Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [28]
Spread out before him in that stodgy, cavernous, and darkly ornate old church was the self-assured, fully clothed congregation: those spiteful, glowering, bitter, haughty, and arrogant nuns; and the priests, always striking a benign and beneficent pose but ever vigilant, like quiet lieutenants of an unseen or unknown commander. Before them all, dressed in their sanctimonious garbs, the uniforms and raiments of society, the figure on the cross was so naked.
After I grew up, I was for many years a traveling professional musician. A fellow musician, a Jew, surprised to see me reading the Old Testament before turning in one night after a gig on the road, asked me a question he had always wanted to ask a gentile. Did I blame the Jews for killing Jesus? No, I answered, it had never occurred to me to think there was blame to assert, or that it even mattered. The emphasis in our Catholic teaching had been on the greater reasons for his life and death-becoming flesh and blood, walking among us, forgiving our sins. He needed to die in this way to accomplish his mission. Had he died in an accident, or contracted a disease, the whole story would have been different.
Besides, I always had the impression that Jesus was killed by neither the Romans nor the Jews. I always believed it was God, the Father, who was responsible for the death of Jesus. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” is a question countless children have asked of their fathers over the millennia, or of their guardians whenever they’ve found themselves at the mercy of a hierarchy of self-serving pharisees or the tyrannical jurisprudence of a greedy misanthropic bureaucracy.
My many hours of contemplation looking up at that crucifix, the penances I performed at its bloody broken feet, shaped in part my future politics: my distrust of the state and of religious institutions, my revulsion at capital punishment and the power of life and death over its citizens that the state claims as justified and God given. But more than that, sometimes I would gaze at the opulence of those surroundings, and hear the words of faith, hope, and charity parroted by the congregation, and contrast this with the fate of this poor pitiful man, naked and nailed to boards, dying in front of all these supposedly pious souls. I would wonder, was I the only one in the room to see the contradiction here? Yet, one classical message did get through to me. His flesh instructed my soul in ways in which to “offer it up.”
The concept of “offering it up,” I was startled to learn when I moved beyond the boundaries of my Catholic upbringing, was not a universal teaching. At least I’ve not encountered it elsewhere. We were constantly told by our educators and parents that the sufferings we endure in this life were put there to inform and instruct us, but more importantly to test our faith. These sufferings could be offered up to God as a kind of sacrifice—other than our sacrifices, what have we, really, as representative offerings of our virtues? I have always thought the missing concept of sacrifice is what gives the lie to the devotion of televangelists and born-agains: their brand of Christianity is simply too easy without it. If the cross is where life leads us, this Christian way of life should not be easy.
I did not think of the religious icons in the church as objects of art when I was a child. Kids would ask, if idolatry was wrong, why do we kneel and pray before a statue? Of course, the explanation was that these were not idols, but icons to keep our attention focused. People knelt and prayed before the symbols of their faith. Thus an early moral quandary was averted. But doesn’t one quandary always lead to others?
When I consider Christ’s dilemma for any length of time, I simply find the Church’s explanation for the necessity of his martyrdom inadequate. Why was this gentle soul held down and nailed to these boards in the first place? When I ponder the implications of a dogma-driven culture, the facts of the story as told by the four apostles