Beauty and the Moonlight

We are steeped to the gills in jellybeans and chocolate bunnies. And after several successful egg hunts, we find we’ve come up one short: our baker’s dozen is now an even dozen. Fortunately, this year we decided to do the hunt with plastic eggs instead of the ones we dyed fancy colors. This was partly practical. AJ couldn’t stop picking up his creations, but had an unnerving tendency to drop them. He seems to be specializing in a very post-modern, reconstructed “egg” concept. I seem to be specializing in egg salad.

AJ, who woke at 4 this morning in all the excitement, is dead asleep. Mr. Spy and I are enjoying the annual screening of The Sound of Music. I’ve watched it nearly every Easter since I was a kid. The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz (which we watched a day or two ago) will always be holiday movies for me.

I particularly remember one Easter, which we spent at the very fancy mansion of some friends of my friend K, the one who we stop to visit on our drives to see my parents. We’ve been friends since we met at age 12. On the Easter in question, we were maybe 14 or so. After Easter dinner with the grownups and swimming in their indoor pool, the one with a two story wall of glass looking out into the forest in a New York exurb, all of us kids ended up sitting and watching The Sound of Music. We had all seen it a gazillion times and K and I knew most of the dialogue by heart (I still do, much to Mr. Spy’s annoyance). We had nicknames for everyone. Gretl was called Grandma, because her little puckered face looked so old. And the Baroness was the Yellow Tootsie, because she’s wearing yellow in so many of her scenes. I don’t remember all the rest of them, but it was the perfect movie for loving and making fun of at the same time. And every time I watch it, I think of that day and I want to call of K.

We did go to church this morning and the music was lovely and all the right hymns were sung. The ritual made it feel like a holiday too. But the sermon was….almost beyond description. It began with a very ill-advised rhetorical conceit that seemed to be making light of war deaths (”4,000 dead in Iraq. It figures.”) and deteriorated from there. The young priest (female — we went to an Episcopal service today; we are, at best, religious tourists) meant well, but nothing came out right. She started talking about the Maundy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, how intimate it is, and then hastily backtracked, “but not in a sexual or aggressive way, but gently!” Somehow it made it worse. I mean, we’re all used to the ceremony. I hadn’t really considered the potential sexuality of it (although I find it kind of creepy and tend to avoid it) until she mentioned it. And then, of course, we couldn’t think of anything else.

In the last part of the sermon, in an attempt, I think, to connect with The Youth of Today, she decided to talk about the religious content of her favorite song: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I knew this was trouble as soon as she mentioned it. It’s one of my favorite songs too and it’s rife with religious imagery, but its meaning is very complicated, convoluted and elliptical. And I’m really not sure it’s a song I’d equate with the kind of divine love Christians are supposed to find on the day of the Resurrection. I’m pretty sure Cohen’s talking about something else entirely. But the priest read several verses. [Thankfully one of them was NOT:

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah]

and then seized on the phrase “our love is not a victory march” and went on and on about how this is the perfect phrase to describe Christian love. I kind of tuned out at this point. But it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud when she finished and the congregation laid into the offertory hymn. Verse 1:

The strife is o’er, the battle done;
The victory of life is won;
The song of triumph has begun: Alleluia!

D’oh! Apparently love IS a victory march! Don’t ever let anyone tell you that church isn’t entertaining. If the sermon wasn’t entertainment enough, you would have enjoyed watching all the little girls in their Easter dresses spinning in the aisles like miniature fairy princesses. I know I did. I may be a heathen, but I appreciate a good ritual, even if it’s an annual ritual of conspiratorial mockery. Tomorrow I will repent. Or not.