Holy Week Pt 3 - A Painting and a Song for Good Friday

Today is Good Friday.  Rather than running my mouth off* I will let Van Der Weyden and Bach speak for themselves.

 Van Der Weyden's Crucifixion Diptych at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Made for a Carthusian Monastery, it is one of the starkest paintings of its type I've ever seen.  In person it actually takes your breath away.

The Opening Chorale to Bach's Matthew Passion.  I couldn't find a Youtube recording of "Ach Golgotha" that I liked.

*I was going to  write a longer post about how Bach's St Matthew Passion is a masterpiece of Baroque-era sampling (Bach re-appropriates tunes liberally, not just in the Chorales).  But it was a stretch, and has been said before.

Holy Week Pt 2 -- Religion, Adolescence and Adulthood

In the past few years I find myself in the unaccustomed position of being a believer, but not being very devout.  To explain why this feels strange for me it would probably help to explain where I'm coming from, religiously speaking.

I was at my most religious when I was in high school and early college, ages 14-20 or so.  My religious beliefs during that time tended toward the extreme -- not in a fundamentalist theological-political sense, but in an absolutist, give-up-everything for God sort of way.  I admired the urgency of Jesus' all-or-nothing message in the Gospels, particularly Matthew " "Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.".  If you'd asked my when I was 19 what was most important in life, I may well have answered "mystical communion with the divine."  Though I wasn't planning on selling my possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor, I felt vaguely bad about not doing so.  To me the best life was the most meaningful life, and the most meaningful life was the one tied to the highest things.

I suppose there are several reasons for my adolescent religiosity.

Holy Week pt 1. -- The Strangeness of Liturgy

I grew up in the liturgy of the Episcopal church.  I was baptized, confirmed, and married according to the Book of Common Prayer.  I've heard the Eucharist service more Sundays than not since I was born, and have witnessed 24 church years progress from Advent 1 to Christ the King Sunday*.  Going to church for so long, its rites are as familiar as my family's Christmas or Easter Dinner or the road to the diocesan retreat center in the mountains of Western Virginia.

Being familiar, the rites do not lose their beauty, but I suspect they lose some of their power.  The Eucharistic prayer is lovely every time I hear it, but the strangeness of Theophagia is easy to ignore when you've done it 1,000 times before.  Religion risks becoming something merely comfortable, which is not exactly appropriate if it is supposed to be an encounter with God.

So I'm glad when Lent and  Holy week roll around.  The great holidays of Lent -- Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday -- make me feel as though I'm in some 'exotic' religion from  the east, like I'm living out a picture of Divali or another Hindu feast that is outside of my modern, western experience. 

Ash Wednesday will never cease to be strange--getting ashes put on your forehead as a priest says "remember thou art but dust, and to dust you shall return" is not something to get used to.  And the strangeness continues.  Palm Sunday starts with the congregation waiving palm branches and shouting 'Hosanna' and ends with us playing the part of the mob shouting for the blood of our own God*, whose death we give thanks for every Sunday.  Maundy Thursday sees us reminded of the weird origins of our weekly Eucharist (and  sometimes watching one another's feet) and Good Friday is stark, silent and grim.  In Easter the mood does a 180 again, and in some ways it is a Sunday like the rest -- once again a celebration of resurection.  Yet it means more because of the preceding week and 40 days before, which serve as a reminder of just how strange our Sunday rituals are.



*Advent is the season before Christmas, and the start of the church year.  Christ the King Sunday is the last Sunday before advent.


**I really like this part -- Like the arias of Bach's Matthew Passion, it shows that the sin of all human beings is responsible for the death of Christ, and thus gives the lie to the toxic notion that 'the Jews' killed Jesus.

Contraception and Catholicism, Continued - The Anti-Americanism of the Catholic Hierarchy

Catholicism has, over the course of American History, become a vital part of the American landscape.  From the Catholic founding father Charles Carroll and his cousin Bishop John Carroll (an early supporter of a vernacular Mass) to President Kennedy, Catholicism made a claim to be a faith compatible with American ideals, and over a century and more it proved itself to be so.

A separation between Church and state came to be welcomed as it allowed Catholics to send their children to Catholic schools, rather than the de-facto protestant state-run schools found in places like Massachusetts.  American Catholics embraced democracy and the democratic process, rather than opposing it like many in Europe, who viewed republicanism as inherently anti-clerical.  American Catholic churches featured greater lay participation in their management as well.*  The Catholic Hierarchy objected to a number of these views, characterizing the American church's tendencies as the heresy of "Americanism", and tried off and on to bring the American church more in line with Rome.**