Holy Thursday with Tina

When I was a very young boy, before it was remodeled into part of a family room, a dark, narrow hallway separated two small bedrooms in my grandmother's basement. The hall ended at the storage area under the front porch, which we referred to as our grandfather's pantry - even though he'd been dead for more than a decade already.

On the east wall, just before the pantry, hung a large icon of the Crucifixion of Christ.

It looked something like this.

Lit by a small candle in a red holder, the images of the blood spewing from the centurion's stab wound, the wailing women, the anguish on His face captivated me. And frightened me. I hated being sent to that pantry because I knew I had to pass by the icon, even though my Aunt Tina told me time and again that I didn't have anything to fear.

So why am I sharing this? Two nights ago, Holy Thursday, I kept the vigil  at church reading psalms out loud in front of the cross with a crucified Jesus.

Ours looks similar to this one.

Since I live so close to Prophet Elias, I always take a "shift" after midnight. When I arrived at 1:00 a.m., two women were reading out loud. One left after a couple of minutes. The other woman and I read our alternating verses, until 2:00 a.m. when her parents arrived to pick her up. We were the last scheduled readers of the night. However, if I wanted to stay, she had keys and could lock the doors as she left. I chose to stay.

Turning off the lights in the narthex and exonarthex - leaving just the dim lights inside the church - she made sure I could exit through a side door, before locking the front doors behind her. I paused a second, keenly aware of my isolation. As the agonized image of Christ stared down at me, I started reading psalms - mostly about an angry, vengeful God.  My voice echoed off of the emptiness, and the doors rattled every time the wind blew.

The speed of my reading increased. It seemed to mimic my childhood feet rushing past the icon on the way to retrieve something from the pantry for my grandmother. It took me a minute to realize that I may have been by myself, but I wasn't alone. Call it fatigue, call it my imagination, but I'm sure I heard my Aunt Tina's voice reading every word with me.

That knowledge calmed me. I read for another 20 or 30 minutes, put the book of psalms on a pew, and quietly left the church.