It was the weekend before Easter, and we were in the car driving home from church. Palm Sunday. I had a palm bent into a clumsy cross in my back pocket. The palms they burn and turn to ashes in 33 days shy of a year. In a week Jesus would die. The mass was filled with sadness. For weeks we’ve not sung as much as we usually do throughout the year. We were being solemn, trying on solemnity. The service on Palm Sunday ended with bells sounding, sounding, sounding. It said in the program that the bells are a tone painting that signify the nailing into flesh, Jesus’ wounds. We stand and listen, and Henry doesn’t squirm. When we walk out of the church, the priest has tears under his eyes. In a week Jesus will be dead.

I always cry lately on Christmas Eve. There is so much joy, but every year it’s the same: we celebrate the birth of a child, but in a few months we will be mourning his death. So much foreshadowing. All the sacrifice from someone who is perpetually kinder and more wise than I know how to be.

I was trying to explain this in the car on the way home that Palm Sunday. I was trying to talk about my sadness because of the foreshadowing, because every year we celebrate and mourn, year after year, celebrating and mourning, then the tone painting with the bells and the tears in the priest’s eyes. We have to believe that we are worth the sacrifice, and that there is something after all this pain.

I don’t believe in Jesus, Rosie cut in. She was in a sour mood. I’ve heard this from her before, and I truly don’t care. All teenagers doubt and defy and feel sullen once in a while. But this time I just felt too sad. I got out of the car and hid with the dogs, Moby stretched like some solemn and understanding pieta across my lap. Rosie was instantly sorry that she had hurt me, but I couldn’t articulate why it made me so sad. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, she said when we walked in the door, but I snapped that I didn’t care if she believed in Jesus. Then I disappeared.

Because I’m not always sure if I do, either. I believe that a man existed who had a presence. I believe he had the sort of power to change the world that some people have, like Obama maybe. Some beauty, a capability to help people rise to their highest selves. I don’t know if he was more than that, but I don’t care. I have no reason to care if the story is true or not: because the story is beautiful. That beauty matters more than any scrutiny of fact. Fiction, it has been said, is the lie that tells the truth. Myth isn’t exactly true for any time, it’s simply true all the time. I’m not sure why people are so concerned if any of this god stuff is really factual. It’s beautiful enough to not worry about that. There was a human who so loved the world that he died for us so that we can live. The tone painting.

Good Friday we were in an airplane, suspended. On Sunday the world was made of light. Jesus died on Friday, and on Sunday he became light. Tonight, driving along the ocean, struck by the sky and its constellations, I felt whole. There is so much sadness in death, but then we get to become light. I believe we are recycled, that in this world nothing is thrown away.

On Sunday our tiny cottage by the ocean fogged up with the heat from the oven, and our small world glowed abstractly. Easter was filled with light. I don’t know if I exist, but this life is beautiful enough that arguing about whether or not I am truth or fiction is just quibbling.

April 7th, 2010 | Category: inward | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL