Valyermo – Stations of the Cross (4)

Posted on October 3, 2002 in Culture Photos Travels - So Cal

Click on the Picture

Behind the pond and up the hill we found stations of the cross which were done in a whimsical, modernist fashion. Colorful cutouts depicted the key events in this mythic prayer cycle, from the condemnation by Pilate (represented by a pitcher and wash basin mounted on the cross) to the resurrection. (Normally there are only fourteen chapters in the cycle, but the addition of the fifteenth is an appropriate addition to the myth.)

On a personal note: I am an agnostic who retains an appreciation of the potency of myth, including Christian mythology. Some years ago, I was attacked online by a Wiccan after I mentioned being moved by a statue of a suffering Christ I saw at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. She declared me a barbarian, a participant in an evil blood-thirsty religion. The other members of the mailing list grew nervous. Though I had not begun the fight, I felt as if I was the one blamed for it. Never once did I attack the faith of the Wiccan as incorrect or unjust. I simply asked for myself an understanding of what it was that moved me.

Nevertheless, I was cast off. The excuse was that I “represented the dominant religion”. Friends who read the exchanges and who were familiar with my particular unorthodoxy laughed at the accusation.

Many mythic traditions feature a cycle of suffering, death, and resurrection involving one of its principle figures. The Sumerians sent the goddess Inaana on a journey to hell, where she was stripped of her seven garments at seven gates and then hung from a pole. The Egyptians had Osiris and the Phoenicians Baal. (For that matter, Wicca has its own dying and rising god.) Jesus follows in these traditions. If I enjoy and respect the emotional power of these other stories, what should deny me the like pleasure of appreciating the deep emotional framework of the Christian myth?

The only mythic tradition which features fluffy bunny angels and ever happy endings that I know of is largely produced out of Hollywood. The rest of them, including the antecedents of Wicca, include characters who go through some pretty rough adventures. Christianity is not decidedly more brutal in its iconography than other traditions. Ultimately I see all these myths as affirming the reality of suffering in this world. But most go farther: they encourage us to hope, even against mutilation and death.

Though I am no longer a Catholic, I am still moved by the Church’s iconography. No servant of social justice should underappreciate the devotion given to the Virgin Mary, for example, in the name of those who have suffered through the repressions of tyrants, some of whom claim to be good Christians themselves. (I enjoy, in particular, the work of Robert Lentz, creator of the Mother of the Disappeared and similar works.) Many turn to “Our Mother of Sorrows” to find what is often lacking in the world, sympathy and empathy for the discouragements that flagellate us. (After all, she, too, saw her son tortured and killed by by the agents of a cold colonialist bureaucracy.) Even if these figures do not exist, I feel that meditating upon them can be beneficial because they remind us of the potency and the reality of the never ending human story. Seeing Jesus and Mary suffer in a story — or Inaana or Baal — reminds us that we are not alone; that in every moment, there exists hope stronger than fear — the mighty emotion of transcension and victory over the pain inflicted on us by this sometimes evil world.

Elsewhere I told a friend on IRC:

There’s an awful lot of silliness about religion, but there is also a lot of beauty, IMHO. I laugh at the silliness and revere the beauty.

And I might have scared chari when I joked in her comments:

I’m convinced that Jesus has a better sense of humor than his followers give him credit. It’s too bad that the fifth gospel, which contained all his jokes, was lost when the Crusaders burned the Library of Alexandria. 🙂

As far as I know, there was no Jokebook of Christ burned in Alexandria. But I still think Jesus had a sense of humor. You can’t be that serious without also possessing a feel for the absurd.