This past Easter Saturday was our friend Jim's 70th birthday party, and a helluva party it was.
70s themed costumes for all, disco ball, coloured lights, dancing to funky disco music--and food and drink of course.
To top it all off, Jim and several friends did 3 choreographed numbers with changes of drag and fetish costumes. A ball gown, an Abba get-up, and assless leather chaps for the inevitable Village People number. It was like a mini Mardi Gras: there was lots of love in the room, and everyone had a fab time.
Contrary to the current taste for protecting children from drag queens, I would rather my kids go to something like this every week than rehearse annually the grim passiontide story of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Think about it. A man is stripped to his loins--beaten, whipped until his flesh is flayed, forced to carry a heavy object to public ridicule. All of which causes him to faint again and again. A woman takes pity and uses her veil to wipe his face, only to have it come away with his tortured visage printed in blood, sweat, and do doubt tears, on the cloth. Extreme close-up on the horrid image.
Then, if that's not enough to put you off your chocolate eggs, this guy is nailed to a piece of wood by his extremities--hands and feet. (Well, we're told, hands are technically impossible, because the weight of his body would have torn the nails out between his fingers joints. His wrists, then. So much better.)
His torturers are not done yet. They gleefully force a spiked ringlet of thorns into onto his head in mockery of a crown, and stab him in the side with a spear because they're getting bored now. Blood and water flow from the gash. Water? Is he not fully dehydrated by now? This is Palestine, after all.
Of course, after lingering in excruciating pain for a while, he dies, his alluringly fit yet savaged body hanging like meat from a hook. His friends put what's left of him in a rock tomb.
And then after a few days baking in the Middle East, he becomes, one assumes, a zombie, rising from his grave to walk the earth again. Unrotted, somehow.
If there is a more gruesome movie on Netflix without the recommended use of the parental lock, I'd like to know.
As a young Catholic kid going to 'Stations of the Cross' every year, this 14-part mini series is on permanent repeat, and at Good Friday and Easter Sunday services the story is exhumed annually. And we were reminded all this unimaginable suffering was endured for us because we're born bad. He suffered and died thus for our sins. (Substitutional atonement--don't get me started...)
Hope, it was supposed to give us. Hope. Rot.
My hope is that this grisly story--hardly more ennobling than Mayan human sacrifice--is consigned to the curiosity cabinet of humanity's dark bestial past, a morality tale of how very sick our imaginations were only a couple millennia ago.
Give me the cheap redemption of the Village People and disco balls and music and drag acts and dancing and fabulous fashion.
Keep the death cult, thanks. I'm eating: the canapes are delicious.
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