EPISODE 416: EASTER WOW

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
EASTER SUNDAY METAL DANCE REMIX

It’s Easter Sunday, and I’m sitting in a café that’s become kind of a favorite of mine in the last six months. It’s near the ocean, is really the thing that makes it special. What is it about sunlight near the ocean? Even sitting here inside a café (with fantastically high ceilings), the air just slightly glows. Or like somehow it’s just the slightest bit less heavy than other air. Like you didn’t even know normal air was heavy until you came down here and suddenly it felt like if you’re not careful you may just start floating.

The Jesuit community I live with has this little house right on the beach about a half hour south of where we live, and some Easters a bunch of us will go down there and just watch the world go by and/or slap volleyballs at each other. (Note: We will watchpeople slap volleyballs at each other. Slapping them ourselves would require first of all two free hands, which is unlikely amidst the drinks and snacks; also, fitness.)

It’s nothing flashy, but the setting is undeniably great. For a long while I felt a little embarrassed that we had this house available to us. As the old joke goes, “If this is poverty, bring on chastity!” (The fact that the Jesuit term for a house like this is “villa” does not help us. Let’s be honest, the only other people who talk about spending time at their villas are billionaires, movie stars and dictators.) But you know, when it comes to Easter it is kind of perfect, a place where you literally can feel the weight of Lent fall away. (Lent is like a long slog through snowdrifts. Easter is like coming around a bend to place where the snow has unexpectedly melted and there are people lying on picnic blankets before a lake while the sun slowly meanders towards the horizon.)

This year I’m actually having dinner with a friend who is not Catholic. She thought it was hilarious that her friend the priest would go out for Mexican food with a non-Christian on Easter. But when she suggested it I just leapt at it. There’s nothing so refreshing as breaking an old pattern. (Have you ever had the experience of suddenly having someone cancel dinner plans and even though you wanted to have the dinner you’re just filled with relief? Like you actually want to call the friend who cancelled and thank them for the incredibly thoughtful gift they’ve just given of time? It's amazing, isn't it?) ++ I had the 7am Mass today. It was a good crowd. Actually, it’s always a pretty great crowd at this parish, both a lot larger than I’d expect for an early morning Mass and also a lot more receptive to whatever goofiness I might want to throw at them. A few weeks ago I did a whole thing about the titles of Daenerys Targaryen as a way of explaining just how strange it was that God, when asked who he was by Moses, says only “I am who am.” Game of Thronesmay be low-hanging fruit in a lot of circles right now, but I wasn’t sure what an early Mass crowd might think of it. But they were absolutely with me. And here’s the thing, I’ll bet many of them actually don’t know the show well, but it didn’t matter. They’re just up for anything. Open and free. (They really are pretty remarkable.)

My homily was actually about my favorite experience of Easter, which amounted to a time I was forced to baptize a bunch of babies at an Easter Sunday liturgy (because there’s not enough going on during that particular Mass), and in this very elaborate rite where I had to stand in a pool up to my knees, have the children passed to me by their parents, dip the children into the water without drowning them –the water was SO HIGH—and then lift them up high -- no joke like Simba in the Lion King -- while the congregation was made to sing a song. I was not happy about any of it, and neither was one of the children, as he made clear by taking the moment of his ascension to empty the contents of his may-I-say-quite-large bladder all over me.

There’s more to the homily than that, i.e. a point that has something to do with the celebration of Easter versus the announcement of my new comedy album, “Good Morning Church”. And people had seemed to really appreciate the story. But nevertheless I spent most of the rest of Mass worrying whether it had really been sufficient for the occasion.

The humorous version: I can definitely tell you one thing the Pope did not talk about today!

The less humorous version:

aka Dude, What is wrong with you?

Whenever I go east I’m often impressed by the intellectual rigor of the preaching, particularly from Jesuits. And I think I aspire to some form of that, at least occasionally. I almost did a PhD in Old Testament instead of my M.F.A., and actually when I stop to, you know, feel things like you genuine humans, I sometimes feel the pinch and pining for that study and type of thinking about things. In the midst of my self-recriminations I had flashes one of my Jesuit heroes sitting at his desk working on the text of his Easter homily for hours into the night, like a character out of Dickens. I have no doubt it was beautifully written and delivered, and that at the end he looked in my general direction, smiled sympathetically and held back a disappointed sigh.

And Easter and Christmas are of course The Really Big Show, like The Alan Brady Show big.* You know you’ll have more people than usual, and also that some, maybe many of them are not regular massgoers. So you want to really nail it. As a Jesuit I think I’ve been trained to understand that to mean “make it scholarly”. And some places that would be true (…maybe). But do I really expect people who are not at Church each week to somehow be more religiously engaged and eager for exegesis than the ones who do come regularly? And if so, Um, why? Dost thou not see their fidgeting children? Canst thou not remember their need for a visit to grandma’s and also brunch?

The priesthood is this exceedingly strange profession where people will generally not tell you when you’ve screwed up and no one demands you do any ongoing training despite the fact that what you are asked to be ever-ready to perform tasks which will have potentially huge impacts upon people at a time when they are feeling vulnerable. To say that it can make you lazy and/or self-indulgent is not a judgment as much as a How Could It Not?

So yeah. I loved sharing my Easter story, and it really did have a point. And I think I could have done better and I’m worried Pope Francis would not have liked it. ++ You might be wondering, why is he writing me on Sunday?

I have this sense that this newsletter is moving toward some kind of change. Like there’s some other version of it that is slowly trying to push through to the surface of my consciousness, and in the meantime fighting its way through old ideas and practices. It seems like right now there’s kind of three different formats that dance and wrestle for control each week – deep dives into pop culture; musings about life and sometimes God; and things I found that you might like. And I wonder if it’s not a bit too much to read sometimes. (I can feel some of you nodding.)

I’m also thinking a little bit about my send dates. Usually Sunday is when I’m most in the frame of mind to read and write and think like this, and I’ve often wondered whether I shouldn’t just Drop the Wow (trying it out; kind of like it) on Sundays rather than Friday. In fact I’m going to do that very thing with this ep this afternoon. #EasterBoldness

Any thoughts on this, or anything else Wow-related? Feel free to reply. And hey, if you like what you’re reading, recommend it to others. It’s free and also nutty. And sometimes there are dragon memes.

No idea what this means, but I love it.

I’m going to put a couple links below. Think of them as paying forward Thursday, when I will be in silence with 70 men and desperately trying not to think about whether Tony Stark is dead and Steve Rogers is dead and whose shoulder Rocket Raccoon is shooting a big laser rifle gun thing from.

Easter is all about freedom. You know the way you think the world or your life or the ending of Endgame absolutely is, the things we think we’re all stuck with?

God, about that: Not so much.

However you think of Easter (if at all), I hope today/this week/always you give yourself a few moments to sit some place with great light to let it all go and enjoy your life.

*High props to my Dick Van Dyke Show peeps out there. You are loved.

++ LINKS ++

This weekend in Health Apps You Use Because You Find Them Helpful but Maybe You Should Reconsider Because Your Employer Has Access to the Data (this story honestly stunned me).

Keanu Reeves is 54 and this is a profile of him and you should read it because of everything. (Also, it demonstrates one of the greatest Does Not Compute but is True aspects of moviemaking, namely that having no money to work with can actually make your movies so much better.)

And a show recommendation: After Life, on Netflix. Ricky Gervais as a small-town journalist who has lost his wife to cancer and can’t figure out a reason to go on living. It sounds dark for a sitcom (and at times it is), but pretty much every episode has a moment where everything you expect is turned upside down and something quite beautiful shines through.

In a sentence, I’d say it’s a show about how everyone is a lot more than you give them credit for. Which I don't know about you but is a concept I could really use to think about more often.