Of Dead Saviors and Chocolate Easter Bunnies
by Tommi Avicolli-Mecca‚
Mar. 20‚ 2008
Easter was never my favorite holiday. I had nothing against the day itself. After all, we got baskets filled with candy from a giant Easter Bunny. He was like Santa Claus, only non-human and obviously a mutation.
Jesus allegedly rose from the dead on that morning. In fact, it was the culmination of the Jesus Christ Superstar story that started with his all-so humble birth in a cold smelly manger in Bethlehem, wherever that was. If it was only about dead saviors and chocolate eggs, I would have been in seventh heaven. But Easter time meant two things I didn’t like: Lent and Good Friday.
Lent was the 40 days before Easter. It was a time to give up something that was important to us as a reminder that we had to suffer to save our immortal souls. Who knew why? Jesus supposedly fasted in the desert for 40 days, so we had to do it, too.
The easy way out was to give up something we didn’t like. When the nuns asked us in school, we pretended it was a great sacrifice.
“Sister, I’m giving up broccoli. It’s my favorite thing in the whole world. Every time I pass up that broccoli, I’m suffering like Jesus did.” It worked like a charm.
During those long dreary weeks before the treats arrived in a basket, the nuns went on and on about our sins and the sins of the entire world. As if we were responsible for all those pagan babies being born in heathen countries.
Those poor kids never had a chance. Since they weren’t baptized into the “true faith,” they were condemned to float around in limbo for all eternity.
Nobody knew exactly where limbo was, but it wasn’t a fun place to be floating, especially with no one to change your diapers.
Good Friday service gave me a glimpse of hell. Why did they call it “good” anyway? There was nothing “good” about it. Jesus got nailed to a cross and we had to kneel for three hours at the Stations of the Cross while some priest paraded around in a tacky dress, mumbling long prayers in Latin, a language we couldn’t understand.
There were about a dozen separate “stations” to the service. They commemorated various moments in the crucifixion saga. Everything from Jesus carrying the cross and Veronica wiping his face, to our man-god being whipped by those nasty Roman soldiers. By the fifth or sixth one, my knees were aching and I was thinking, “Crucify him already.”
After I reached puberty, my thoughts at those Good Friday services drifted to things other than what was happening to poor tortured Jesus. Surrounded by pew after pew of boys, I came to understand the meaning of “near occasion of sin.”
It made the three-hour ordeal more bearable.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical southern Italian atheist queer performer and writer with a website: www.avicollimecca.com
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