(no subject)

[adiva_calandia]

So, some thoughts on Easter Vigil masses while I continue to avoid homework:

A few weeks ago, we read Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. I talked about it some here, I'm pretty sure. Most everyone in the class either didn't understand it, didn't like it, or both, largely because of the final scene: Agave, still in a Dionysian frenzy, hoists her son Pentheus' head onto a pole in triumph. Cadmus, her father, finally makes her see that it's her son, not a lion, and she breaks down -- but then the head begins to jet red liquid. "More blood, always blood," mourns Cadmus, but Tiresias (who has to be there to make it a real Greek tragedy) tastes the liquid and murmurs, "It's wine." The people -- the nobles, the slaves, everyone -- slowly move forward and drink.

The class -- including the prof -- thought that this was weird, kind of gross, incomprehensible, and comic.

I was the only one who felt like it was both understandable and beautiful.

I tried to explain why I felt like that. I wrote up a whole presentation comparing Dionysus to Christ, and I tried to explain the sacrament of communion by the seat of my pants (which is pretty well impossible). Finally, I said that we as a class don't have context for something that is both joyful and solemn and sad and ritualistic all at the same time, and without any kind of personal, emotional context, we can't understand the play.

But I understood it, I thought to myself, because of Easter Vigil.

When my mom explained to me what to expect from a Vigil mass, she said, "It's really pagan," and that description has stuck with me. It is. You have all these people sitting in darkness, and then fire is carried in and passed from person to person in the form of candles, until everyone is holding a tiny, fragile light. Even all together, those lights can't fill the darkness.

It's a vigil. We, like the women, are grieving in the dark, scared and sad.

And then the sun -- the Son -- the new year, the light, spring, warmth, joy, returns and all the lights in the church come on and banish the night, the Devil, the old, the darkness, winter and cold and sorrow, and the people sing Glory.

And it doesn't stop with the lights. Later in the ceremony comes the ritual cleansing with water, the promises to live right (because that's all baptismal promises are, really; they're an expression of faith, but they're a promise to love and live, too), the welcoming of the community.

And the congregation sings Praise and Yes. Yes. Say alleluia, say amen. I take death with me, out of time, and make of it a path, a birth. And he sun with its brightness, and the earth with its starkness -- all these I place . . .

We drink the wine that is blood, eat the bread that is flesh, symbols for rituals much, much older, much scarier, powerful rituals and rites.

But if you haven't experienced it -- maybe if you haven't been raised in it, maybe if you've never stood in front of a congregation and asked them to raise their voices in song and joined yours with theirs to say, in joy and relief, that light has returned to the world -- if you don't have that context, as none of my classmates do, then perhaps it makes sense, a sad sort of sense, that you can't understand why drinking Pentheus' blood need not be horrifying, or comic. It can be terrible, but joyful; elated, but mournful.

I'm sure there are other ceremonies, holidays, experiences like this in other faiths -- Passover? Diwali? And lacking context, the way my classmates lack context for my Christian experiences, perhaps I can't understand them the same way people who are raised in them can. I want to try, though.

(As long as I'm mentioning examples I tried to use for solemnity and joy all at once, I should probably say that one of the other examples I gave -- visually -- was Woodstock. Soyinka says in his stage directions that the Bacchae's frenzies should have the feel of a rock concert, so I feel justified in that.)

Comments

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

I will try to remember to come back to this post and leave a longer comment-

But... wow. Thank you for this- you've managed to explain and sum up a lot of my feelings that I've never been able to.

[mercuriazs.livejournal.com]

Oh, Adiva, this is a wonderful post. I was really sad to miss Easter Vigil this year.

Also, I've participated in Diwali festivities for a few years in middle school, and it's ... well, it isn't what I was raised with, but I think it's a beautiful, beautiful holiday. (And I'm very sorry, but the Ramayana kind of wipes the floor with Stations of the Cross. >.>)

Also this play sounds really interesting. I should see if our drama library has it. Would it, you think, or is it super-obscure?

[adiva_calandia]

(Dude, Hindu mythology can beat up Christian mythology any day. Jesus has his moments of badassery, but Krishna -- well, beats him six ways to Sunday, if you'll pardon the expression.)

I don't think it's that obscure? When I tried to find it in a used bookstore, I could only find it in a collection of other Soyinka plays, but I could find it. Soyinka's other plays do some of this same Christian/Yoruba/other mythology blending that makes my supertextual connection sense tingle, too, so you might want to check those out, especially A Dance of the Forest.

[mercuriazs.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Danke schoen.

[batyatoon]

Passover's nothing like this.

Possibly the closest thing we have, weirdly enough, is Yom Kippur -- only it's terror and awe rather than sorrow and grief that are transmuted into joy and triumph. At the very end of the service, when the congregation proclaims The Lord He is God seven times in unison, and the shofar is sounded ... it's maybe a little like that. Maybe.

But the ritual of communion is one we don't have, and the triumph of spring over winter is something we don't celebrate.

[adiva_calandia]

I was hoping you'd weigh in! *grin*

*nodnod* That sure sounds similar. Catholicism seems to have sanitized a lot of the terror that I think can be found in the Bible, and that I'm sure was part of the religion in the first few centuries of its practice. Comes of being the dominant religious power for a millennium, I suppose. *wry*

No spring-specific holidays at all? I mean, Christian Easter isn't technically about the triumph of spring over winter, it's about the resurrection of Christ -- but since we appropriated pagan spring holidays to make conversion easier ("You're going to celebrate the day of your death on a different day every year depending on where the moon is! If that's not pagan, I'll eat my hat!"), I feel justified in the comparison.

[batyatoon]

Oh, we have a spring-specific holiday; one of the names of Passover is Chag ha-Aviv, the Festival of Spring. (This is why every so often we have a leap year, in which there are two months of Adar -- the month before Nisan, of which Passover is the 15th -- in order to prevent Passover from coming while it's still winter.)

But it's not about a triumph. There's no victory in the coming of spring; there's no sense that there has been a struggle, that winter seeks to remain dominant and that spring has to fight to be reborn. And -- I wouldn't say this if you hadn't already, but really, that concept of the turning of the year is pagan, and we didn't adopt it even to that extent.

Passover is about our birth as a nation, and about how God redeemed us from slavery ... and in a big way it's about God's total mastery over nature, and over the powers that the Egyptians worshipped as divine. The Resurrection story layers very well with the pagan rebirth-of-spring theme; the Exodus story kind of contradicts it.

[agonistes]

That's interesting, because our senior minister brought up Passover in his sermon today -- but not in the context of "this is the same symbolic thing as Easter". The way he connected it to the rest of what he was saying -- he was talking about how human experience and emotion mirror the cycle of the seasons, and the way he phrased it had Passover commemorating something hugely godawful that passed over the houses of the Jews. Remembering that experience with the holiday makes collective identity stronger, while acknowledging that (for lack of a better phrase) shit happens, and you deal with it all as a community. Up to and including the slavery part.

[batyatoon]

You can look at it that way, certainly, but I think Passover isn't really the best example -- Hannukah or Purim would be better, because those are stories in which we did something to deal with the horrors we were facing. Pretty much all we did in the Passover story was holler to God for help, and then take one symbolic step (the slaughter of the lamb and the painting its blood on the doorpost) to express our willingness to follow Him out of it.

[ceph.livejournal.com]

You need to read Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich--I just lent it to Mom when she was here, so maybe you can get her to send you that copy. It talks a lot about the parallels between Christ and Dionysius, and both the divine and the dark aspects of Carnival-type celebrations.

[adiva_calandia]

I do. *grin* I'm willing to bet I know a quarter of it already from Medieval Drama, but I'm also willing to bet that the other three-quarters are fascinating.

[vivien]

I feel similarly about the pagan-influenced shivery wonder of Christmas - waiting for that light in the darkness, knowing there is hope to stave off the death winter brings. One of the things that drew me back into church is the connection I feel through ritual to the people of generations reaching back to pre-history - we might not all have believed the same things or worshiped the same way, but the struggle to find the light in the darkness has always been the same.

Christmas is solemn and hopeful "we can make it" joy; Easter is triumphant, "we made it through the worst of the worst" joy. I am all about the joy.

[genarti]

Yes. This is beautifully put.

It's not what Easter means to me; it's not even what worship means to me, exactly, because the whole concept of group worship is something that's never emotionally clicked with me when I'm actually practicing it rather than thinking about it. So it's funny that I get such a feeling of "Yes, this is it exactly, this is right" from this post, because I'm having trouble tracking down what exactly is behind the gut reaction of recognition. It's not church, but it's there, all the same.

Singing, maybe. Partly. In a choir, voices lifted, in aching harmony, all together and all shaping something that's beautiful and mournful and glorious all together -- there are reasons that I love hymns.

And: yes.

[adiva_calandia]

My mom's been saying for a couple of years now that the main thing that keeps her coming to church is the music. The Pope is annoying; the priests at our cathedral have been even more so at times; the people are nice, usually, but that's not quite enough. But the music . . .

And -- the times I have felt closest to God or Life or whatever greater force you want to name have been when I've been cantoring, and asked the congregation to join in the opening hymn, and there have been enough people to blow me back with the power of their voices. Usually that's Christmas mass or Easter mass, when the Catholic guilt kicks in and everyone comes. *grin* I got to cantor once when there was some kind of Northwest Diocese conference in Anchorage, and the first three rows were packed with priests. And hooboy did they sing.

I've always liked the saying that when you sing, you pray twice. Raise a joyful noise, right?

So yeah. Hell if I know what I think about God and religion; I know this post doesn't cover everything I think about Easter, but I do try not to repeat myself too much from year to year, and I've gotta have something to write about next year. *grin* But this is part of it, for me.