Christ
the Lord is risen today…Allelujah!
-
Charles Wesley
The pink padded album lay among the things
I had received from my mother years ago.
The front says simply BABY. I
picked it up and carefully turned the pages.
Always before, I had given it merely a passing chuckle. When I walked, when I sat up, what I ate and
when I ate it had never held a lot of meaning for me. This time I paid attention. In Mom’s neat handwriting I found out a few
things about myself.
There was the usual stuff one finds in
a baby book…my progress through my first year of life and pictures of my
birthdays complete with cake and candles.
There were little notes about my first car ride and our train trips to
Texas and Illinois while Daddy was in the Army.
And then I saw a note that surprised and moved me. In slanted script on the side of a page, Mom
had written that I was christened on April 1…Easter Sunday, 1945.
Tucked in among the pages was something
I had always overlooked: a yellowed clipping from the local paper giving
details of the Easter service at Vero Beach Methodist Church. It’s one of the beauties of growing up in a
small town…the newspaper printed everything!
In this case, as part of a community drive related to the war effort,
our church had exceeded its goal. And
there, in the middle of that short article, it says that Sierra Sue Kennedy
(yes, that’s me!) was presented for baptism by her parents, Sgt. and Mrs.
Purnell Kennedy.
Mom’s little notation said that Daddy
was on furlough and we were home for Easter.
What did the world look like that April 1? One might be tempted to make a joke about
April Fool’s Day but that would be inappropriate. It wasn’t funny. It was a world of bizarre contrasts. There was a war on and my father was in
uniform. My parents stood before God and
the congregation and vowed to raise me in the nurture and admonition of the
Lord.
Most of us have seen photos or film of
that time: soldiers with guns and helmets in the midst of the rubble of a
battlefield, military parades, and banners heralding the fighting in places
never before heard of like Okinawa. But
in other parts of the world, Easter was celebrated as usual. Googling that date, I found images of
well-dressed women wearing furs and Easter bonnets strolling down Fifth Avenue
in New York. As those pictures proved,
the war raged and yet life went on. And
on that Sunday morning, a one-year-old baby girl was having water sprinkled on
her head in a white frame church on 16th Avenue in Vero Beach,
Florida.
Thus began my journey with Jesus to His
Cross and Eternity, though it would be years before my heart would begin to
understand and accept its meaning for my life.
As I write this, it’s the beginning of Easter weekend, 2018. Sunday is
April 1. Since 1945, this Christian Holy
Day has fallen on April 1 only once, in 1956.
It won’t happen again until 2029.
I would guess that of all the possible dates for Easter, April Fool’s
Day is likely the most memorable!
How interesting and timely that I discovered the information
about my baptism just months ago. To
consider the world as it was then and the world as it is now is both very
different yet much the same. Conflict
still grips the world, though not on the scale of 1945. The well-dressed women no longer wear furs,
and there will be very few bonnets among the faithful ladies come Sunday
morning. Hose and gloves have passed
from the scene, thankfully. The biggest
change is that my little white frame church was replaced in 1951 by a
Spanish-style sanctuary. Over the years,
it has grown into a campus of classrooms and social halls. The main thing, however, remains the main
thing: the focal point of our sanctuary is the large Cross hanging on the wall
above the altar.
Life moves on at a rapid pace. But for me, the center point was set
April 1, 1945.
-Photography by Jerry Doutrich
(Excerpt from forthcoming book:
Cradle and Cross: Observations on Christmas and Easter by Sue Holbrook)