The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Baltimore Magazine. Barefoot girls hold a ribbon and loop around a maypole. There are pony rides, potato-sack races, even a live band as people celebrate the end of history.
In faded photographs of the community, I see people who are trying to live their lives halfway to heaven. We were actually trying to bring heaven into this world.
Along with others in the broader Catholic charismatic renewal, we believed that the Holy Spirit was pouring out right before our eyes. Because of our faithfulness, we were witnessing the breakthrough of the kingdom. I was born into the Lamb of God, one of the dozens of covenant communities to take root in the s when the charismatic renewal first swept the nation. By the late s, approximately families occupied the two-story homes in those neighborhoods or on their periphery.
Families were to limit television, secular news reading, even charity work. Men, in turn, were not to become too involved in domestic work or the more mundane routines of child-rearing. A music team worked the crowd into a zeal, then slowed the beat for adults to speak in tongues—ancient Hebrew, I was once told. Some went forward to deliver prophecies.
There really was a sense of spontaneity, though it seems many of the divinations had been pre-screened by Nodar. When I close my eyes, I can see and hear those prayer meetings. If I close them really tight, I can even slip back into their imaginal realm, outside of ordinary time and into a kind of deep time.
