Word of Your Faith
Father opens the screen door to the basement hall and unlocks the deadbolt of the wooden door. He allows me to pass him and step down into the surprisingly small room. The lights flip on behind me and there is a quiet buzz. This is not at all how I remember it. A flood of memories, like ghosts, charge towards me: The women in the kitchen, the endless tables of people, the choir in the upper right hand corner and the priest’s table in the upper left. As a kid, I would say this room held more than one hundred parishioners. They have all passed on since that time. Now, this quiet corner of time is a monument to a time long gone; visited now only by the remaining children and grandchildren occasionally on holy days. As I stand there, a word comes to mind.
My bloodline, like most American mutts, is a buffet of national dishes. My ancestors Hailed from Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, and Serbia. Mostly I am Swiss-German but The loudest faith tradition is Serbian Orthodox. In each family exists a generational word that winds back and forth through time’s spiritual arrow whose twists and turns of spikes and pillows we feel. A pull to stay the course Of faith or to come home Sometime in the future. Even if a new form is found.
Serbs have a word: Slava. It means glory. The saint of my ancestors, St. George, was baptized on the feast day of May 6th and he is my families Slava. Slava is passed from father to son across a thousand years or more, and existed before Christianity. It was later adopted with the Church. But, it was the women that were the teachers of the Slava tradition; the bread, the candle, the dead.
What can the world Slava mean to my grandmother who never worked the land; who, instead, worked at a manufacturing plant? Who only witnessed the “modified American” version. My grandmother knew this word. But her version of it could never hold quite the same meaning as it did for my great grandmother who suffered and worked the land In faith.
For my mother, it probably had no meaning At all. It was an annoying tradition, of many, that required her to a reason for dressing up like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird complete with a bruised knee. A time of cousins and of feeling untouched by God.
For me, it meant dinner at grandmas and not much else except a different table cloth and a new candle. There was no man to pass the tradition down. There was only her husband, a Pole. There was my uncle. Another Pole. and my uncles best friend, my dad, a German. Then there was me and my cousin. She had no sons. But, I believe she slated me to be the next keeper. But mom had other plans.
Glory and Celebration died a slow death in my family. It took 3 generations, but it hung like a stained tapestry out of a garbage can. Once it served but was never replaced and America was cleaning house. By the seventies it was almost entirely gone. By the closing of the mill in the nineteen-eighties, it was near death.
The tradition of Slava kept things alive. It was the cosmic cleaning service that made all things new. It brought spring renewal. Rebirth and along with it, a celebration of those that have been left behind. A lighting of a candle, the breaking of bread, The idol and the naming of those past.
I am too far from the tradition now to formally and knowledgeably hold a Slava. But, I am here to bring Glory and Celebration to my family who has felt buried for decades. I call upon my grandmother and her mother. On my great grandfather Milena. I thank them for trying. I scold them for not doing better.
It is time for a rebirth. I will hold Slava myself on May 6th. I will welcome the martyrdom of St. George and that he was willing to die for what he believed. By the way, the whole bit about the dragon and the maiden was something that came later to make the legend more interesting.
This is not a Christian newsletter. It is not a Buddhist or Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish newsletter. It is not a newsletter for people who have their faith figured out. It is a newsletter for people who are still carrying something and who suspect — correctly — that the carrying itself is a form of spiritual work.
Every tradition I draw from, I hold the way a guest holds something borrowed: with care, without possession, with gratitude for what it offers. My own practice is Quaker. I hold it lightly here. What matters more than any tradition is the question every tradition has learned to ask: what are you carrying, and what will you hand forward?
Reply to this email. Tell me one thing about what you were handed spiritually — wanted or not. I read every one.
