Thor's Day: Trinity

Lego churches

Three churches

By Morris Dean

Because it was Sunday, our rendezvous with my wife's cousin and his family was going to be at their Church of Christ a few miles south of Baltimore. To get there by 1 p.m. from where we live , we got up at 3:30 and left the house at about 5:05. We had been making good time when I took the wheel for another turn at driving, so it looked as though we were going to get there on time despite the growing apprehension I was feeling at the thought of having to darken the doorway of a hard-core Christian church. For surely they weren't just going to come out into the parking lot and we all just drive off together. We were probably going to have to go in and mill around for a while, especially since it had been about ten years since we'd been up to see them.
    I parked at about 12:45, and we sat for a while looking at people coming out. No recognizable cousins emerged, so my wife called him. He came out, we got out of our car and went over to greet him, then followed him back into the vestibule, which was jam-packed with adults and children, white, black, brown, and yellow—a promising cross-section of humanity.
    Not too bad, I was already thinking and feeling, just people, parents, grandparents, and children. Great grandparents, in fact, for some of the great grandchildren were my wife's cousin's. I fell easily into bantering mode, and no one said anything I caught about religion or anything remotely religious...until my wife's cousin informed us that his son to whose house we had been going to proceed for lunch (or Sunday dinner) had "had to go over to Washington to participate in a Tea Party demonstration." This was the weekend before the resolution of the government shutdown, and, as everyone who was following Congress knew, things had become very religious indeed.
    A church that nourishes Tea Party activism seems to me to be perverting the humanitarian spirit that has informed the best traditions of the Christian Church.

In Baltimore the next morning, after spending the preceding afternoon with the cousins, who are very nice people you wouldn't suspect of far-right sympathies so long as you talked about family roots in Indiana and whatever happened to this relative or that, we awoke to a slightly overcast morning at Henderson's Wharf. If we could have opened a window in our ground-floor room, we would have been able to step right onto a boardwalk along the harbor and (though we didn't know it at the time) walk several miles along the harbor, if you counted up the miles in both directions.

Our first sighting of the spires

    Because we had to exit by the Inn's front door, the prospect eastward beckoned, so after breakfast we set out that way for a walk. After not many turns we saw some vaguely church-looking gold spires in the distance and I guessed it was an Eastern orthodox church. "Or maybe Russian," my wife offered. "I wonder how far it is," I said.
    Turned out it wasn't very far, less than a mile anyway. As we approached it up a street from near the water that we could see seemed to lead to it, the gold globules shone and I took some pictures.

Still several blocks away, I reckoned

Remembering the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Eastern Orthodox Sofia, I was imagining a huge edifice and expected to discover that it was still several blocks away until we passed an intervening building and there it was, less than a block away and of modest proportions.

But only one more block and there it was

St. Michael Ukranian Catholic Church! My wife was very close to right.

The church was surrounded by a metal fence, all gates padlocked;
this was as close as I could get

    And what was that prominently named on the last line of its bulletin board?

Cropped (I was no closer to this than to the other sign)

    Pyrohy! That sounded so familiar, I thought of something edible with a similar name in Bulgaria. Perogie? Indeed, we learned later from a building contractor engaged on a project nearby, it is indeed food. "I always buy a dozen," he said enthusiastically. He was Ukranian, he said. (Later I learned that pyrohy is plural for pirog or phyih, and here's a photo from Wikipedia.)

Fish pirog

    A community gathering place, a place to eat and socialize and make community arrangements—perhaps its primary function, and arguably more important than anything theological.

On the third day, so help me, I found myself looking for yet another church. The writing spirit in me sought a trinity to serve a column that my muse was already working on.
    Once again, one presented itself as nearly the first order of the day. We were walking along So. Ann Street (which I was even mis-reading as Saint Ann Street), when we realized that the tall brick building we were walking by seemed—by its spire we had to crane our necks to see—to be a church. Here's an aerial photo, from 2006 or earlier (below), of its whole block [for history, see "Holy Mess: The Battle over St. Stanislaus," posted by Laura Laing, June 7, 2006].

    And then I saw the see-through image on the front door (inset photo above right). A physical fitness enterprise might have adopted "Sanctuary" for its official name simply because a fine church building came on the real estate market. But I think it more likely (or I would prefer to believe) that its proprietors had a spiritual bent that tended toward the natural rather than the supernatural and had named their business "Sanctuary Body Works" from the get-go, the former St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church's coming on the market being a lucky happenstance. Providential, purely metaphorically speaking.

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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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