GOOD FRIDAY ENDARKENMENT

People get exasperated with me because I’m too serious.  it was a problem in the ministry because people expected fun, joy, safety and other nice things for nice people.  But if you can’t be serious on Good Friday, you must not be truly Christian.  Christianity, in spite of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” is meant to confront suffering.  It’s a rich source of symbolism for hardships, trials, and death.  

This morning my “feeds” supplied a powerful essay originating in the cross that became the jewelry symbol of the religion.  “Crucifying the Prairie: An Eco-Theology of Resistance for Good Friday”.  By Jacob J. Erickson April 13, 2017 

http://religiondispatches.org/crucifying-the-prairie-an-eco-theology-of-resistance-for-good-friday/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c263faba8a-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-c263faba8a-42405913

The article uses a philosophical interpretation of the horizonal bar representing the secular world as it intersects the vertical bar that reaches towards the transcendent sky at a point that creates human religion, combining the worldly with the supernatural.  One could also use the phallic idea, but where’s the crossbar?  Also, some have tried to get an interpretation out of the fact that the bottom of the cross is embedded in the earth, a going-down instead of a reaching up.  A hole.  But Erickson uses James Cone’s book, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” to point out the dark abyss, the grave at the foot of the cross, the oil well.  (Which gets redeemed by the hole that is Jesus’ tomb that He is able to leave.)

Then a new but related image came in from “Naked Pastor”  david@thelastingsupper.com. “I had been thinking about the cross and what it symbolized. It certainly is a metaphor for perseverance in spite of suffering. It is about victimization of the innocent. It also represents determination, sacrifice, surrender, struggle, and the desire to work for justice in the face of incredible injustice, as well as abiding under threat.”

His idea was the Cross as the "Narrow Gate."

If you like the image he created, you can buy it from him on a t-shirt.  https://www.etsy.com/shop/nakedpastor  It’s an effective artistic premise to think of the space occupied as well as the space emptied.

Lots of other good stuff in David’s shop as well.  In one cartoon Jesus assures the thief beside Him that He’s had “gooder” Fridays.  You know David Hayward made that up, because surely a good middle-class Savior would not be ungrammatical.  David has been what I call a minister and he calls a pastor, both Protestant terms trying to distinguish Protestant clergy from Catholic priests, but he gets called out of ministry, falls out, runs away, is tossed out -- as have many parishioners -- so that he has to struggle back through “the Narrow Gate”, another Biblical image of doing hard serious things.

Now he has the idea that a congregation that uses a building to go sit together at a specific meeting time is maybe not where he fits, so he’s trying to invent an online interactive sort of congregation.  Others are doing the same.  It’s the old Unitarian Universalist idea of being united by differences that the UUA abandoned when they got snake bit by corporate liberal politics.  Thelastingsupper.com

Through my decade in the ministry, I tried to come up with new and striking images for Easter, all those nature tales of renewal in Spring.  Shedding one’s snakeskin, emerging from one’s cocoon, sailing off on a gossamer kite like a baby spider.  I just wanted to escape from all the chickies and bunnies and candy, the fol-de-rol of pastel baskets and new bonnets.  Well, I really rather liked the bonnets, but no one wears anything but a billed ball cap these days.  Maybe with a fertilizer slogan embroidered on the front.

What persists in my own store of imagery is the Good Friday service the Portland, Oregon, downtown ministers used to present at lunchtime so the office workers could come.  It was in the Congregational church, I think, which had no windows in its sanctuary, because the ceremony was that of Endarkenment.  I googled for more references and was startled when my own post came up, the one for Friday, Aprl 14, 2006, “The Easter Peony.”  The details of the performance are described there.  It’s a little startling at the moment because of the UUA struggle over dark people.  The actual event was somehow reassuring, sitting there in that dignified traditional setting, listening to “God” speaking on the amplifier.  But it was supposed to be terrifying, a depiction of death.

At the moment there’s a bit of news about darkness.  Our fascination with Black Holes and Dark Matter as features of the cosmos is beginning to provide some new ideas, even notions about how to photograph a Black Hole.  It only means transitioning the code of whatever is Out There into patterns our eyes can see, but that makes us think we understand, which is an illusion.  But it’s easier to think about.

The other new You-Tubey phenomenon is a paint so utterly black that all one sees is a silhouette, no features at all.  An invisible cloak that color would indeed make a person only a hole in perception.

Maybe in our time of displacement and persecution, the Cross imagery that is most relevant is not the single X on Golgotha (well, one of three) but what we are assured was the true situation at the time when Romans tried to intimidate political enemies into obedience by crucifying hundreds of people.  (Game of Thrones picked that up to epitomize class domination in one of the “redeemed” nations that Daenerys Targaryen added to her kingdoms.  I forget the name of the nation.)  The Romans put up the crosses along the roadways so that people couldn’t avoid them.

What is the symbolic motif for people drowning in an attempt to escape domination and devastation?  Maybe we should return to the acronym name for Jesus which meant “fish” in Latin.  You know, like the Christians in “Quo Vadis” drawing a fish in the dust.  Does anyone watch “Quo Vadis” anymore, or does everyone prefer the absolutely authentic and ghastly versions of Jesus’ actual and certified death on the Cross?  Maybe “Bones” should take on Crucifixion before we all leave the scientific paradigm entirely and surrender to demagogues of propriety.  Maybe they have — those scriptwriters are pretty bold.  They wouldn’t shy away from the sexiness of a naked tortured man.

“Maybe” is the anti-principle of symbols and metaphors and acts that can be depicted in jewelry.  I guess that fish shows up on automobiles. Many believers want certainty, a guarantee, and hopefully one they don’t have to fight for, something handed to them from authorities.  A nun once told me I was a Post-Christian, sort of like French Post-Colonialism.  That is, staying in the same paradigm while unraveling it, a dangerous thing to do.  True enough.  Maybe if Christianity weren’t so political, its roots so drenched in blood, I might stop thinking about Ydddrasil, the Norse cosmic tree with its roots in the Well of Urd.  But then the jewelry might depict a hanged man, a dangling man.

MY MARE'S NEST

Living a solitary writing life is not a matter of being rolled up like a pillbug ignoring what goes on.  Rather, at least the way I do it, this is an arduous and tricky process of trying to reconcile a long and very mixed life into some kind of coherent understanding of what it all means.  What I’m getting at present is concentric circles, a swallowing black hole in the middle and then shadows (umbras) and shadows of shadows (penumbras) around them until there is finally light farthest out of all.  But also, I see pentimentos, images that come and go from underneath.

Partly it’s a matter of trying to process all this paper I’ve toted around for decades, believing it was worth something as a record.  Partly it’s because the world is now full of people trying to figure things out: war, sex, money, sex, disease, sex. . .  Partly because of the influence of people like Darrell Kipp, whose ideas goes on after his death on a scale he never really expected; like my eighth grade grammar teacher; like my undergrad acting professor; and of a lot of little kids, some whom are still little kids.  There are other charismatic influences, like Tim Barrus, whom I hate to mention because it makes him a target over and over, and Bob Scriver who needs no explanation.  (If you want one, buy the book:  “Bronze Inside and Out.”)

Another dynamic, fueled by the need to survive as individuals and species (which don’t always support each other) and shaped by the Big Picture of Everything Unfolding which is often too big and too subtle to comprehend (cosmic rays, climate change), constantly changes the terms of engagement.  It is these terms that can be changed by writing/images.  We call it “Raising Consciousness.”  It motivates the constant struggle to reform government, to find cures and energy sources, and to maintain intimate ties with beloved others.

One strand of this thinking about pecking orders and the issue of power gelled in Saskatoon.  The right wing clergy had been sending abused wives back to their husbands on grounds of Biblical authority.  The women were ending up in hospitals and morgues.  The social workers of the community organized a workshop for clergy to get them to see differently.  The irony was that the person who probably saw it most clearly was me, a liberal -- probably the most liberal clergy in town.  To the point where it scared my congregation, which mostly handled painful emotion with avoidance.

My realization was simply how much the congregation tried to control me -- somewhat innocently.  And the other side of that was how much I resented and was blinded by that effort to control.  And the black hole reached out in secrecy so that some of the issues couldn’t be addressed even with my confidential ministerial committee.  (The mistress of a major minister had been banished to Saskatoon.  The previous minister’s wife had had an affair with a local professor.  The single female ministers -- Christian -- in town lamented that no one would sleep with them.)  

So here’s another factor in this cats’ cradle:  behavior norming, which is set by the social circles that one knows best.  My cousin, who was raised by Depression homesteader standards (same as me), was challenged by re-calibrating to a group that dressed expensively, cooked gourmet meals, and lived in fine houses -- which was the circle her husband’s business served.  At retirement she reverted to her family baseline with relief.

But, interestingly, we three female cousins on that side live quite modest lives and yet love to read about the “upstairs” life: haut couture (which we translate to home sewing), reading and BBC series, family relationships, and so on.  I’m the most daring, partly because I was “re-normed” by the theatre department of the School of Speech -- not that I went on the stage, but that I saw life as worth risking and went to Browning, MT, where I was re-normed again on the boundary between the circle-the-wagons white community and the nothing-to-lose indigenous people.  Animal control, which means going from one house to another in bad neighborhoods, and ministry (don't ask -- I've already said more than is wise) both made me push out farther and farther from any norm.

James Flynn  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Flynn_(academic) has become my hero in this enterprise because he so clearly describes the difference between simple social norming according to the people in the immediate environment  and complex analytical thinking that tries to bring up the pentimento from underneath.

I just watched a disturbing interview on YouTube -- it’s worse than sex between bedbugs though it is only talk.  It is faces of boys coming up from the bottom of quicksand, faces of systematically abused boys.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORU5x-ryedU&feature=youtu.be  This video is coming from England, so everyone in Valier will feel safe, but it happens here as well.  Probably not so systematically and dramatically, but always a little dark tentacle wiggling along.  Denial of it simply makes space for it.  

Rooted in the need for power over someone weaker, such abuse starts in families where it is generally kept secret, though kids usually know.  Most abused children are exploited by family members and everyone knows that but would rather imagine shadows. 

Bill Mahoney

Let’s stick to talking about boys.  Suppose a boy is gay in a non-gay family.  Unless his family preserves his inclusion and protection, he re-norms himself to the others like him.  Their defense is often defiance but not always.  Famous artists are often driven by the re-norming to a new set of standards.  (Late breaking news about Lucian Freud.)  Being gay, even now that so many honorable and respectable people are out of the closet, is still a crime in backward countries.

But being gay is not the same thing as being a pedophile and even pedophilia is a various set of categories.  Adolescents, both male and female, will claim they have a right to their sexuality.  Both not to be forced into it and not to be prevented from it.  Toddlers will be sensual but not sexual, and normally the same will be true of primary school kids.  The law recognizes this but it’s very hard to line out legal norms with proper consequences.  

Another circle -- inside that one -- is the pedophilic organizations, child trafficking.  People as property.  And another one inside that is trafficking of images -- which the internet has exploded around the planet.  Everywhere is the inexhaustible supply of vulnerable kids.  We think of them as being off the street -- the ejecta of broken families -- but also efficient sources are any places kids are rounded up and detained, the notorious institutional caregivers that Bill Mahoney talks about.  Kids incarcerated.  By the time the practice has evolved that far, the big-time powermongers of corporations and governments begin to get involved, unable to resist such a potent marker of exemption from legal control.  

This is not pentimento but penitence.

And now we’re talking blackmail, a pinnacle of power, a pyramidal peak of control.  The individual is entirely ground under by a group with a deviant norm derived from what was originally society’s over-eager wish for success -- privilege as access to law-breaking sex.  Mahoney is dramatic, impassioned, and telling the truth IMHO, but the real roots of the problem are -- as Hannah Arendt put it -- in the banal.  The wish of ordinary people to be spared the necessity of even thinking about it, though it could be happening next door.

The lip of the black hole is condemnation and accusations such as those aimed at Mahoney for making this video.  (You’d better watch it quickly before it gets removed.)  The spinning vortex is the death of the youngsters, either due to disease and trauma, or because of snuff films -- the ultimate excitement.  You didn’t hear it here first.  

But the youngsters who do not die might grow up to be Bill Mahoney, and what are you going to do about it?  If your norm is safe prosperity, you might deny all this stuff, avoid it, eliminate the source.  The comments attacking him are stunning.  They will rebound. 

The Black Hole Wolf by t0xiceye

My norm is seeing, admitting, analyzing, dealing with it, taking risks.  A Valier citizen used to claim that black helicopters rose out of Lake Frances and stole kids.  He's dead now, but . . .