(no subject)

[fadeaccompli]

Easter is the only holiday that still has an emotional hold on me. Christmas is a nice time for giving gifts and hanging out with family, and I like some of the associated traditions, and some people write very nice things about it, but it's not doing anything that I can't get elsewhere. I didn't grow up with Halloween, so I admire it from a polite distance, like Passover or the Fourth of July. My family never did Lent, I'm still not very clearly on what Labor Day is for beyond something about white shoes... I just don't feel much attachment to holidays. It's not like people around me celebrate them the way I did when I was a kid, anyway. So it's no big.

But Easter. Man. Death and resurrection, sacrifice and silence and rejoicing. Standing on the roof of the school at sunrise, shivering in the mountain air, while we said to each other, "Christ is risen!" "He is risen indeed." That pulls on deep emotional strings, for me. It's like pouring out a drop of distilled Hope in the middle of the darkness.

And, well. I don't get that anymore. The days leading up to Easter, I get a lot of coupons suggesting that this is a holiday about buying toys for children. I wake up late on Easter morning, and check my Twitter feed to find 70% of the posts being some sort of "Aren't Christians stupid? Let me express how much I scorn their stupid holiday!" comment. The day after Easter, I can pick up discount chocolate bunnies. Sometimes I'll see chocolate crucifixes in the dollar store, and blanch. (Really? Really? The fuck.)

Most of the people around me don't feel the way I do; that's okay. Some of the people around me want to make a deliberate point of telling everyone they don't feel the way I do; that's okay. Some of them want to make sure to express that I am a wrong and stupid person for feeling the way I do, and...I admit, that hurts a bit. But I realize some of that is coming from them having been made to feel similarly by other people they associate with the religion before, so, y'know. Collateral damage. It happens.

I'm too agnostic to try to embrace Christianity again, these days. (And frankly, I don't have the self-confidence for it. Large portions of my social group would take it poorly, and I am not going to choose that hill to die on, as expenditures of emotional energy go.) I'm not about to show up at a strange church on Easter morning, because I'm not part of that thing anymore, and it'd be...fake, really, to try to embrace the community sensation that comes at that point.

If it's not worth doing properly, it's not worth doing at all.

But I think back to my surly little preteen self standing in the cold air on sunrise, and the way that wave of emotion poured down on me from every side. Light out of darkness, hope out of despair, and the determination to do something great with a new opportunity. I miss the taste of it, the way I miss the smell of jungle rain on sun-warmed cement, and I can't get back to either sensation.

Ah well. Christ is risen. (Perhaps.) He is risen indeed. (Let us hope so.)

Comments

[fadeaccompli]

I accept awkward solidarity and embrace it with awkward, sincere gratitude. There is a part of me that knows I cannot possibly go back to that wide-eyed wonder, even if it did hit the hardest during my cynical, grouchy teenage years. That's not who I am anymore. And yet.

Mundus resurgens, I think, will suffice for me.

[hawkwing_lb]

It is very difficult, for me as a cynical adult and avowed agnostic/weak atheist, to speak honestly about the immense appeal of the religious sense without feeling as though I'm betraying a part of myself - I can't turn off the part of the mind that analyses the sense of belonging and wonder and sees how it may be created/recreated/caused. But it does seem to be an intrinsic part of being human also - not necessarily religious belief, as such, but the appeal of the sense of transcendence, community, communion with mythic sense.

Part of it is nostalgia for the innocence that allows a pre-analytical experience, of course. But part of it is simply the fact that religious experience as found in organised religions remains one of the most intensely communal and self-connected-to-other-selves - and not on its face tawdry and commercial - experiences that most humans can have.

[fadeaccompli]

But part of it is simply the fact that religious experience as found in organised religions remains one of the most intensely communal and self-connected-to-other-selves - and not on its face tawdry and commercial - experiences that most humans can have.

Yes. This exactly. (And it did nothing good for my faith to run into churches during late adolescence where I could see how deliberately they were trying to invoke these things, in contrast to the less slick and practiced--and thus, at least to my perception, more honest--rituals that I'd grown up with.) At times some moments in conventions hit similar notes, but...it's the difference between being in the jazz band and playing a great song that we all know and riff on, and humming along to the same song on the radio. It pulls on some of the same heartstrings, but it's not nearly as intense or personal.

I miss that transcendental feeling, but I no longer trust anything that might offer it quite enough to get it again. Because--drugs aside--one needs to have a certain amount of trust and surrender to get that sort of result. And I haven't the time, all else aside, to form strong enough links with a new community locally that I could even try for that.

[hawkwing_lb]

I need to get you to meet me in Greece during one of the August full moon cultural event nights. Because I'm pretty sure you'd feel a nice bit of transcendence at an open-air performance in an ancient theatre.

I know I did. *g*

[fadeaccompli]

Somehow, one of these summers, we will make this happen. Oh yes.

[hawkwing_lb]

It would be my delight to attempt to provide some guidance to the Best Spots. :)