was in bed, I watched the Holy Monday service, paying attention to each detail, weeping inexplicably at this simple prayer: Make radiant the vesture of my soul.

A vesture is a garment, visible to the world. The soul–well, it is mystical, even mythical. In the Harry Potter books, it can be sucked out by dementors. In the psalms, it is grieving, afraid, lost–eventually finding rest in God. 

I told my mom once that I could feel my soul. She was washing carrots–why I remember that, I have no idea. She turned to me, a bit dazed, clearly unaware that I was in the kitchen. “Everyone can feel their soul,” she said simply, and went back to washing. 

I’m not sure if she was simply trying to normalize whatever angst she assumed I was sharing with her, or if the sentence was definitive, something she understood in a visceral way, that didn’t need a lot of words of explanation. 

Either way, it comforted me to know that whatever fiery sensation I experienced on occasion, like when I was helping someone out, or when I smelled the incense my yiayia threw into our furnace on Sundays, was normal. My soul was a real, living thing inside me. But it was also private, hidden, something nobody talked about much. 

So if the soul is the private place where we can hear the still, small voice, where we can feel authentic joy–what, exactly, was the vesture of the soul? What clothing does something invisible actually need? How could the soul be radiant? And why had this short sentence, which I’d never noticed before despite sitting with the Holy Week services every year, stuck with me? 

I pondered these questions as Holy Week dragged on. Every night, there was an emergency of some sort that prevented me from watching that night’s service. I missed the Hymn of Kassiani–I was working late to meet a critical deadline at work. I missed the service of repentance and oil–I was in the hospital, sitting beside one of my children in the ER, without a cell phone to let my supervisor or coworkers or the three people I was interviewing for summer jobs know I wasn’t available. At 2 p.m., after not having eaten all day, I gave up the fast and my beside vigil and went to the hospital cafeteria. I grabbed a crab meat sandwich with cheese and cheetos, not even bothering to look for a vegan option. 

I missed Holy Thursday evening, kissing Jesus’ feet as he hung on the cross–I was sending e-mails apologizing for all my missed meetings and helping the same child transition back home. 

Every night I looked for that Holy Week book, thinking maybe I could at least read a little from it each night even if watching the services wasn’t possible. It was nowhere to be found.

Before this Holy Week from hell had begun, I had been looking forward to celebrating Greek Easter at my in-law’s house. My spouse had worked on “American” Easter, when it was 25 degrees, and on Greek Easter, it was supposed to be 70. My in-laws have a beautiful property, and I couldn’t wait to spend the first real spring weekend outdoors. The kids couldn’t stop talking about the Easter egg hunt we would have when we got there, with Nana and Papa’s epic prizes. By Thursday, though, it became clear that there would be only one warm day this month–and that was Saturday. By Sunday, the temperature would dip again, and there might be snow.

So my spouse proposed we celebrate Greek Easter on Saturday instead of Sunday. It would solve a lot of other problems, like my daughter having to miss the dress rehearsal of her play, and another daughter missing an event she had been looking forward to. 

What the hell, I thought. I’m not keeping the fast anyway. What difference will it make?

I missed Friday morning and afternoon services–too much to do to catch up at work. On Friday night, I caught the Lamentations on my phone while lying beside my son in a rare moment of calm. As usual, when the girls in white circled Jesus’ body, which had been laid to rest in the beautifully decorated Epitaphion, anointing him with flower petals, I wept. My son laughed at me, saying, “Mama, you cry at everything.”

Somehow, on Saturday, everyone woke up in a good mood. We headed to my in-law’s. The kids hunted for Easter eggs on a balmy, though muddy, spring afternoon. They played with their prizes. We ate well–tsoureki my aunt had sent us, Greek dishes I’d made, a chicken rice hot dish and Minnesota “salad” from my mother-in-law for the kids. On the drive home, I held my spouse’s hand and said, “that was a perfect day.” I considered skipping the midnight Easter service altogether.

“I’ll watch it with you,” my spouse said, knowing full well there was no way I’d feel good later about missing it. So, after everyone was in bed, I assembled a makeshift altar, got a loaf of tsoureki I had made and a bottle of wine for makeshift communion. We logged on, but the service wasn’t there. A half hour in–still not there. We began to search for other services we could watch, with no luck. 

“Let’s just forget it,” I said.

“No, let’s wait awhile,” my spouse responded. “But, do we have to wait for communion to drink the wine? I mean, we’re at home…”

I grinned and opened the bottle. I poured us each a glass, and we toasted to finishing a week of utter hell, to a day that had gone blessedly well in comparison. 

And then, we both spit out the first sip.

“There’s something wrong with this wine,” she said.

“It tastes terrible,” I said, “but I thought maybe it’s because I just brushed my teeth?” 

“Well, I didn’t brush mine yet. No, it’s not your imagination. The wine’s bad.” She walked toward the kitchen. “I’ll dump this one and get us another bottle.” 

But, it had been months since we’d had anything to drink, and it turned out there wasn’t another bottle of wine. So instead, we opened some alcoholic seltzer–”Pomegranate ginger is close enough to the blood of Christ, right?” I said–and toasted again.

And then, suddenly, the screen came to life. The familiar pre-Pascal hymn began, and I began to cry, remembering my father singing this song as he wandered the house around Easter time. 

Then the priest from my childhood–the one who had come to our home after a visit from CPS, who had buried my father, and also, who had hurt me deeply as a teen, telling me the devil was the one putting questions about our faith into my head–took the pulpit and announced he was retiring. I gasped. “This is his last Easter,” I told my spouse. “I’m glad the video started working.” 

And then, as if he’d been following me around all week, he gave a pre-paschal sermon about radiance, even in times of great trouble and change–how we can carry the light of Christ into the world, how we can continue the long legacy of a church’s mission to serve in the center of the city for more than century. 

And then the screen grew dark, and a small light emerged in the center, and we lit our candle and sang and sang and I hugged my spouse and wept some more. 

When the priest read St. John Chrysostom’s Easter sermon, I wept even harder at the reassurance that all are invited to the feast, whether they kept the fast from the start or didn’t keep it at all. (Whether they were organized enough to know where to find their Holy Week book. Whether they lived close enough to a church to go. Whether they’d been kicked out of the church for marrying a woman. Whether they had made it to Holy Week services or not. Whether they could remember the last time they had actual communion or not).

Maybe the vesture of our souls is simply what holds them together–the cobbled memories, the small, sacred moments to which we return year after year, the comfort of ritual. Maybe the vesture of our souls is also what holds everything together, all the disparate parts of who we are. And if we can let it do its work, we can learn to live authentically, crossing each threshold with courage, walking through the dark night toward the small flame emerging from the altar, singing Christ is Risen even when everything seems lost.