REPENTING OF SENTIMENTALITY

Editorial Note: I'm in a grumpy mood...pissy, even. Thought you ought to know up front.

It was the Wednesday evening of Holy Week. You’d think the season would have tempered my response, but it didn’t. The church sign should have made me sad, but it pissed me off, instead.

“He is Risen!” it read.

“How could that be,” I wondered “when he’s not even died, yet.”

Before the horror of Good Friday, before even the sadness of Maundy Thursday this group of believers had started Sunday’s celebration. That’s (not helpful), or I don't think so.

Now, the Wayward Saint's going to tell me that this is a bit grumpy. Fair enough. But I'm grumpy because people are being ripped off. Hear me out.

“And they lived happily ever after” could be the summation- the point- of every fairy tale. It’s everyone’s favorite part. But what would happen to the stories themselves, if all we told was the happy ending. What would become of their charm, integrity and power, if we reduced the telling to the resolution?

Imagine a child climbing onto her Grandpa’s knee.

“Tell me about Little Red Riding Hood,” she asks.
“They lived happily ever after.”

“Tell me the story of the three little Pigs”
“They lived happily ever after.”

“Hansel and Gretel”
“They lived happily ever after.”

Those stories just ain’t what they used to be. Not really worth the climb. Does Grandpa not have the time to tell them properly? Of course he does. Maybe he just knows better. That's got to be it. Apparently there’s the need to condense, to make efficient… to skip to the good parts.

Western Christians have long struggled with their attitude towards time. This isn't a "bible thing;" it’s a Western Thing. I’ve been told we learned this from Plato who contrasted the inferior changing realm of things with the unchanging and superior world of Ideas. St. Augustine wondered if anything other than the present even existed, and now we're taught to long for the day when “time shall be no more.”

But that’s wrong headed.

Time was God’s idea. He thought it up; he created it. He pronounced it good. In fact he took his jolly good time in the creating of each and every one of Chronos’ fellow creatures. Six days he labored, we’re told. Six days.

Then there’s that whole round about “Seth to Christ” thing- with innumerable digressions and plot twists. God took his own sweet time in shaping this world. He’s in no hurry to work out its redemption, either. Still working on that, in fact.

But this isn't because God is lackadaisical, rather he values the process. He loves a good story. He knows how to tell it well.

God's simply not sentimental.

Jeremy Begbie defines Sentimentality, in part, as skipping over the tension of a story in order to go directly to the happiness of the final resolution. Surely skipping Good Friday and beginning with Easter is bad story telling, but it’s cruel taunting, too.

It comforting to know that things will work out, that Sunday’s coming. But we need to learn the value of waiting- of living through Holy Saturday. That Sunday is, in fact, still to come. We need to learn the value and importance of Hope, because each of us wakes every morning in that in between time of Christ’s Easter vindication and our own personal glorification.

For you and me…we’re still waiting. Things aren’t how they ought to be- how they one day will be. Not yet. Not yet.

No where is this more clearly seen than in the themes that underpin the story of Holy Week: life and death. Today I read that an upcoming believer's funeral was to be celebratory and without sorrow. Sentimentalism, that...Hurtful, cruel taunting.

Certainly we are not to mourn like those without hope...but we are allowed to mourn. We are commanded to hope, which is to say that we are instructed to acknowledge with Bono that we still haven’t found what we’re looking for.

But more than simply allowing us to concede the reality of where we find ourselves (and aren’t you glad our God knows that it is what it is), a proper understanding of Sister Time frees us to see the goodness of our waiting. Like a good tune- you can’t rush through it, you can’t skip to the end…not without ruining the song.

That in between stuff matters- to music and to our lives.

Fr. Begbie asks that if they marketed The Beatle’s Greatest Hits in an album that played the songs in half the time, would you buy it?

Apparently, many would. That makes me sad. The fact that the church is “selling” it- well, that still pisses me off.