I used to belong to a book group at my old church. We read books of all sorts, and discussed how they did (or didn’t) relate to our Christian faith. One night - I don’t remember what book we were discussing - the author introduced the topic: do we love Jesus?

Presbyterians are a frosty bunch. We jokingly call ourselves God’s frozen people. When you start talking about feelings, and then make those feelings about God, you can see neck muscles clench. The fingernails gouge into the pews. Awkward silence takes on a new meaning.

So we hesitantly stumbled through this discussion, hemming and hawing about loving Jesus. It’s not that we don’t, it’s just that the language of it sounds presumptuous. And one of the women there, a vivacious Caribbean woman (Bahamian? Jamaican? I don’t remember) became flustered by our hesitance and gave us an exasperated pep talk on loving Jesus. It was a thorough, sisterly rebuke, full of things like “How can you say that? Don’t you understand…” and we had very little to say for ourselves afterwards.

The woman later returned to her home country to care for her sick father. She married while she was there, and then returned to the States. We invited her back to book group, and she declined.

Because she had converted to Islam.

And everyone in the group mourned her loss to the faith, discussed her (unexplained) reasons for converting, and generally felt bad, but wished her well.

I wanted to call her up and ask if she still loved Jesus.

I frequently feel like a misfit in church circles. I don’t mean over theological issues, though that happens too, but over cultural ones. Christian women, at least evangelicals, tend to be earnest and kind and devoid of all sarcasm. Irony is not appreciated. Sometimes I feel like the only smart ass in the room. One of the nicest things about blogging is finding more of my kind.

Another example. For college I attended a small evangelical college and the chapel services were sometimes painful. Sentimental and moving to those who appreciate Precious Moments and Touched by an Angel, but occasionally mortifying to the rare student who preferred the satire of Steve Taylor to the sentimental musings of women published by Zondervan.

For example, we once had a chapel led by a student group from South Africa. They were kids full of good will, an interracial group who visited churches and schools and told folks that God wanted them to love everybody. Not a bad message. For our service they decided to perform a version of the Passion narrative set to Carman’s song “This Blood Is for You.”

Maybe you’ve never heard of Carman. He is a Christian performer who reinvents himself every few years. His songs are not really sung - usually read. They are always melodramatic. They are the antithesis of irony. And if your first thought when you saw the title of this particular song was some connection to the beer commercial “This Bud’s for you,” you are completely wrong, but a lot like me.

Anyway, this song is a description of the crucifixion told from the point of view of a spectator, with metaphors that make me choke a little. “Like razors through a sheep” is not the most communicative line. Pictoral, sure, but more distracting than helpful.

So this goup of lovely, well-meaning teenagers acted out the story of Jesus’s death, accompanied by this song. A young woman played Jesus, and a scene came when they pretended to nail her to a cross. In a musical crescendo, she opened her nailed fists, and red streamers fell from them and dangled from her fingers. She then walked around the stage draping the ribbons on people. She pulled them over their heads. Ribbons trailing everywhere, through the other performers’ hair, over their shoulders, and so on, as lyrics described the Atonement. I started to feel a little queasy.

Okay. The Atonement is a powerful doctrine. I believe in it. Jesus as a sacrifice whose blood washed away my sin - that gets me up in the morning. I understand why everyone in the audience was moved. But as I looked around at all those moved people, I wanted to ask, doesn’t this performance seem a tad, um, graphic? “Covered in his blood” is a metaphor; it does not involve actual drippy red hemoglobin being smeared on me. As the performers were taking this to an uncomfortable degree of literalness, earnestly and devoutly, I cringed and suppressed hysterical giggles. I was thinking things like, “Why settle for ribbons? Why not try ketchup packets next time? Or that theatrical red syrup? I mean, since we’re being so literal.”

I could say nothing to my fellow-students. Stoning has fallen out of favor, but it could be revived.

Maybe I am just too much a creature of my time. The sarcastic outsider is a staple of the wider culture. Maybe it’s an inevitable symptom of being overeducated. I do find as I get older, I am kinder and better able to suppress my tendency toward humor at another person’s well-meaning earnestness. I still laugh, but I do it internally or out of earshot.

So apologies to you if you are offended by that mommy in your church who covers a smirk with her hand and coughs, when your pastor leads the church in a rousing chorus of:

And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.

But if you find yourself laughing, almost involuntarily, at this or this, come sit by me.

P.S. And I snickered when the little girl in church sang the last line of the Gloria Patri as “world without men. Amen, amen.” Sorry.

Great minds think alike. So it should be no surprise that both I and Owlhaven gave a June Perfect Post award to Antique Mommy for her Ode to Mary Tyler Moore.

If you aren’t familiar with the Perfect Post awards, it’s a little scheme dreamed up by Lucinda and MommaK at Petroville.com to allow ordinary bloggers to express their admiration for a great blog entry. Every blogger can give one award each month. It’s also a great list for suggesting new blogs to try. I haven’t done this much, because, just between you and me, I’m kind of a snob and my standards are high. And Antique Mommy suffers from the fact that her blog is always so well-written that singling out one post as exceptionally good is difficult. But she went above and beyond her usual skill in laughing at herself in this post. Enthusiastically, wildly, and with abandon, she invited us all to laugh with her. It impressed the heck out of me. If you’ve never read her stuff, here’s your chance.

Sweetpea when she was a newborn.

“Meevle-effle-flumpf,” Sweetpea said yesterday. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds advanced.

When Sweetpea was born, I worried that I would not be as good a mother to her as to JellyBean. The time alone you get with your first baby is unrepeatable. Every baby after that must share you. I worried that I would not bond with her the same way I did with her sister. It did not help that Sweetpea was a colicky baby. Until she was almost four months old, I knew how I would be spending every evening after six pm: holding my crying baby. She was miserable. I held her in the glider, rocking back and forth. I laid her across my knees and rubbed and patted her back. I snuggled her into my chest and sang to her (she preferred the loudest and schmaltziest songs I could muster). All of it would work briefly, but nothing really satisfied her. Eventually I discovered that the colic came if I ate any chocolate, even a single oreo. If I cut out the chocolate, she was much happier.

She has been my most independent baby. When she started baby food, she refused to let me feed her. Either she did it herself, or it wouldn’t happen at all. Except for the pains of colic and teething, she is a serene child. She does not display her emotions dramatically like her big sister, but maintains a general equanimity, and smiles mostly with her eyes. Oh, those peaceful eyes. They melt my heart.

Of course, I love this baby to distraction. My worries were just normal, silly mother worries. And my worries neglected to consider how wildly Sweetpea would love her older sister. JellyBean is a celebrity to her. Right now they are supposed to be napping, and instead JellyBean is chattering and jumping in her crib, making Sweetpea giggle. Sometimes this goes on for an hour or more, till Sweetpea gets too tired to stay awake. If JellyBean makes too much noise after that, Sweetpea grunts at her in surly old man noises: “Noisy kid! Go to sleep!” Only it sounds more like “Eeerrrrghh.”

I remember feeling scared and overwhelmed when I was pregnant with Sweetpea, wondering how I would manage two children. And it has been hard, especially in the beginning. JellyBean was too young to be left alone with her sister even for a minute, and interacted with her mostly by shoving. They both wanted to be carried at the same time. One crying would set off the other one crying. And two kids in diapers is a special kind of sensory experience. But even in this chaos, I love having sisters. I love the chatter and the giggles and the double cuddles in my lap. It’s still not easy, but it’s joyful, at least on a good day.

And doesn’t everybody live for the good days? It’s enough.

The summer before I started grad school I decided to read Shakespeare’s plays. Somehow I had missed them in school, and I was a little embarrassed that I could get so much education without ever reading his work. I find reading plays difficult. In narrative I have pictures painted for me; in plays I must imagine much more. It is unfamiliar brain work for me, and I enjoyed learning how to do it.

I say this to let you know that my evaluation of a play may lack something. I started reading Christopher Fry when I was looking for modern interpretations of Moses. I was blown away by The Firstborn. But I have never seen it performed, and envisioning a play is still something of a challenge. I read the play primarily as poetry.

Christopher Fry was a twentieth century playwright who wrote both verse plays and screenplays. He wrote the screen adaptation of Ben-Hur. In 1938 he began The Firstborn, a modern interpretation of the Exodus story that worked in themes of the Holocaust then beginning in Nazi Germany. He finished the play in 1945.

When the play begins, Moses has long been absent from Egypt, having fled to Midian after murdering an Egyptian. The Pharaoh, Seti, discusses with his wife, Anath, the possibility of inviting Moses back to Egypt to lead their army against a new enemy. Moses appears before Seti and Anath make a decision, and condemns them for the oppression of the Hebrews.

The play explores many issues, too many to discuss here. The responsibilities of power, the love of the homeland, the solace of pride, and the ties of ethnic identity. Throughout the play there is a tension between the comfortable life of the wealthy and safe elite, and the desperate misery and violence of the Hebrews. The focus of the play is the internal crisis of Moses, in his decision to stand in solidarity with his Hebrew brethren and as he realizes what God’s demands will mean for Egypt. When Moses first appears to demand freedom for his people, he explains his return by saying:

My blood heard my blood weeping
Far off like the swimming of fear under the sea,
The sobbing at night below the garden. I heard
My blood weeping. It is here it wept and weeps.
It was from here I heard coming this drum of despair,
Under your shoes, under your smile, and under
The foundations of your tomb. From Egypt.

There are several elements of the play that become troubling when it is seen in light of the Holocaust. One is the character of Shendi, Miriam’s son, who is effectively a collaborator with the Egyptians. The difference between enslavement for labor in the biblical story, even with its horrors, and the programmatic annihilation of the Holocaust make the Shendi character somewhat implausible and possibly offensive, if the play is seen as an interpretation of the Holocaust.

Another possibly troubling line occurs in Moses’ debate with himself when Pharaoh’s son offers the generalship of an Egyptian army:

Egypt and Israel both in me together!
How would that be managed? I should wolf
Myself to keep myself nourished. I could play
With wars, oh God, very pleasantly. You know
I prosper in a cloud of dust - you’re wise
To offer me that. And Egypt would still be,
In spite of my fathers, a sufficient cause.

Moses refuses the offer, but his consideration of it shows that the play should not be read too precisely as an examination fo the Holocaust.

But Fry’s deft use of tension left me feeling that these jarring choices were deliberate and meant to make us consider more thoroughly the ripple effects of oppression. There is a necessary tragedy to justice. By the end of the play, the violence and horror which Egypt inflicted on the weak has been brought home to the powerful, even those of good will and relative innocence.

A noticable difference between the biblical story and Fry’s play is the absence of God as an active character. In Exodus, YHWH has many speeches; in The Firstborn he says not a word. God’s speeches to Moses are implied but never described, and the closest God comes to speaking is an ambiguous rumble of thunder after Moses calls to him. But this does not mean God is uninvolved in the play. Fry was a Christian playwright, and the theology of his plays can be seen in Moses’ description of God as “the infinite eavesdropper,” a paradoxical title. An eavesdropper sits outside the action, listening in on what others are doing. But an infinite being cannot be outside the action; there is no place where he is not. In all of Fry’s plays God appears not as a character, but as the ineffable mover in all actions, the omnipresent spirit, the place in which all places have their being.

Fry’s metaphors and careful rhythms are not easily reviewed in this little prose description, and I urge you to read the play yourself, if you have any enjoyment for poetry. I find myself frustrated in trying to convey the power and complexity of his work. I have read The Firstborn five times now, and the characters are so complex that I find something new in it every time. I would love to see it performed someday, but until then, I am content to read and re-read it.