The Will to Blog

I've been informed that I need to blog more.

Haroseth and Cherubs

Had a Passover Seder (dinner) on Wednesday night with the extended family, minus my dad, who has finally said "to Hell with it, I'm not going to waste my time with that goddamn religious nonsense," or words to that effect, and once you're pushing 80 you can say those sorts of things. Cousin Wendy had, to my surprise, flown in from Montreal, and we had as our guests the Butlers from across the street, an African-American couple experiencing their first Passover and liking the haroseth.

I am, by the way, only sort-of Jewish (semi-Semitic, if you will), my mother having been a Gentile. To say nothing of my Jewish father being a strident atheist and a bit of an anti-Semite....

And just so I have all my bases covered, I just got back from SS. Peter & Paul in North Beach, where I attended Easter service. A CATHOLIC Easter service. A first for me. A friend asked me to accompany her -- she is rediscovering her Catholicism, so I said hey, what the Hell, and went along. (Of course, we first had to fortify ourselves with dinner at a nearby Italian place -- lots of pasta, imperative for attending two-hour Easter services at SS. Peter & Paul.) The service was....well, somewhat interesting...the sermon itself focused on Exodus, with a lot of attention paid to the Passover element of Easter, the whole Passover story from the plague of the firstborn to the flight from Egypt. The priest said that ultimately Easter was about finding "shalom" within ourselves. Shalom, the Old Testament word for peace, not just being the absence of conflict, but of inner harmony and wholeness. So I could get to that, spiritually, and it made me feel less threatened as a Jew.

That said, though, I have a problem with the use of the vulgate. These services, particularly the chanted liturgy, sound so canned and unappealing in English. I think whatever power there was in Catholic/Christian ritual was lost with the departure from Latin, so much more magical and ancient, charged with the mystery of the divine. Name and form and all that. Chanted liturgy just sounds silly in English -- like setting an instruction manual for a cordless telephone to the tune of a Gregorian chant. Plus, with Latin, at least if you are a casual observer, you won't be focused on the curious and inherently unsatisfying dogma of original sin.

Here's another thing: while the soaring, dark recesses of European Gothic cathedrals inspire spiritual awe, in their mouldy, midaeval way, American Catholic churches tend just to be tacky. Lots of gilded plaster, inadvisable baby blue accents, waxy cherubs. Hardly tokens of the timeless and boundless.