The Dude Abides
Good Friday is the worst day of the year.
For me, at least.
It’s almost always an appropriately cloudy, brooding day, as if the weather is setting the mood for what is, for many Christians, the most somber of days.
It’s the one day a year I know, with absolute certainty, that I am a complete and utter asshat.
The day to recall all the horrendous things I’ve done and do on a regular basis. Terrible, toe-curlingly uncharitable thoughts and deeds. Callous antipathy, more often than not, for the rest of the human race.
The lowlights of my life.
It’s the day I’m sure it’s all my fault. That I am a failure. That I’ve sinned and fallen short of the glory, if you will. That I must repent my evil ways.
Other religions have similar days or times set apart for serious reflection on the condition of our souls. For the Jewish people, it is Yom Kippur, a day of atonement for the sins committed in the previous year. For Muslims, it is Ramadan, 40 days of fasting, abstinence and prayer observed each year to commemorate the time their holy book, the Quran, was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
In the Christian tradition, there’s Lent, culminating in Good Friday, the day the Bible says Jesus atoned for the sins of the world by dying on the cross. (See the Gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and/or John for more details, or “The Passion of the Christ” for a synopsis.)
In theory, all of Lent is supposed to lend itself to deep spiritual reflection. But Good Friday is the day my audit report arrives from the Eternal Revenue Service.
And it’s not pretty.
Most distressing is the realization of just how unforgiving I can be, how ungracious and unloving. Toward the people I love, and especially toward a few folks I don’t. (That “love your enemies” bit trips me up every time.)
As far as I can tell, I’m not alone in this annual exercise of lamenting the human condition in general, and my own in particular.
There are liturgies and, some might say, even entire religious traditions built around it. Books and music have been written about it, and art made to reflect its anguish.
A lot of people ask me what I turn to for guidance and inspiration this time of the year. (I’m no spiritual savante, so perhaps they ask me because I go to churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, etc. for a living. Who knows?)
I tell them that since 1999, when it was first published, I’ve read and reread Anne Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith just about every Lent. In ways big and small, her thoughts on faith transformed the way I see myself, my spirit, the world. And God.
Over the years, I’ve bought at least a half-dozen copies of Traveling Mercies, but they always seem to walk off in someone else’s hands. It’s that kind of book.
If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. Lamott, a recovering everything, is inspiring with her stunning feats of boundless humanity and reckless leaps of faith. She’s my hero.
Last week, Lamott, who described herself as “a big ole lefty and a big ole Christian,” was in town for a reading and lecture at Chicago’s North Park University, a Christian college associated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, where Traveling Mercies is required reading for every student as part of the core curriculum.
At the college, Lamott spoke, variously, about faith, forgiveness, parenting, hiking regime change, Jesus and George Bush.
Everybody has those somebodies in their life that just make it difficult to do the right thing and nearly impossible to do the loving thing. The Difficult Ones.
For Lamott, it’s George W. Bush and his administration.
She has a hard time loving the president, she said, especially because Bush and many of his cronies are Christians. Just like her.
“I’m doing whatever I can that I think would not horrify Jesus,” she told the North Park crowd, referring to her opposition of all things Bush. “I just want to be one of the people who’s not a right-wing fundamentalist who totally loves Jesus.
“I think that there’s nothing that can separate us from God’s love and there’s nothing that is so awful and heinous and barbaric and evil that would have Jesus just go, ‘Oh, forget it,’ and stomp off,” she said.
Not even right-wing conservative Christians who have “stolen the Bible” or the architects of a war based on a lie that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of soldiers, she said.
Earlier this week, as I picked up Traveling Mercies again, I had a conversation with Lamott (via e-mail because we’re both better with a computer keyboard than with a phone) about what was on her mind as she stared down Good Friday.
“On Good Friday, I have to think doubly hard about the resurrection, because if it is not true, then we are all going tourist class, and it is all truly hopeless,” Lamott was telling me.
“I do believe in the resurrection, and I have had my own resurrection story, and know many, many people who have, too — the end of the light, the end of all sanity and good ideas, and hope. And then grace steps in — and for some of us, this came as Jesus, and for other people, it came in other direct experiences of Divine Love — and salvation and redemption are jiggled out of the dark, brutal, hungry world.
“I thank God that Jesus seems to have such low standards that people like me are welcomed into the kingdom, and entrusted with his love, to share with others, as others have so freely shared with us.
“I try to keep things really shallow; I understand about as much as is in the songs we sing with our kids on Sunday: Jesus died, and rose from the dead, for me, and for Donald Rumsfeld and Karen Hughes. Go figure.”
She and Bush and everyone else in the world are suffering from the same “sickness in us that is fatal and progressive and disgusting,” Lamott said. Humanness.
“Inside, I’m just as capable of any madness or egotism that Bush has displayed,” she said, explaining that she feels sorry for him and empathizes to a certain extent. “But mostly I hate George Bush.”
“I am a bad Christian,” Lamott continued, echoing my own thoughts. “And Jesus is so sweet and kind. I think he watches me, and knows the inside of my heart and loves me anyway, and I guess — urrrr — he feels the same way about Bush and Cheney.”
So it seems.
Maybe on this bad day called Good, we’ll both find the courage to love The Difficult Ones in time for Easter, and pick up some traveling mercies for the coming year.
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