April 24, 2006

This weekend was the Orthodox Easter and everything around the dinner table was dripping with symbolism: lamb soup, lamb stakes, lamb intestines wrapped in warm dough. It feels as though I went on a binge, eating nothing but the body of Christ, the Lamb of God.

The stench of sacrifice was everywhere.

“How is your faith different than mine?” Laura asked a while ago. At the time, I didn’t know what to tell her, so I told her that Orthodox Christianity is like Catholicism, but more extreme. But Easter puts things in perspective for me — orthodoxy, more so than any other Christian branch, takes symbols and drips them in meaning.

Most vivid for me are the Easter masses I went to as a kid. At midnight the churchyard was packed with a thousand breathless bodies crushed against one another, listening to the strange incantations of the man in black. The ring of golden chalices echoed in the night, and soon a murmur about a dead man rising spread through the crowd. And that murmur became a throbbing beat that moved through the crowd, until every heart vibrated with the same frequency.

And then there was light. A single candle spread fire through the crowd, and everybody carried their own flickering candle home. The dark streets became a river of light, each candle connected to every other candle by an invisible thread. And everything from beginning to end of the ritual was connected by some larger narrative that made every movement meaningful.

And then one schism after another ripped apart the veil of ritual. Eventually, the Protestants came along and fucked everything up. The more modern branches of Christianity deal with abstractions rather than with overwhelming symbols of human sacrifice — the architecture of the churches and the celebrations of faith have been scrubbed of symbols and all those uncomfortable signifiers of a dying world.

In other words, nobody slaughters lambs in the streets anymore.

Pity.