The Telling

Passiontide begins. At tonight’s service we come to an altar draped in red with images removed or covered. We bear the cross with a wreath of red berries and hear the first readings for Sunday. We hear the first hymns that are the songs not of Lent and fasting, but of the Passion, suffering, rejection and dying. Later on in the second service, there is the introit to the Passion

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly nation; from wicked and deceitful men deliver me, for you are my God and my strength. Send forth your light and your truth; these have led me and brought me to your holy mountain and to your dwelling place.

We come in with the reddish cranberry candle and with the great red shrouded image of the Madonna holding the dead Christ, and then sit down to hear the Passion. At the time that Christ dies, I rise and unveil the painting,  and then kneel and hear the rest of the ancient story.

We will hear the story tomorrow morning as well and then we will hear it the next Sunday, twice. And then we will hear another version of it on Good Friday, also one in the middle of that fateful week called Holy Week. Years ago Passiontide lasted two weeks for everyone. The story of the Passion was heard now, and Palm Sunday’s story the next week. Convenience flattened it all down to one week. Looking at this story over and over again for two weeks, living in the Passion too long, was too much.

This time of year, this time of deep storytelling, I am reminded of a magic I often forget, and that is the magic of the Telling, the transformation and power worked by the preparation to sit down and hear an ancient story, hear what is called a myth. We are so wasteful with our words and what we hear, but the bard believes his own telling and shaping of words, his story creating, his poetry, are a sort of sacred work, and we also believe that the hearing, the sacred silencing and taking time over and over again to hear the old stories, is the holy work too. We light the candles on the altar, the modern memory of when bonfire and altar, congregation and community were one, and we leave the silly mind, and the superficial mind and the so called rational mind behind and offer our whole childlike selves to receive the Telling. Dionysus, Isis, the Passion of Jesus, Adonis, Moses, the many Creationsall the different ways these tales are told, are sacred to us, the tellings which make these specific stories different from any other stories,. And they do not remain the same because these stories are composed of layers, because every story is a conversation inside of itself. Every writer knows that. And we ourselves are conversations, looping contradictions, eyes opening and shutting like cherubim or Argus and so, though the story seem the same, and we seem the same as well, the alchemy is in what comes to us and from us at this particular Telling, what magics might be wrought when we are willing to give ourselves to tales which are not simply pastimes.

Postscript:

I am watching a movie I have watched several times before: Jesus of Nazareth, the old Franco Zefirrelli made for television miniseries with movie production values. As I watch his version of the story of Jesus unfold, as I remember the Passion performed last night, it occurs to me that these stories are like the Lapwing. If you get hung up in them, you miss them. Was it really like this, exactly, whatever that means? I am almost offended by the especially blond haired and blue eyed boy they found to play young Jesus. Did Jews in the first century really live like this? Did Jesus really say those words? How real this all seems. How real was it? But this is the Lapwing. Even for the one who simply asks did any of this happen at all? it is the Lapwing, the sacred Mother who flaps around the holy thing and threatens to take those not intent on contemplation and discovery away from the holy thing by distracting with what does not matter. My experience is Christian and so Jesus means more to me than Adonis or Attis or Dionysus, but even the story of Jesus is something that is not entirely itself, that is a mystery pointing to something I cannot name and cannot explain. Even in unbelief or ante belief or heretical belief, hearing the Telling, being present for it, a glory will be revealed which the story can only hint. We must wait for it. This is the glory of the Telling.