Le weekend

Sorry to have been incommunicado over the weekend. We left on Friday after work for a quick trip down to St. Francisville. We were supposed to pull out at five for the long drive, but of course things in our house run on Dreher Standard Time, so we didn't actually get onto the interstate in Dallas till 7pm. Pulled into my mom and dad's driveway in south Louisiana at 2:15 am. Bless you, Red Bull.

I must say I prefer driving at night with kids, because they sleep. At one point, we were motoring through Acadiana on I-49, and all the kids were asleep, and Julie dozed in the passenger seat beside me. My iPod had just finished an episode of "This American Life," and for some reason the backlight wasn't working, so I wasn't able to see the screen to get another episode, or some other podcast. In frustration, I started pressing the wheel at random, and finally heard a sound coming out of the earbuds.

Of the hundreds of songs on my iPod, what should come out of the speakers but REM's "Nightswimming," which Julie and I have always considered our song (And what if there were two/Side by side in orbit, around the fairest sun?"). There I was, driving at night, not another car on the road, in the middle of nowhere, more or less, with the things -- which is to say, the people -- who mean the most to me in the world, all sleeping in the car I was piloting soundlessly through the hot summer night. That song, which my wife and I loved so much we wanted it played at our wedding for our first dance (though that plan fell through at the last minute, alas), playing there for me at that moment -- well, if felt like a benediction.

The next morning Julie and I woke up and hurried into town for the first-ever Divine Liturgy in my hometown. Fr. Matthew Jackson and some of his parishioners from Christ the Saviour Orthodox Church came over from McComb, Miss., to celebrate the liturgy in the Old Market Hall downtown. Julie joined the choir, which consisted of our pals David and Edie Varnado, and, well, Julie, who held sleeping Nora on her shoulder the whole time. Julie and I both agreed later that this liturgy was the most meaningful we'd ever participated in, each for our own personal reasons. For me, a big part of it was realizing that this 1819 building into which Christ was coming that morning in the Eucharist was once a place from which African slaves were bought and sold. During the liturgy, I prayed for the souls of those slaves, and for the souls of those who bought and sold them. I prayed for the descendants of the slaves and the slaveowners, and all of us who still suffer from the legacy of that evil. I prayed for forgiveness, and healing, and renewal. Who on earth would have figured that from an obscure place on earth where such evil went out, the Holy Spirit could be present in a special and literal way, through a liturgy written by a fourth-century bishop of Constantinople?

I so hope the little Orthodox mission in St. Francisville takes off. The liturgy took only an hour (afterward, I phoned a priest friend back at the Dallas cathedral, where the Sunday liturgy is 2 1/2 hours, and joshed, "Hey, what are y'all hiding from us?") And it was just magnificent. It was really interesting to me that almost everybody at the liturgy was younger than I (and I'm 41). There is an evident hunger among young Christian adults in that part of the country to explore the ancient Christian faith. It's amazing to my eyes to see this happen in my hometown.

We got to see my brother-in-law Mike over the weekend. He looks great -- very fit, certainly, but you can tell by looking in his face that he'd seen a lot. I asked him how he'd changed most over the past year, and when he finally answered, he said something profound. He said that he learned how little any one of us counts for in the world. He said that we mean everything to those who know us and love us, but a man could go out in the morning and be blown to bits by a roadside bomb, and "the mission would still go on." (I took him to mean mission in both a literal and metaphorical sense). That's wisdom -- in fact, it's the same wisdom as in Auden's famous poem about Icarus ("...everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster")

It was a shame to have to drive back home yesterday, so early. But that we did. Back to work. But what a special weekend it was, with family and friends and the faith. "These things they go away/Replaced by everyday."