Cupcakes for the Mother of God 8 comments

By Caroline Langston

August 15 was the Feast of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Eastern Orthodox calendar. It is the day that commemorates the death, or "falling-asleep," to use the common locution, of the Virgin Mary: unlike Catholics, Orthodox tend to hedge their bets on the Assumption—at least in terms of official dogma.

While it is a beautiful feast for Roman Catholics—as Jessica Mesman Griffith’s recent Good Letters post reveals—it is not a Holy Day of Obligation, as my Catholic convert brother reminded me on the phone. Really? I had to ask him more than once—how many Catholic churches have “Assumption” in their names?

But it is a strangely big holy day for the Orthodox, and comes at the end of a two-week period of fasting from meat and dairy that is also punctuated with sung services asking the help of the Mother of God.

The Dormition packs an emotional intensity for many Orthodox that far outweighs that of ostensibly more important feasts, like the Transfiguration, which precedes it by nine days. I have seen 75-year-old gruff Greek immigrant men well up in tears at the imagery used to describe this “God Bearer,” which is, of course, the literal translation of “Theotokos.”

As Jessica’s post detailed, the icon of the feast features Mary lying on her funeral bier, surrounding by the Apostles who had been mysteriously spirited from around the world to be present at her passing—the “sons” that Christ had commended to her care.

The fast culminates in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, at which Holy Communion is offered to the faithful, either on the morning of the feast day or at a vespers service the night before.

Reader, I missed all of it.

And why? Because my husband’s heavy metal band, Rome Apart, had an important gig at the Recher Theatre in Baltimore, and I needed to be there for him. Yia-yia was taking care of the children. I drank a club soda with lime and ended up leaving the venue with an open bar tab, and had to go back to pick up my credit card. I’d missed the vesperal liturgy at my church, 60 miles away in Washington, and by the time that Saturday morning arrived, I knew that I was going to be missing every other parish’s, as well.

So much for the celebration of the Feast I had intended.

Now, nobody could mistake me for being any kind of a religious legalist. I used to joke around that I was going to launch a blog called “The Orthodox Slacker” that would offer guidance on how to get through our meatless, dairyless Lent (McDonald’s French fries, anyone, now that they’re not fried in lard?), or which ethnic calendars allow beer and wine on fasting days. (The Russians consider beer “bread,” I was once told. Very convenient.)

But for the Feast to just come and go, unmarked and unobserved, made me profoundly sad. To do so seemed so contrary to everything I believe about how to live out my faith in the world: that intention is one thing, but in the end, it’s all about the practice.

There’s a great moment in Allegra Goodman’s 1998 novel Kaaterskill Falls in which Jeremy Kirshner, the genius and secularized son of Orthodox Jewish rabbi Rav Elijah Kirshner, scandalizes his more pious family members by arriving too late for the Friday night candle lighting that marks the beginning of the Sabbath:

The start of Shabbes is not a thing to be put off. Not a thing to be delayed. The moment comes, and either one is ready or not, either one observes the time or one does not. The moment comes once, and it is gone. Candle lighting is not delayed because someone is late. Shabbes is not an event like the theater or the train, for which it is simply rude or impractical to be late. There will be another show, or another train. There will be other times to meet one’s friends, but for candle lighting there is no other occasion. The time of candle lighting is a matter of readiness for God. And to be unready, to put candle lighting off, to delay, or simply to let other concerns govern the clock—that is an offense, that is truly a desecration....

And yes, I know that the Christian tradition has a different take on what constitutes observance than does Orthodox Judaism. Even the traditionalists among us tend not to fret too much about missing services for “a cause worthy of a blessing,” a phrase my husband and I have turned into a family cliché, so much so that we just call it a “CWOB” (kwob).

My mother, a disaffected Baptist in flight from the rural Southern legalism of her youth, was very fond of saying, when I was a child, that “You can worship God in your fishing boat just as easily as in the First Baptist Church.” She was right, of course. But what that meant in practice, though, was just that on Sunday mornings she got to watch Face the Nation in her nightgown.

As a result, she raised a child—me—who obsessively checks the New York Times website and reads political blogs all across the spectrum, from Crunchy Con to Daily Kos. Children live what they learn. Especially when children are concerned, it’s all about the practice.

But I don’t want my children to think that the Feasts are merely ideas, simply narratives in the religious story book. I once read an essay by Allegra Goodman in Real Simple about how she wanted Shabbes to be just as boring and long for her children as it had been for her—because now she looks back and see that this is how the faith came to her.

On the afternoon of the Dormition, after we’d missed all the services and not done the Fast, and there was no going back to be done, I put my five-year-old on a chair in the kitchen, and together we mixed up a bowl of vanilla cake batter. Seizing some inspiration out of nowhere, I let him crack eggs, and talked about the representations of Mary where she is like an egg, the symbol of new life who is “More Spacious than the Heavens.” I let him pour in the oil, and we talked about oil as a symbol of gladness. Everything seemed charged with meaning and everything, it seemed to me in that moment, can be made captive to our faith, to be brought under the authority of joy.

I watched him bite his lip as he leaned over and, with the exquisite precision of the training from his Montessori school, poured exactly even amounts of batter into the cupcake tins. He grew impatient waiting for them to come out of the oven, but when the moment finally arrived, the cupcakes were hot, and full, and sweet.