Yesterday I was searching for and admiring the art of Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin. Here is “Batiliman” (1940), from his Crimea travel landscape series. That was two years before the artist died of hunger, back in Leningrad during the Siege. His paintings give me the hope that in his final days the memory of those beautiful distant scenes were a great comfort to him.

That night in a dream, a Bilibin-style landscape appeared again, as a high summit under a clear sunny sky. But this scene was a pilgrimage site with an ancient whitewashed stone church. A church on level ground would have its rooms spread out side by side. On these rock cliffs the chambers and cells were stacked at facet angles instead, fashioned over many years and braced into the mountain.

Far uphill, there was one lone pilgrim carrying large parcels. Even at a distance there was no mistaking this sturdy vigorous woman with her braided crown of silver hair. It was our loved departed Mother N., by some miracle alive and well in a new country. She was striding along in her Sunday best, a sky-blue flowing silk dress and head scarf. In the dream it was clear that she was heading to the mountaintop ahead of the rest of us to clean and restore that church in honor of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, a place for our Orthodox congregation to gather for Liturgy.

It took an effort to catch up and keep up with her, and then I was too breathless to ask questions. But at least I helped carry the parcels for a while. One was a large planter of blooming red carnation plants for the church door. There were two large earthen jugs from the Holy Land. One held wine for Liturgy, and one held light sweet almond oil and attar of roses, for chrismations.

Following Mother was a tall snow-white long-haired llama, coming along to stay and guard the church. At first the llama made me feel afraid; those are powerful animals, dangerous when they want to be. But I reached out and touched his reins, and he fell in right beside me looking peaceable and content. 

   “Mother!” I asked her. “How is this possible, that you’re back here with us again?”

Mother was never one for chitchat when there was some place to go and work to be done. She and the llama forged ahead, and I was left on the path watching them go. As an answer to her wayward random Roman Catholic she only nodded toward the church with a word of good-humored reproof and a bright twinkling side glance: “Just come Home.”