Ilya froze.
He closed his eyes and dropped his head. The cold, dry wind fed the coldness in his heart as he carried the burden of guilt on his bent shoulders. Resurrectional bells pealed from the church tower, but in his mind rang only the harsh words he had spoken to his grandmother. Ahead of him, the call of family; behind him, the fading past. Why was Baba so stubborn, why did he always bear the burden of her disappointment?
Ilya turned and looked back at the house as the conflict tore at his soul. The soft light of candle and lamp through the windows triggered a childhood memory:
Decades ago, young Ilya had stirred from sleep and turned over in his bed. Snuggled up in his blanket and laying on his side, something compelled him to open his eyes. Half asleep, he remembered the darkness: a deep, moonless night outside, the glow of a small lampada the only illumination within. His family snored lightly in their nearby beds with cricket-song backdrop through the open windows.
Baba stood in front of the icon corner as she had hundreds of times before. A small, still lampada flame cast a warm glow on the faces of the icons there depicted: calm, holy countenances that stared with an intense peace. The eyes of each were welcoming even as they burned searing holes into the depths of her soul. A microcosm icon of humanity herself, Baba offered her down-turned eyes in response. She, the base, the clumsy flesh and blood, standing for a reckoning before the divine, the eternal spirits who, through the window of the icon, reached back towards—and into—her.
She held a prayer rope in her hand as she had countless times before: a counting aide of one hundred knots in black wool, each tied round with seven crosses. Legend has it that a great saint discovered this knotting technique when the demons kept untying his knots as he attempted to pray. As they now bind strong, so too did they bind and concentrate her attention. Knot by knot, prayer by prayer, she pulled them through her fingers, dropping her mind into her heart, stepwise, with their gentle rhythm. Not vain repetitions as are cautioned against, but a short prayer, a direct prayer: O Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. A prayer revered by Orthodox monastics who repeat it ceaselessly throughout their days; its simplicity belies its all-encompassing scope. It cries out the most essential request of prayer and invokes the fullness of the Divine in the right spirit of contrition suitable to such a bold petition.
Ilya barely heard her whispers, an intense cadence of mouth and lip sounds that seemed to intensify towards the center of each prayer before tapering at the end. These waves soothed Ilya’s mind and fixed all his senses on his Baba standing in that tiny corner of the universe.
Her prayers sang internally as a rhythmic tide, ebbing and flowing, lapping the shores of her soul. Sometimes distraction receded the waters; a rededicated attention beckoned those tides back in. At a certain point a small tension in her heart arose, like poking the ground to release the bubbling-up of a spring. Little by little it swelled, not from thoughts or imagination or forced feelings, but originating from the prayer itself. These waters of prayer became tears, first in her heart, later moving up to her eyes, all flowing from the Creator’s unearned grace as He prayed in and through her. She felt that Source of love within her next to her sinfulness, moving her to embrace a love for all people and for the Divine that resides within each and all. A warm soreness bloomed from her core as her heart was cracked open by this love. Through that crack rushed a flood of tears welling up like a spray of pressurized water with all the power of a dammed-up Ocean behind it, releasing so little—only what she could endure—but with an unstoppable force from its massive Source.
Ilya watched the steams of tears twinkling in the soft lampada light, running down her cheeks and soaking into the folds of the babushka around her neck. He remembered a deep sense of peace as the scene folded him into its grace, her head hanging lower and lower, teardrops now falling to the earth, lips and whispers intensifying. Ilya caught a faint glow emanating from her figure as if spilled down upon her by the lampada light, gently casting its illumination across the entire room and onto those who slept therein. He squinted, thinking that his sleepy eyes were playing tricks on him. Her phosphorescent glow remained.
She prostrated herself to the ground, muffled sobs and lip sounds absorbed into the floor. As Ilya’s eyes drooped, Baba’s prayers became sporadic. Finally, her soft snoring rose as incense from her exhaustion, still humbled—sound asleep—on the bare earth.
Her glow faded into the blackness. The lampada light continued to shine. Ilya drifted off to sleep, and the next day his young mind cast the whole experience as a dream.
Snapped out of his reverie by a gust of harsh wind, Ilya wondered now if it had been more real than he once believed. Across the road, the dark red glow from the house seemed to flash brighter for a bit, and Ilya blinked his eyes back into the present moment. He turned towards the church and picked up his pace, coaxed forward in his sullenness by the jubilant bells declaring the joy of the Resurrection.
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