Friday good

Hello, friends,

I think this may be my last post.  I had a friend ask me last night if I was going to keep this going after Easter.  At the moment, I think the answer is no.  But I will say that returning after so long to doing some writing, which always requires reflection and centeredness to some degree, has felt very good.  Thank you to any and all of you who have been reading.  A blog is a funny thing -- you don't know who's out there.  But it's the same, really, with any writing and readers, unless you're reading aloud to an audience.

I have not been as disciplined as I'd hoped or intended.  But I don't feel too bad about that.  It was still a discipline and a practice and an opportunity I chose to take for myself.

Today is the day that Christians remember Jesus's crucifixion.  For me, it is such a powerful story that grows in its meanings and dimensions every year.  All the characters are all of us and speak to me differently each time I hear the story.  In high school my youth group performed the passion each Palm Sunday.  It was stylized and stripped down with great live acoustic music and very moving.  I played Pontius Pilate a couple of years and Peter a couple of years.  If I were to do it today, I would suggest and maybe insist on playing Jesus.  Such small-minded casting!  ;)  Jesus was always a guy, and someone with dark hair, usually a person of color.  Anyway.

But I do remember at some point in my youth being taught that the story wasn't supposed to just be one of tragedy and sadness at a good man being killed, but to understand my place in that story, including as one of the people yelling "crucify him!"  That is an uneasy role to truly inhabit, but in adulthood, it makes a lot more sense to me, as does Peter's and Judas' betrayals.  And the story is so political!  That part of it has really expanded for me as I've grown older.  This was in no way an individual experience but very, very collective and all about the politics.  Last Sunday I heard, seemingly for the first time, that Pilate's wife sent him a note telling him not to sentence Jesus -- she'd had a dream telling her that he was innocent.  (Apparently, this detail only shows up in the gospel of Matthew.)  But what a very interesting detail!  Interesting because of the kind-of supernaturalness of it and it's one of the moments when a female character enters into the story.  But one thing I really like about the Bible is that it really seems like just the scaffolding of the stories.  Bamboo, pine, aluminum scaffolding that has been wrapped, soldered together, taped, bound, reinforced, braced, and rebuilt hundreds of times through retellings and translations.  I know there are a lot of religious people who would disagree with me -- "The Word of God" stuff -- but it just doesn't make sense to me any other way.  In the breaking and putting back together, there are just these glimpses of truth or meaning in The Word, whether read or heard, acted or sung, where some kind of sense is made, even if it's nonsense.  That beauty compells me to return to it, to love it, to remain in relationship with it.

So I think about Pilate's wife.  She certainly did live.  And I suspect she had a dream and she told Pilate about it and told him not to condemn Jesus.  But all the details are just for us to imagine!  What was that dream like?  She apparently "suffered much last night because of it", but what was that suffering like?  Was it a terrifying nightmare that she couldn't wake up from?  Or when she woke she knew it was real and not a dream?  Did she do something other than send Pilate a note?  Maybe she screamed at him when she was serving him scrambled eggs and toast or when he was looking for the pin for his toga or taking a piss before heading out for the day.  Was she powerless to override the political power her husband had, but tried to use her personal power?  And what happened that night, and the ensuing nights, after Jesus was crucified?  Maybe she was one of the women at the tomb early on Sunday.  Maybe she refused to have sex with him ever again.  But what was her relationship and interaction with Pilate like?  It's clear that Pilate was torn -- he didn't want Jesus crucified and didn't think he was guilty.  But he also wasn't willing to stand up the the screaming crowds -- he just washed his hands of it, like a good liberal.

Well, ha ha ha!  I just read about Pilate's wife on wikipedia and discovered, hardly to anyone's surprise, that there has been much written about her (Procula/Claudia) and her dream, and they have made their way into about a million pieces of art.  :)

So, this is hardly a conclusion to my writing, but it is a little reflection on the day and how I'm responding to it.

I wish you peace, every one of you, and the joy of the Easter season.

Briana