Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [29]
When I consider the politics of a Roman occupation, and of a Pontius Pilate, I think of the entrenched Jewish leadership of the region and their fear of succession. I think of the kind of societal machinations practiced by those with power, as well as those attempting to achieve power. I then shudder at how easy it is to fall afoul of all those interests, as have political prisoners all over the world, from jailed marijuana users in the United States to enemies of juntas in South America, Africa, China, and elsewhere.
In the mid-1980s, my Jewish musical partner and I attended a Bob Dylan concert at a big stadium. It was during Dylan’s Christian phase, and he was sharing the stage with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was a terrific show, and the last, I think, of what I would call Dylan’s “howling years.” When Dylan strode to the microphone and sang the words, “When they came for him in the garden, did they know?” a sweet song about the moment of Christ’s betrayal, my friend sought me out in the crowd and, with eyes bulging from his head in anger, screamed, “What the hell is this?”
“Calm down,” I patted his back as we watched. “Think of Jesus as a metaphor for every poor innocent fuck who’s been dragged from his home and shot in the streets for his beliefs.” At the time, Ronald Reagan was not so secretly funding the Contras in Central America. One of their tactics was to go into a village and drag all the men from their homes and murder them in front of their families. From then on, my pal had no problem listening to Dylan’s Christian material.
As for me, I am forever kneeling on that velvet cushion at the magnificent mahogany railing in that dark old church beneath my haunted crucifix, where candles for the dead are always burning, where everything has its own elegiac echo—even the whispering zephyr-like swish from the long black robes of the nuns as they move so swiftly and lightly on their feet, and the sound of the long rosaries hooked onto their ropey belts clacking gently at their sides. Sometimes the sisters hold their rosaries in one hand to silence them. They move about, gliding, watching, always enforcing a hush on us potentially rowdy children.
This is not a warm and welcoming place. It is cavernous and gray with red velvet and gold. It is heavy dark wood and cement and stone. Scrutiny was constant. Every movement was watched and considered, and make no mistake, the scrutiny was there not to protect us, but to protect the estate in which we found ourselves.
Once, in grade school, I was assaulted by a bully who tried to throw me over a railing at the top of a long flight of marble stairs. A friend who intervened convinced me to report the incident. The bully’s parents were major contributors to the parish. I was the one who was ultimately punished. Over the years, whenever their word went up against mine, I stood my ground, and I lost. My fellow students would abandon me to my fate, apologizing in private for not wanting to get in trouble. But that’s what it was all about—fear. Scaring you into being good. They knelt you down in front of that horrific crucifix. They hovered over you and watched what you did and listened to what you said. “Good” had a metaphysical definition in the catechism, but was in practice a mere euphemism for conformity. Back in class we talked a lot about hell, where they would hurt you forever if you were bad. But bad was defined as disobeying rules that could and would be changed arbitrarily.
I eventually came to see the church building itself as merely an expensive imitation of a theater, a hollow space into which were drawn all the vanities, fears, pretensions of status, and covetousness of its congregants, who were, simply, a reflection of its own all-too-human makeup. A space where the human condition was acknowledged only in the most discriminating