January 7, Baptism of the Lord (Mark 1:4-11)
Each January the lectionary invites us to remember the invisible network of faith.
Some years ago one of my parents was diagnosed with cancer. It was a routine, treatable cancer, but the very word, the C-ness of it, frightened me. Driving home I called a friend whose parent had died of a different cancer, and she patiently walked me through the worst-case scenario.
My parent would get sicker and sicker and need help doing things one would never want or imagine having one’s child do because it seems too embarrassing or intimate. But we’d get beyond that. I’d do the things such that they would become routine, and we’d find moments of macabre humor. And then my parent might die. And if that happened, my friend finished, I would become part of the population of children whose parents have died.
Years and treatments and clean scans later, I think of my friend’s statement: that there is a vast network of people whose parents have died, a tribe of sorts that exists and that someday I will join. I don’t think of it in any aspirational way, just as a matter of simple fact. There is a band of people with a shared experience all around me, and in time I too will know what they know and be one of them.
