By Susan Stevenot Sullivan, Staff Writer

MARIETTA--Everyone enters Transfiguration Church by the baptismal pool and font, which gurgles just inside the row of double doors opening into the church.

Parishioners pause to dip their fingers in the font as they enter the church for Mass or other gatherings.

On Holy Saturday evening 15 catechumens know as the “elect,” and one infant, all wearing Transfiguration sweatshirts, will enter the Church through the font and emerge drenched with new life.

After drying off, changing clothes and dressing in new white gowns made by parishioners they will then join the 46 candidates in further celebration of the sacraments of the Eucharist and confirmation.

The initiates rejoicing in a new phases of their faith journey during the Easter Vigil at Transfiguration April 15 include 29 children, six teenagers and 24 adults.

Their journey began in the year-round inquiry class for adults, or the children’s inquiry class, which follows a school-year schedule. Many have been blessed and dismissed from Sunday Mass before the Liturgy of the Eucharist for more than a year.

“When people feel compelled to change their religion, you ‘strike while the iron is hot.’” said Bill Garrity, director of the Order of Christian Initiation program at Transfiguration for the past five years. He said year-round inquiry classes and catechumen/candidate preparation classes provide essential welcoming and nurturing at the time the individual feels the call of faith.

After dismissal from Sunday Mass (the 8:15 a.m. Mass for children, the 10 a.m. Mass for adults) the candidates and catechumens meet in the family life center for two hours of classes and small group discussion.

“We do a lectionary-based and an educational component in the classes,” said Garrity, who is also pastoral advisory council chairperson at Transfiguration.

“If you do it right the readings lend themselves to the factual component,” Garrity said.

Adult classes are team taught in six-week blocks. Thursday night inquiry class teams, who guide the questioning process before the catechumen/candidate stage, also rotate. “That way there’s always a different flavor,” Garrity said. “They aren’t getting a view of the church according to one person.”

The children’s classes are grouped by grade levels. For those in grade three and up classes include a blend of Sunday Scripture and doctrinal information modeled after the adult classes, including two days of reflection with their families. Social and nutritional nourishment are provided as well, in the form of juice, crackers and conversation at a mid-class break.

“The children are wonderful,” said Deb Laraway, coordinator of the children’s OCI at Transfiguration for the last three years. “Everything is new to them, so you always see it new.”

Ms. Laraway hopes that the 35 children in the program feel cared about, feel free to say what they think and feel God’s love through the people in the community.

“I’d like them to feel a part of the community,” she said. “One of our catechists and three of our aides are junior high or high school students -- so the children see that young people aren’t just there to listen, they are contributing to the community.”

The children’s program is also structured to provide an understanding of the sacraments, Catholic Tradition, familiarity with Scripture and with the Mass, she said.

“We want them to want to receive the sacraments,” she added.

Both Ms. Laraway and Garrity agree that having simultaneous children and adult OCI programs results in diverse evangelization opportunities. This Easter’s class includes three mothers and their children.

“Consistently year in and year out we have parents of several children in the program come back into the church or come to the church as a result of their experience with the children’s OCI,” Garrity said.

Whether children or adults, the catechumens, whose crosses hang from a red ribbon, are living reminders to the congregation of their own development in faith.

The 8,000-member parish witnesses the journey of this group through months of regular dismissals from Sunday Mass to the rite of sending at the beginning of Lent to the three Sundays of scrutinies which precede Holy Week.

In addition to the sponsor assigned to each candidate and catechumen, at least twenty parishioners, from sponsor coordinator to hospitality person, help guide the adults and children through the process. While the intensive effort is the grasp of less than two dozen volunteer staff people, the congregation stretches out their hands in prayer over the initiates as each ritual milestone is reached.

In addition to the wearing of the characteristic crosses, the catechumens’ signatures are displayed in the Book of the Elect at the baptismal font. The catechumens’ and candidates’ pictures are hung in the entrance area. Their names are distributed on individual prayer cards to the congregation as a whole.

Garrity said the participants and parishioners are included in every ritual outlined in the OCI process, including the presentation of creeds and a final anointing on Holy Saturday morning.

The Easter Vigil liturgy Holy Saturday evening is the liturgical zenith of the year for the parish and “giant reunion” for former graduates of the program, Garrity said. Since large classes have been the norm for the last several years, the parish experience of the vigil has come to have an added dimension.

“Even the reception afterward is better and better attended because of those revisiting their own experience,” Garrity said. “Imagine being able to come back as an adult or a child or a family to celebrate your baptism as an experience that is well-remembered. You’ve never seen so many hugs and outright joyful expressions.

“It tells you the Lord is alive and well and living in the Catholic Church,” Garrity said.

The presence of the neophytes is felt long after their post-Easter classes, called mystagogia (six weeks for the adults and three weeks for the children) are completed.

OCI alumni can be found in the various choirs at Transfiguration. They are encharistic ministers, work with Habitat for Humanity and St. Vincent de Paul and serve on the pastoral advisory council. One alumna is part of the team which interprets each liturgy for the hearing impaired participants.

After a mandatory year-long break, some alumni become involved in the OCI again, this time as sponsors, Garrity said.

“With OCI it’s important to remember that Easter isn’t the end of the journey,” Garrity said. “It’s a disembarking point for another journey.”

According to Transfiguration’s pastor, Father Pat Bishop, the entire program, which is staffed by lay people, is based on an understanding of spirituality.

“Everything, I hope, is centered in personal relationship with Christ and his Church,” said Father Bishop, who has been pastor for five and a half years. “Bill is a very talented caring, extraordinarily dedicated person. He and his staff have a good understanding of what OCI is all about. The program predates me. It has a life of its own which is not dependent on the presence of the pastor, so people in this community are more aware of it and knowledgeable about it.”

“A priest in a parlor could not introduce people to the whole reality of parish life and Christian community,” Father Bishop continued. “By reason of their baptism lay people have a ministry to helping those who are coming into the church. OCI remains the avenue through which a person experiences what it means to be a Roman Catholic.”

Father Bishop said Transfiguration’s program could not function in a parish that was “not open to new leadership, evangilization or welcoming new people, gifts and talents or where there was a block of political power not to be shared.”

“This parish represents a fertile field for new life to grow,” he said. “The vast majority of the people in this parish are newer than I am. They are ready to extend welcome because welcome was extended to them.”