If you're enough of an old fart---and I guess I am---it seems kind of odd to contemplate something like a "Jesus'n'Mary Zone" in the sense of being able to be "in the zone."
But it certainly seems a real phenomenon, if not usually described that way. Where everything is flowing correctly, presumably (to a person of faith) because you've explained where your problems lie and turned over the solution to Our Lord and his Mom. Things start working out in what is clearly proper fashion, sometimes with very improbable solutions---stuff you couldn't get away with, if you were writing your life as fiction.
I've never managed to be there longer than about two days on a good run; I wonder if saints manage to stay there longer than that at a stretch?
I think maybe it's one of those things where you have to be absolutely in the moment, inside what's happening---and the minute you're aware enough of the situation to know you're there, you're not in the moment anymore, you've stepped outside and become an observer. Which is why you can't really sustain it.
Other opinions or observations cheerfully taken, though. I'd love to see these pages become a discussion forum.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Post-Baptismal Ponderings.....
I suppose there's always a let-down after that much anticipation.
Part of it was being dragged into the mundane almost immediately, with the discovery that someone had stolen my camera from my bag of clothes that I had to change into sometime during the service.
And part of it was just the sheer exhaustion of the Holy Week schedule, with school and work on top of everything that was happening at church.
People who don't know their history tend to refer to the US as a "Christian country" in the idea that the founding fathers meant this to be a specifically Christian setting. (In point of fact, a reading of colonial history in only moderate depth will show that to be patently untrue, almost a direct contradiction of their stated intent.)
But one of the things they note is that "back in the day", schools didn't have "spring break", they had "Easter vacation", and that's true, if "the day" is understood to be the 1950's, not the 1850's. The implication was that the vacation was for Religious Purposes.
But Protestant tradition barely observes Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The rest of Holy Week mostly goes begging for attention, and the idea that Easter is more than one church service and new clothes is long gone from most churches.
Giving kids the day off for Good Friday I think wasn't about letting them go to church so much as letting the teachers go; back then it was a norm for many small businesses, retail businesses to close for some portion of Good Friday, whether the whole day, or closed at noon, or even closed for the classic three hour observance (noon-3pm). Even many larger businesses closed, and of the ones that did not, most would allow some of their workers who asked for it to take off to attend church services on that afternoon.
But at least as I remember it, that one was mostly a church service for grownups, not for children. Partly the length of it; partly the solemnity of it---it went beyond the patience of a child.
In a truly Christian world, seems to me an Easter vacation geared to Religious Purposes would actually start during Holy Week. Leastways that's my take.
Then again, I'm a historian. And in much of the United States, at least, the history of "Easter vacation in school" has far less to do with religious events (mostly focused on a non-school day, Sunday) and far more to do with "might as well cancel school for a couple of weeks since all the students will be staying home to help with the planting anyway."
Of course, part of the "let down" isn't really "let down", it's just change.
Change from being the "new kid", in some ways the center of attention, to "just one of the family." Just another parishioner.
Which is actually a quietly warm fuzzy feeling. :-)
Part of it was being dragged into the mundane almost immediately, with the discovery that someone had stolen my camera from my bag of clothes that I had to change into sometime during the service.
And part of it was just the sheer exhaustion of the Holy Week schedule, with school and work on top of everything that was happening at church.
People who don't know their history tend to refer to the US as a "Christian country" in the idea that the founding fathers meant this to be a specifically Christian setting. (In point of fact, a reading of colonial history in only moderate depth will show that to be patently untrue, almost a direct contradiction of their stated intent.)
But one of the things they note is that "back in the day", schools didn't have "spring break", they had "Easter vacation", and that's true, if "the day" is understood to be the 1950's, not the 1850's. The implication was that the vacation was for Religious Purposes.
But Protestant tradition barely observes Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The rest of Holy Week mostly goes begging for attention, and the idea that Easter is more than one church service and new clothes is long gone from most churches.
Giving kids the day off for Good Friday I think wasn't about letting them go to church so much as letting the teachers go; back then it was a norm for many small businesses, retail businesses to close for some portion of Good Friday, whether the whole day, or closed at noon, or even closed for the classic three hour observance (noon-3pm). Even many larger businesses closed, and of the ones that did not, most would allow some of their workers who asked for it to take off to attend church services on that afternoon.
But at least as I remember it, that one was mostly a church service for grownups, not for children. Partly the length of it; partly the solemnity of it---it went beyond the patience of a child.
In a truly Christian world, seems to me an Easter vacation geared to Religious Purposes would actually start during Holy Week. Leastways that's my take.
Then again, I'm a historian. And in much of the United States, at least, the history of "Easter vacation in school" has far less to do with religious events (mostly focused on a non-school day, Sunday) and far more to do with "might as well cancel school for a couple of weeks since all the students will be staying home to help with the planting anyway."
Of course, part of the "let down" isn't really "let down", it's just change.
Change from being the "new kid", in some ways the center of attention, to "just one of the family." Just another parishioner.
Which is actually a quietly warm fuzzy feeling. :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
