Did I mention how going to work Easter Sunday afternoon sucked every ounce of resurrection joy out of my soul?
It was a good morning. Coolish, but sunny and beautiful. Clear blue sky. Redbuds blooming. I got the boys ready for Church while Mrs. Avdat went ahead for handbell practice. (I am still thoroughly enjoying sleeping in on Sundays and worshiping with my family for the first time since... well, ever).
We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, which brings tears to my eyes. I always react to that hymn the way that I ought to react to The Strife Is O'er, a sense of the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders, from the world's shoulders. Pastor Janet's sermon (with an acknowledged assist from Barbara Brown Taylor) was a slam dunk. "They were looking for the past but stumbled upon the future." Fair words of warning and promise to a budding Church Historian.
We went home, ate lunch, rested, and then I went in to wait tables at That Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before.
Nothing bad happened. No rude customers. No co-worker cattiness.
But the very absence of novelty is what was so spiritually crushing about it. The same musical soundtrack of current pop hits and classic rock standards. The same menu, same smell of french fries. No ham biscuits like there were at every Easter family reunion we attended as children. The dark interior which dilates your pupils and makes it impossible to see outside. Not that there's anything to see outside. A strip mall parking lot. There is a Bradford Pear, the ubiquitous and sterile suburban organic yard decoration that provides the barest hint of nature if you look at it out from under the awning: brown in winter, white in early spring, brown again as its blooms wilt in the face of the inevitable late frost, then green.
Shortly, it wasn't Easter anymore. It wasn't spring anymore. It wasn't anything anymore. By the soundtrack and the landscape you could place my serving gig somewhere in America on either side of the century's turn, but otherwise the venue is as unplottable as Number 12 Grimmauld Place. Suburban wasteland.
I should be tougher. Dietrich Bonhoeffer managed to cultivate a rich spiritual life in a concentration camp, for goodness sake. I ought to be able to find God in a restaurant.
When Jesus returned to his hometown, they took umbrage because they knew the back story on this hot-shot prophet. He was just the carpenter's son; who did he think he was? Mark reports, "He could do no deed of power there because of their unbelief." I'm struck by the word "there," as opposed to say, "for them." It raises a interesting possibility, that there are spiritual dead zones in the topography of creation.
Are they all due to unbelief? Or can inspid art and culture do the same?
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