By Caroline Langston
In what seems to be the way of most tragic circumstances these days, I first heard the news electronically. It was an ordinary Wednesday when I saw the e-mail from the church’s listserv:
It is with regret that I inform you of the falling asleep in the Lord of our parishioner Azin Naimi.
As you can read from the information I received and from the Washington Post article below, Azin passed away in a terrible tragedy.
I will forward any further information on services as soon as possible. Our condolences and prayers go to her Mother Mary and her family.
Attached to the e-mail was a photograph that pictured a lovely woman with masses of wavy dark hair, open eyes, and an exceptionally kind smile. I did not immediately recognize her: Our Antiochian Orthodox parish has some several hundred members—Syrians and Greeks and even a good number of ex-Protestants like me—who commute to the Divine Liturgy from all over the Washington, D.C., area, and beyond.
But whatever the parish lacks in intimacy, it makes up for in its bounteous warmth for all who come through its doors, its shared sense of family spirit. From the moment we first arrived at liturgy in 2006, we were welcomed with love: The ushers high-fived my son on his way down the aisle, even when he was a scrappy four-year-old in occupational therapy, unable to sit still for more than a few minutes. Last year, when Anna Maria was born, I couldn’t walk through coffee hour after church without elderly widows kissing my baby atop her head.
So I immediately hit the Washington Post link. I was taken not to an obituary but instead, to an article in the paper’s Metro section. I held my breath as I read the story, learning my first details about my fellow parishioner’s life along with her death: Azin Naimi was a painter; it was a Monday night; she walked to the studio she rented in an industrial area not far from her Rockville, Maryland home. There, for reasons that are not yet clear, she was murdered, it appeared, by a handyman of another business at the facility. The suspect dumped the body in a Washington, DC, alley but was picked up soon after.
May her memory be eternal, my lips pronounced: the Orthodox statement that all life is in God’s hands, forever, which is also an avowal that the particular image of God that is Azin Naimi shall also live forever.
May justice be done, I thought.
But in my heart I just kept thinking, How awful, how awful, how awful. And because I did not know her, because of the preoccupations and cares of my life, I put the news out of mind. Still, though, the sense of something out of order in creation continued to pull at me like an undertow.
The next Sunday at the end of the Liturgy, Fr. George strode to the lectern on the marble solea. He is a great bear of a man, nearing the fiftieth anniversary of his priesthood, a grandfather who had a houseful of sons. And he is the kindliest priest I’d ever encountered in the Confessional, even when handing down a penance.
That day, he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him. He began to recount the story of Azin for those of us who had not known her: She was forty-five years old, Iranian by birth, and of Muslim background. She was widely-traveled and an art history expert, in addition to her painting. Some years before, she had desired to be baptized and chrismated in the Orthodox Christian faith, and Fr. George had done so. She had painted beautiful canvases of Jesus and Mary, in addition to landscapes and portraiture. Several times during his talk, I could hear in his voice the sound of tears.
The funeral was that night. I couldn’t go. (Ambassador Connie Morella, however, managed to get there just she returned from a trip, and gave a moving eulogy; she had known Azin well since she had worked with Azin’s mother, Mary Bazargan.)
But all week I thought off and on about Azin. I wondered about her background and how it had led to her faith. Most of the Iranians I’ve known have been largely secular, but still: What a leap to go from a culture that has traditionally shunned images to the florid panorama of our church’s iconography, the saints spiraling up our walls and overhead?
This Sunday, as we celebrated a nine-day cycle of memorial prayers after Liturgy, Fr. George told us more. She had first encountered icons as an art dealer, and she began to believe that she was encountering God and his Mother through them. In the past year, she had thrown herself into charity, into the life of our parish community, cooking kibbee for the Fall Bazaar and so much more.
(“Don’t you remember, she sat right in front of us two weeks ago?” my husband said when I pointed out her picture.)
So many things kept going through my head: For her to die, in this particularly horrible way, felt like a tear, a rent, in the Body of Christ—one that we felt more sharply, more acutely than our usual griefs.
Unlike the murder described in A.G. Harmon’s post a couple of weeks ago, in which he indicted the officiant for calling for forgiveness before mourning, grief, and justice could actually take place, nobody at church this morning was ready to forgive.
Instead, we mourned—those who knew her, and those like me, who did not. (Letters of condolence were sent by President Obama and Congressman Chris Van Hollen.)
We prayed over the silver tray of memorial wheat that symbolizes the new life that rises from the ashes of the grave.
At coffee hour, we shared cups of the honey-dusted wheat, scattered with Jordan almonds, and studded with chocolates that offered a burst of unexpected sweetness. Someone had arrayed Nazin’s paintings across the parish hall stage, and all of us looked at them, at the portraits of Jesus and Mary, at the rich European landscapes.
We looked at them, and marveled at their brightness.
thanks. Mary