A Sound of Sheer Silence

This question has been asked of me, and I think it is a fair one--why would anyone celebrate or remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth?  In my experience, when that question is asked, it is not being asked from the place of "why would anyone care about what happens to this person anyway?," as part of a broader project of skepticism about religious things generally or Christian things specifically.  Yes, sure, some people will do that in a trolling kind of way, but you can usually spot those people straight off, and those folks can thus be easily ignored.  Don't feed the trolls. But, in my experience, this question generally comes from a more sympathetic place.  Why do we come to church on a Friday year after year, and hear again and again this long, brutal account of a man being tortured and killed?  Particularly as, we believe, the story ultimately has a happy ending two days later.  Why dwell on the horror?  Good Friday services are, in my e...

Doubt takes different forms.  When people think about doubt in terms of religion, people tend to think about big-picture structural doubts.  Does God exist?  Did Jesus rise from the dead?  Things like that.  But there are other, more subtle forms of doubt. Last night at Maundy Thursday service, I heard a stem-winder of a sermon.  The topic of the sermon was how Jesus's death and resurrection defeats the Empire of Death, which is powered by fear, scarcity, and division.  It was a fantastic sermon, and it presented the Christian message in its most vital and relevant possible form. And yet, as I was sitting there, the doubts came.  Did it really?  Did this story that we remember every year really defeat fear, scarcity, and division?  Or, even, did it provide the possibility of overcoming those forces?  Fear, scarcity, and division seem more powerful and more omnipresent then ever.  It doesn't feel like those forces are being ...

A family member, when he very small child, developed a series of ear infections which were not properly diagnosed and treated.  As a result, he spent the first couple of years of his life with so much fluid in his ears that it was as if he was listening to the world underwater.  He heard just fine in a mechanical sense, but what he was hearing was distorted by the fluid.  Consequently, his speech was distorted as well--he was reproducing faithfully what he was hearing, but that speech was, in a sense, also passing through the fluid in his ears.  Eventually, this was fixed--tiny tubes were inserted in his ears to drain the fluid, and speech therapy rapidly addressed any legacy of the clogged ears.  In fact, he is a trial lawyer, so he literally talks for a living. I've often wondered what must have been like for him the first time the tubes were inserted in his ears and the fluid was drained away.  He was probably too young to remember, but it must have be...