empathy/hate/hope (holy week)
lent diary #5
Something was different on Palm Sunday.
The Friar says so. Of course, I’d already gotten a clue - I was holding a palm leaf in my hands. A first for me. The palm rested flat on my palms, like a blade I was afraid might cut me if I didn’t handle it right.
I had the feeling that everyone in the church knew what to do with it except me.
My mom would tell me, later in the week, that this feeling is what steers her away from churches. That and a general distrust of the worship of any individual man or deity. But it’s mostly the voice of the anxiety that we share.
It bonds us.
So I’m holding the palm. And I watch the procession march in, waving massive palm fronds, fanning the altar where Jesus hides behind red velvet. He is veiled, covered, anonymous. The fanning is accompanied by music, by prayer. My heart does not feel that much, but my brain whirls in an attempt to dissect the ritual. I pull from my Performance Studies knowledge to try and summon emotion. Yet I’m still tired, absent-minded.
I had the feeling that everyone in the church knew what to feel but me.
My ex-girlfriend told me, earlier in the week, that she was sad she couldn’t go with me. ooh tomorrows Palm Sunday thats a fun mass, she texted. A few days later she broke up with me. We’d gone to this church once together. Our yearning for the voice God is something we shared.
It bonded us.
Then, the Friar spoke. After the normal opening, the time came for the reading of the Gospel. But he told us he would not be giving a sermon afterwards - instead, he would only speak before in order to frame The Passion of Christ. He wanted us to remember, as we listened to the climax of the Greatest Story Ever Told, that its protagonist was a man, a human. Divine, yes, but someone who suffered intense, physical suffering and humiliation.
There are times when we have - or will - suffer like Him, he said. When we will be in pain, or humiliated, or lost. When we will ask where God is, when we will ask why he has forsaken us.
And the “performance” began. It was not a full-fledged Passion Play, but Luke’s voice was split into three human bodies, standing on three different parts of the altar. Three spoke as one, each playing the different “characters”: Jesus, Pilate, Peter, etc. At the trial, when the crowd yelled for Jesus to die, the congregation spoke these words in unison. I didn’t know the verses, and I just listened, quiet in the crowd.
I had the feeling that everyone in the church knew what to say but me.
And then we got to the Passion itself, the death of Jesus on the cross. Suffering, crying out, mutilated, humiliated. A martyr, a man, a God - tortured to death. At the moment he died, there was a moment of silence as we all dropped to our knees. A moment to really think about the death of this man.
Yet I still struggled to feel anything.
We are talking about the murder of our God— we’re witnesses, every day, to the sacrifice He made for us, with His physical body. We’re talking about his blood, his wounds, and we are proclaiming his mangled body to be in the room with us. And then we eat Him and He literally becomes part of our cellular body.
How are we not falling down on the ground and WEEPING – every time? Why am I ever bored? Just waiting to get out and have brunch? Because it’s been 2000 years and we know the story already?
But the story is new every time because there are new kinds of sinning every day — and He dies for those sins, every time, every day, all over the world, in every church.
He is dying He is dying He is dying
He is giving us His body so that we can LIVE, and meanwhile I’m just sneakily checking my phone and speed-praying by rote, just saying the words.
I never feel anything
This passage is from Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Oh, I’m excited to finally talk about it - it’s my favorite play by my favorite contemporary playwright, and by far one of the most incisive, complex, and damning portrayals of American Catholicism. Arbery calls it a “fugue,” a musical term characterized by different voices imitating and twisting a main theme.
The themes: Catholicism, pain, and Trump.
The voices are heartbreaking, infuriating, ugly, painful, and pained. They belong to five people who are wrestling with their Catholic beliefs. Five intellectuals who all voted for Trump in 2016. Five increasingly drunken friends who deride trans people, call liberals terrorists, and scream out for someone to love them, to hold them.
They are hateful, confused, and broken people.
Are we supposed to empathize with them?
Oh don’t with the empathy. Liberals are empathy addicts. Empathy empathy empathy. Empathy is empty. Hannah Arendt says we don’t need to feel what someone else is feeling – first of all that’s impossible, second of all it’s self-righteous and breeds complacency, third of all it’s politically irresponsible. Empathize with someone and suddenly you’re erasing the boundaries of your own conscience, suddenly you’re living under the tyranny of their desires. We need to know how to think how they’re thinking. From a distance.
These words are spit out with coke-fueled righteousness by Theresa, the personification of the hyper-ironic, venomous Dimes Square brand of Catholics. She’s by far the least empathetic of the entire group.
But that first passage, the one about being bored when faced with the blood and ecstasy of the Passion - that belongs to Kevin. Kevin - ridiculed as a “soyboy” by Theresa, and looked on with pity by the others. It’s easy to label him as pathetic. He gets violently drunk, sobs, vomits, hurts himself for attention, and throws himself at the feet of his disabled friend, begging her to let him bathe her. He careens between wanting a girlfriend and wanting to become a priest.
He is suffering.
Are we supposed to empathize with him?
Used to believe I wanted to be a Catholic priest I would never have to worry About the girls tryin' to break my heart "Catholic Priest" (MJ Lenderman)
The body is Arbery’s main key to excavating some sort of empathy from theatre audiences that, more likely than not, exist on the opposite end of the political spectrum as his characters. The characters suffer from Lyme Disease, lust, and alcoholism. The spewing of fluids, like mini-exorcisms, remind us that they’re humans with bodies and desires just like ours. The structure of the play - two unbroken hours of conversation - forces us to stay with these humans, to listen to voices we might otherwise tune out. We see their pain.
Do we need to see people suffer in order to empathize with them?
I remember reading the play for the first time and feeling a lightning bolt shoot through me when Kevin entered. He’s my favorite character, bar none, in the entire dramatic canon. Something about him breaks my heart so, so much. He’s a mirror for me. He feels like me from an alternate universe, one where I didn’t discover my transness, or theater, or my best friends.
I do feel when I read about his suffering, about the turmoil of this fictional character that I would probably steer clear of in real life.
And I did feel an ache when, in our reading of the Gospel, Peter inevitably denied Jesus three times. He had three chances to help. Three chances to do the right thing, to stand alongside his radical friend who is being dragged to his death by cops.
Like Peter, like Kevin, I’ve been ruled by fear and desperation.
It’s not the best feeling in the world.
Something was different on Good Friday.
My Mom visited on Good Friday. We went to Santa Monica, and I remembered to not eat meat. So I shared salmon and fresh squeezed orange juice with my mother, who is beginning to call me Elaina.
We talked about Temecula, where I went to elementary school. A place where I was friends with other boys who made casually homophobic jokes. Our own fugue of bitter “Dark Humor” that I mimicked without a thought. If we hadn’t moved, if I’d stayed there any longer, I might have ended up like Kevin.
KEVIN
It’s a transgender world & I’m a transgender uh
And how do we
Like if I’m dancing with them
Like do I dance them to the gates of hell & slam the gate shut behind them
Kevin’s an egg, by the way. One hundred percent. So there’s a good chance I also would have felt the pull of my transness, even in this shudder-to-think alternate universe. I would’ve cracked eventually.
In this universe, I didn’t end up as Kevin. I ended up as Elaina, and I’m very happy.
We walked to the beach and joked about my Dad always forgetting about the whole Friday Meat Thing on Lent Fridays. I’ve been pretty lax this whole Lent season about the Friday Meat Thing, but for Good Friday I decided to lock in.
But I had plans with Callisto to make him one of my favorite recipes. It has meat in it, but I didn’t want to change plans, so I got the ingredients and we still cooked it together. I ate the potatoes and green beans we made on the side, but not the chicken. It wasn’t the biggest sacrifice in the world, but it was an exercise in selflessness. I didn’t need to eat it myself - it was enough just to make something for my friend to enjoy.
I had planned to make that recipe on Tuesday for my aforementioned ex-girlfriend, but a phone call on Monday night dashed that plan. I resented her at first. I was angry. I wanted to say cruel things.
But I knew it was the right thing to do. It took all my strength, but I opened my hurting heart and saw the pain she was in, the massive life upheavals and physical and mental pain she’s still in. Both of us need things that neither of us can give at this moment. My heart has softened this week.
And I ended up making the meal anyway, just for someone else I love.
Something is different on Easter.
The church is standing room only. I stand at the very back, gazing at the wall of lilies surrounding the now-unveiled statue of Jesus. There are candles burning and a choir singing. A saxophone gently blows. Every sense is told that today is different, today is special. There is an atmosphere of joy that stands in stark opposition to Palm Sunday and Good Friday. The dramaturgy of the week is Catholicism in miniature: first there is pain, then there is deliverance. I felt light and joyful.
For a moment, at least. The Friar tells us to introduce ourselves to those around us, to spread peace and love. I smile, I wave, I shake hands. I hear names. I’m asked my own. In the first entry of this series, I mentioned being thankful at not having to say my name at any point, of exposing some part of myself with its femininity. Now that moment had come.
My name is Lynn, I said.
Not entirely a lie. I’ve played with the name Lynn, often as a middle name, or perhaps a stage name. Elaina Lynn. Yet, when I said it, I felt disappointed in myself. I crumbled with fear. Three different people asked my name. I had three opportunities to be true to myself.
I denied myself three times.
Sin is a strange idea. The definition that rings truest with me is that Sin is anything that harms yourself or others. What I did with this denial, with this fear of saying my name, might count as a Sin. I’d harmed myself with my fear.
I doubted again if this church was a good place for me if it provokes this type of fear. Maybe if I’d said “Elaina” nobody would’ve batted an eye. I don’t know. As I walked up to receive communion, to do the ritual I’d flubbed my first time here, I realized how few people there looked like me. I gazed up at the altar and wondered if I’d find a spiritual place for me and my people.
Then, something called me to look at the people around me. And I locked eyes with a trans woman in one of the pews. Red hair, white dress, glasses. Simple and beautiful. Someone who looked like me. When we looked each other, we recognized something. We smiled. And I kept walking.
The Friar talked about the Resurrection, about Sin being forgiven, about second chances and personal revolutions always being possible. The joy came back. I went out into the sun. I’ll be back next week. And probably the week after that.
The Church is still a tangle of contradictions for me, a blend of joy and fear. I still believe, and I still feel held, though some of my writings might seem that I feel the opposite. How can this be?
To answer this, here’s a poem from a Jewish Buddhist:
Do not decode
these cries of mine -
They are the road,
and not the sign.
Leonard Cohen, "All My News"I’m still figuring it out. I’m still on the road.
This is the end of the Lent Diaries, at least for this year. I’m feeling a bit too tired to fully tie together all the entries of the series. They’re both disparate and unified, a fugue of their own, but together I think they make something special. They’re a road of questions, not a series of answers.
And if you’d made it this far, thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope my personal reflections and recommendations allowed you to think about your own life a little differently. Writing them has been lovely, though I haven’t solved any contradictions and come to any grand revelations. That’s not the point.
They are the road, not the sign.
To end, one last song for you:
Okay, maybe one more:
But that’s it. That’s all.