“The simple elegance of the service had been a good match for my head,” Livingston writes, “but the tangled mess of my heart longed for something else. ‘I need a statue of a saint,’ I joked, but [my husband and I] both understood that a statue was shorthand for many things.’”
“Jewish custom required that a male child be circumcised on his eighth day after birth. Everyone seemed to think the baby should be named Zechariah, after his father, but Elizabeth told them that the child’s name would be John. What a kerfluffle that made! Children were usually named after their father or at least a deceased relative so that the child would carry on the name, but there was no one called Yochanan in the family so why would they name him “Jehovah has been gracious” or “has shown great favor” (the meanings of the name in Hebrew)?”
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