The fire raced up their living room walls, blew out the windows and rained shards of glass onto the couple as they fled their Eagle Rock home for their lives on Feb. 4.
A few weeks later, while staying at a hotel in nearby Pasadena, Renèe Dominique and Brian Smith were walking their dog past an old Baptist church when they noticed a poster about Ash Wednesday — the Lenten journey that culminates on Easter Sunday. The poster read: “Remember you are dust; to dust you will return.”
“I said that is so apropos for where we are at,” said Dominique. Seeing a connection, Dominique and her partner of 28 years, Brian Smith, began attending First Baptist Church Pasadena, and have gone both Sundays since March 17, St. Patrick’s Day.
Whether it was the church’s poster about dust and ashes, the generosity of congregants and community members, or both, the couple is experiencing a self-described rebirth. It will continue at the central Pasadena church’s Easter Sunday service on March 31, the same day about 200 million Americans celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“The resurrection is new life,” said Dominique on Tuesday, March 26. “We feel like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. The Hindus say this: ‘You are not your mind, not your body, not your thoughts. Your spirit is more than that.’ That is the message of Easter: A promise of something else.”
Symbolism, whether in poetry, religious texts, or art and architecture, kept surfacing as Dominique, 58, and Smith, 63, pointed out little things that took on bigger meaning at the apartment in Old Pasadena where they’ll be staying for the next year as they pursue rebuilding their home.
Through three, west-facing windows, the sunset’s golden glow illuminated the metal frames, forming a cross in each window. “There are three windows. Three crosses, because Jesus was hung with two other people,” Dominique said.
Out of the ashes
On a foldout table now functioning as her desk, a…
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