I saw a staring virgin stand
And bear that beating heart away;
When it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim.
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This is an odd time to come out of the closet, I know. The recent scandals among the Pentecostal TV evangelists are giving God a bad name. It’s tempting to distance myself from the whole mess. At best, Christianity is an embarrassing religion, and never more so than on Easter Sunday. Even as a kid I knew that the central image of Christianity — the Crucifixion — is pretty revolting. And consider the Byzantine rationalizations necessary to explain how nailing a Hebrew man to a cross two thousand years ago could be of any use to me in this or the next world. If you can understand Christian theology, you can probably also understand postmodern antideconstructionist literary criticism.
Nevertheless, it’s my religion and I’m stuck with it. It’s part of me, like my last name, the shape of my nose, my appendix scar, and my taste for trashy love novels, and no oversexed snake-handling speaking-in-tongues hillbilly Bible-thumper can take it from me.
While I’m washing my hair I hear the Last Words of Christ. The script is taken from the New American Bible or some other atrocity (What ever happened to the King James version?). The line “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” comes out “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing!” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” comes out “Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus is apparently a method actor. He delivers these lines in an anguished, full-throated Shakespearean roar that makes my hair stand on end.
This is the Resurrection? After that Cecil B. De Mille Crucifixion scene with all the crying and yelling and the people rolling their eyes and hallelujahing and carrying on with full orchestra and chorus? Then Jesus just pops up off the slab — surprise! I’m alive! I mean, we are talking serious anticlimax here.
