Seven Signs of the Lion

THE BEGGARS AT THE DOMINICAN CATHEDRAL

THE BEGGARS AT THE DOMINICAN CATHEDRAL

Nicholas decided to go to the Dominican Cathedral to church on a snowy February Sunday. The colorful word for February in Ukrainian is “liutiy,” meaning fierce or ferocious. And this Sunday morning was certainly a ferocious day in what was becoming a ferocious month. While Nicholas believed in God – he couldn’t believe such a wondrous world and universe created without a supreme being – he attended church just once in a while. It had just become too routine for him and less meaningful. And he felt he could express his faith in other ways. Faith for him was something personal, something inside him, and not a social event.

The walk was fairly long from his apartment – twenty-five minutes or so. It felt long because it was so cold. The church was filled with people. It felt warm inside, almost like a living, breathing being rather than a stone edifice – or to say it more precisely, it had an inner warmth – despite the fact that there was no discernable heating system or heat source. The combined 98.6 degrees of five or six hundred worshippers bundled up in fur, leather and other winter coats seemed to heat it up considerably along with the voices of the choir and people singing to accompany the choir. The hot breath of so many voices must have risen into the arches and filtered down. Everyone stood during the service in the Baroque cathedral with statues on the sides and an iconostasis. That was the icon screen dividing the corporeal world where he was from the celestial realm behind it. The choir was exquisite and at times gave Nicholas goose bumps when they hit certain notes and harmonies that rose up and bounced down from the rafters. He sang along with parts of the liturgy – snippets of passages he remembered from childhood. Some of the melodies were familiar, others very different from what he could recall. The only point of irritation for him was the constant shuffling of people past him in and out of the church. He tried hard to concentrate on the meaning of the service – and the readings about the Prodigal Son. He felt more than a bit prodigal in coming back to this place, his ancestral land. The origin, the source. The source of your life and being in spirit and in your genes. A hidden genetic code locked up in the smallest atoms inside you – that draws you back to your origins in dreams and in imagination.

When the liturgy ended, Nicholas began to walk out the door. There were three beggars there: an unkempt and dust-covered gypsy woman holding her just as dust-covered and seemingly intentionally smudged child, a robust teenage boy who looked as healthy as anyone with no immediately evident infirmities, and a stooped over sad oval-faced elderly woman in a faded but once colorful scarf. She must have been over eighty and her coat nearly as old as she – the shabbiest and most threadbare he had ever seen on a living human being.

The gypsy woman was screaming nearly hysterically in quite expressive Ukrainian at everyone to give her money to feed her child, who looked plump and not particularly ill nourished. The boy pulled out a laser-printed sign saying he needed money for an operation. But the sad-eyed woman just stood there silently, eyes downcast, holding a tin cup. Nicholas was immediately drawn to the old woman and reached into his pocket to pull out all the coins he had. They jingled as they fell into the cup. He had the urge to pull out even more money from his wallet, but the crowd pushing out of the church forced him outside too quickly to do that and shoved his hand upward by jostling his elbow from behind. The elderly threadbare and faded woman smiled at him as he passed, and a tear of gratitude trickled out of her left eye. He hadn’t given her that much money – a few hryvnas, a dollar or so at most, enough maybe to buy a half loaf of bread.

Might this have been his first test? A test of what though? He thought so because he felt energy pulsing in his mind and body, as though an electric current had been turned on inside him. It was as if the first sign of the lion wasn’t an object to be found at all, not a physical key, not a thing, but a thought or emotion or a lesson learned. He walked home tracing the same path he took to get there, completing a circle of his journey where he began. But though the circle was complete, he was somehow changed by it in a way he couldn’t yet understand.