I love the pageantry of this time of the liturgical year. Even if I’ve been an irregular churchgoer, the Lenten and Easter seasons always bring me back.

But Easter Vigil is hands-down my favorite service of the year, and always has been. When I was little, it meant that I was allowed to stay up extra-late and play with candles (I may have set my church program aflame once or twice). When I was in high school, I made strawberries dipped in chocolate for the always-amazing after-parties we’d have at our church. And when I was at Whitman, going to Easter Vigil in Walla Walla every year felt a bit more like being at home.

It’s pretty theatrical, sitting in the dark and listening to stories that are thousands of years old. My mind always wanders at some point to imagining ancient life in the holy land; to contemplating the symmetry of the whole story, from the passage of the Jews to the resurrection of Jesus; to wonder at the questions raised by his triumph over death and the rising of the dry bones. I love how the readings anchor the Christian story firmly in Jewish tradition. I love the theatricality that makes this Eucharist different from every other one we might celebrate throughout the year. The year that I attended Easter Vigil at St. Mark’s Cathedral, they did the full nine lessons and psalms, and when it came time to celebrate the resurrection, the bishop yelled it out, they threw on all the lights at once, and the organ went full-blast. It was not entirely unlike watching a geyser erupt.

If you have the time this Saturday night and are so inclined, I’d highly recommend it. If you’re not Christian, it’s like a crash course — it says: here, this is what we’re about. If you are Christian, but haven’t experienced it, try it out. It will renew and reset your perspective. And it’s fun.

The Episcopal service opens with this prayer:

This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children
of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the
Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and
rose victorious from the grave.

All this anti-homeschooling rot is depressing me. And it’s not just about the dissolution of educational freedoms, it’s also an example of religious oppression. “All sides agree the children have thrived with home school,” but “[the mother's] lessons also have a religious slant, which the judge said was the root of the problem.” Mainstream science has an atheistic slant (although it is entirely unnecessary). How is it the right of the courts, or the government, to dictate a child’s education?

Before you start blaming our new president for this trend on the basis of supposed socialist tendencies, consider that Obama has remained relatively silent on the issue of homeschooling, except in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” where he acknowledges that the decision to homeschool should be left up to families, and should be honored.

Of course, this situation is more complicated than just The Courts vs. The Family: it is the father, during divorce proceedings, who is objecting to the children’s homeschooling. And I’m not saying that he should not have a say in his children’s education — but the judge should rule on the basis of what is best for the children, not on the basis of perceived religious slant. If the father wants them to be taught something else, he should homeschool the kids himself when he has them (if he has joint custody), or hire a tutor if he can’t do it. If the kids are really testing “two years above their grade levels,” then it seems clear that that is a system which is working better than the public schools would.

To those, in positions of authority, who are remaking educational policies in this country: flight from religious persecution is how this country got started in the first place. Now, with a failing economy, an overseas war, and a low-level civil war raging over the issue of abortion, we have enough challenges here already. We don’t need a Handicapper General.

Have you ever heard of “The Fall”? No, I didn’t really either, until I was pointed towards it by a friend of mine who was an indie-movie and indie-music buff. Tarsem Singh, director of the incredibly creepy “The Cell,” has done it again: he’s created a work whose visual power will overwhelm you.

I am a sucker for visually intense movies in the first place, but the “The Fall” has something which “The Cell” didn’t, which is: an appealing story. The little kid is cute, Lee Pace is cute, and bedtime stories are timeless, no matter what They Say.

The movie tugs ever-so-slightly on the heartstrings, but not uncomfortably, mostly because the grimness of the story-within-a-story is there to play against the treacle. (This is generally the opposite of how these things work.)

At any rate, this whole post was particularly inspired by the discovery that Tarsem Singh was behind one of my favorite music videos of all time (it was an, “OH, THAT’S why I like it!” moment of sorts) — REM’s “Losing My Religion.”

Which brings me to stage two: review of this video. I’ve always loved the song, but my appreciation of the video has only grown over time. In an era of booty-shakin’ useless videos, the ones which contain an attempt at artistry, symbolism, or any sort of storyline always strike my fancy best of all. This one combines all of the aforementioned ingredients into a frenzy of artistic symbolism based primarily on religious art, and carefully encapsulated in worlds assigned with the three primary colors. The whole video plays as a biography of the stages of faith:

Yellow: Faith, religion, Caravaggio; the Bible (or some weighty Book) appears prominently. St. Thomas sticks a finger in Jesus’ side. Water falls, and the Dutch Masters seem like they might be nearby, because everything is filmed near an open window, with flames, long tables, dripping water. Georges de La Tour would be proud, and Vermeer would wish they’d moved the lights slightly more to the left.

Blue: I do not know the intended purpose, but I have assumed “Gauguin,” mostly from the juxtaposition of the yellows on the blues, but also because of the poses and the presence of Hindu influences. St. Andrew makes an appearance, but the theme is: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Red: Communism. According to Wikipedia, inspired by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. I’ve never heard of him or seen his films, but the “red” scenes in the video all remind me of serious Communist propaganda art: behold, industry! The youth! With hammers! Working metal! And, red! It isn’t about religion anymore, it’s about politics; the individual is obliterated to make way for the work-driven masses, an army of Marthas.

Religion no longer plays an important role, except as the primary inspiration for what all three universes have been reaching towards: a pair of wings. In the Yellow world, the man wearing the wings is an elderly, father-of-Icarus figure who has strapped on a pair of bird’s wings which in the last frame highlight the Bible. In the Blue world, the wings are more stylistic and carefully sculpted, while in the Red word, the wings are partially made of metal and engine.

Put another way, it artistically encapsulates the religious and political collision of Western and Eastern cultures, and has as a coda the fallout of poor Russia, which was caught in the middle.

Take a look for yourself and let me know how wrong I am.

Yes, I’m pro-life. It’s probably the issue that I feel most strongly about, in fact. But I didn’t vote on that basis at all. Why?

Because the current law is in place because of Roe v. Wade, which has been going strong for almost 40 years, and which was a fight in the first place. In order to reverse that decision, we’d have to legally overpower a very loud and very active group of people. While we’ve had a supposedly pro-life president in the White House for eight years, he hasn’t done squat to reverse it, and I’m not sure McCain would either. (And in the meantime, Bush has sent our citizens off to die in a foreign country without clearly giving us a reason, plan, or goal at all.) The problem with reversing abortion as a legal decision is that it’s really a problem of social attitude; if we do make it illegal (which, I agree, it ought to be), we will still have women performing dangerous abortions at home with coat hangers or Lysol, and they’ll continue to do an enormous amount of damage.

We should be educating people: about sexual activity (not just how to be abstinent) and how to prevent unwanted pregnancy; about exactly what abortion is, how it works and what the implications are socially, personally, emotionally, philosophically. Fighting the uphill battle against a law that was made mostly so that people would stop breaking the law and performing their own abortions may be a waste of energy in the end; who knows how it would actually affect the numbers of abortions performed in this country?

What we do need are people who are willing to provide support for pregnant mothers and to expedite the ease of adoption, so that mothers who feel that they are unable to raise children can have alternatives to abortion. We need support groups, charities, and foundations for mothers who keep their children but have no financial or personal assistance from the fathers of the children or from their own families; we need places where safe and free day care could be offered so that single women can work and be mothers, and not have to choose whether they or their children will be able to eat on any given day. And we desperately need changing attitudes about how we view sex so that women will not feel so overwhelmed with shame over having becoming pregnant. In “Mere Christianity,” C. S. Lewis states:

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig, who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

Lewis is scripturally supported in this: in all four Gospels, for all that Jesus preached about how we should behave and treat each other, he said little or nothing about our sexual behavior (save to condemn divorce because he stated that it would force a woman to adultery), and is recorded to have spent quite a bit of time in the company of prostitutes. So can we please get over it already and tackle the large problems at hand?

For all the many, many things that are wrong with the pro-choice movement, they seem to have found the correct tools at their disposal: vocal organizations such as Vox exist in colleges and other organizations countrywide, and Planned Parenthood centers are in most major cities. Meanwhile the pro-life movement claims abstinence-only sexual education activists who are almost certainly causing more harm to their own cause than good. And of course we can’t organize into a cohesive force; who wants to be associated with violent and scary fundamentalists who assault and kill doctors and bomb abortion clinics? We’re desperate for our voices to be heard over this din, but the answer isn’t civil war, it’s citizenship in action. If we want every child to have a life, we need to be prepared to provide for those lives, with health care and education and safe homes. So what are we waiting for?