immersion

I love this picture. Check out the Holy Spirit blowing in! 

I started the week and this post with high hopes of catching up with myself and not waiting a whole week before writing about the meditations from the last one. But it didn't happen, and my excuse this time is the dreaded annual Baptism of Our Lord children's service at Heilig Kreuz, which I was in charge of for the sixth (and I very much hope last) time. The last time I blogged about this, it turns out, was the very first time I did it. And this year was coincidentally a reprise of that service, without the child labor because it's hard to get my kids to darken the door of a church these days. But we again made the river Jordan out of blue baby blankets, acted out John baptising Jesus in it, then picked up the blankets and play-pretend they were "water." And then my script says that the blankets represent water but water, in baptism, represents something even bigger: something that, like water, helps wash us clean and and is important for life and can be tiny like a raindrop or enormous like the ocean. What could it be? 

At this point I got a sea of blank looks from the congregation. I *always* get blank looks from the congregation because audience participation is not a thing at church, even at kids' services, and ok also I am not the most charismatic of humans. But this part has always seemed to confuse my teammates, too, so...maybe my analogy here is not as brilliant as I'd like to think.

As I scanned the lifeless crowd and internally vowed never to do THIS again, one tiny kid raised her hand. And when I came over with the microphone she offered, in a little sweet voice, "Love."

Success! Woohooo!!!!!

At the end of the service the priest was supposed to invite everyone to pray the Lord's Prayer. Because a bunch of families from our Albanian sister community had registered to come, I had made a point of both printing the prayer in German on the song sheet and writing into the script that people could pray in their mother tongue if they wanted to. Still, I expected him to start in the usual way, "Vater Unser..." But no! He took off in his own mother tongue (Polish) and then everyone followed suit, in what languages I couldn't even say because it was such a mix but it was SO COOL. 

Afterwards we ate lunch and then decorated the blankets with fabric paint and that was a mess and chaotic craft projects are really truly not at all my strong point but I have survived to tell the tale.

And what does all this have to do with the spiritual exercises? Nothing and everything. More on that, I hope, next time.

It's a sign [to get a cookie].