phosphorescence

1. Last Friday I went to the Getty.  You can’t really go to an art museum and not see a couple pictures of Jesus. It happened to be Good Friday—a good day to spend a little time contemplating religious artwork. 

Wandering through the Medieval section, I was stuck by an altar screen's depiction of the stigmata. In the tableaux, a shocked looking saint stooped slightly towards the ground while above him an angel who looked like she/he had a severe neck crick fired greenish-yellow beams out of his/her hands.  These beams streamed down into the saint’s palms, feet, and general heart area.  It was obviously a surprise, this holy gift.  Going off the galvanized look on the saint’s face and the rather triumphant look on the angel’s, a unchurched youth might judge the scene as commemorating the conception of lazar tag.     

2. Saturday evening, I switched the television to Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments. I’ve never seen it, but remembered my friend Savay telling me that watching this movie is his Easter tradition.  I thought this was an odd statement coming from a Buddist, so I asked what he liked about it. ‘It’s so nice and religious,” he explained.

I was curious what “religious” meant to him and also (let’s be honest) lured in by Charlton Heston’s greasy, spray-tan muscles. About five minutes later, the angel of death appeared on-screen. He/she was most impressively portrayed in Technicolor: a green, animated, five-pronged glowing glob, dribbling horrifically down in the night sky.  I watched as people screamed and children died.  The only ones saved were the ones who had smeared blood above their doors.   

  

3. We can’t see holiness.  And we can’t seem to understand it. But we don’t let this stop us from trying. Trying to make it fit into our world; to make it make sense; to make it visible.  

This morning, Easter morning, we baptized. Baptism is another attempt to visualize the intangible.  It’s the metaphor of metaphors—it’s taking the most prosaic part of our day (washing) and turning it into the most holy.  It’s a symbol of the thing we fear most (death), immediately reversed.      

Today, we baptized the young and the old, in Chinese, in Armenian, in English.  The pastors trooped into the font wearing t-shirts and boardshorts; the baptizes wore long, flowing white robes, which added an odd, anachronistic vibe to the already mysterious ritual.  

The smallest of the candidates was a boy of 7 who assured us he “wasn’t doing this because everyone else was doing it." Right before he was dipped, his foot slipped on his oversized white robe and he lost his balance. The pastor grasped him, steadied him, muttered some beautiful age-old language, and dunked his shaggy little head under the water. He buoyed back up, a sudden, goofy, stunned grin on his face. The pastor patted him and sent him on his way up the stairs, but he tripped again.  He lurched towards the exit.  He nearly went back under, resorted to doggy paddling for a few paces, and finally righted himself to make a shaky exit, the grin still on his face.   

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And the most mysterious part to me, the part that strikes me: despite the greedy, corrupt, masochistic churches of the middle ages, despite the zealous Hollywood portrayals of the 1950s, despite the way we mess it up and mangle it and bash it into the ground and squeeze it for profit, we still can’t laugh off the idea of spirit.  We still want to paint it, to make movies about it, to write it down. We still want it.  And, if we are very young or perhaps just wise enough- despite that we’ve tried to exploit it, sell it, Technicolor it, and paint it phosphorescent green--it still knocks us sideways.