Easter thoughts

 I got an email from my local hardware store the other day, informing me that they would be closed this Sunday for Easter. The funny thought struck me then that the whole holiday is based on the idea that Jesus got up and went back to work that morning after a pretty rough weekend. Now get back in there and sell me some grass seed and deck stain!

Christian societies have had a conflicted relationship with the sabbath for a long time, especially in the United States, a country founded on commerce even before it was a country. Each colony was a profit-seeking venture. Communities of conscience just provided the recruits willing to undertake the danger and hardship of the perilous ocean voyage and carving out a foothold, for the sake of a place where they could have a dominant role in governance. Religious freedom indeed. But your backers expect more than thoughts and prayers.

I've been out of the church scene for decades, but the logic of Jesus as I understood it then was that we would all do better if we looked out for each other rather than doing the work of tyrants or aspiring in even a small way to be one. This does lead to a world without concentrated wealth, but also without poverty.

At its most extreme, sabbath observance restricts virtually everything that we've come to associate with weekends. Work, play, travel, commerce, toil of nearly any kind must halt. That would include your Easter egg hunt, and a whole lot of the food preparation for Easter dinner. You'd have to rely on the labor of unbelievers, exploiting that they are damned by their unbelief. "Sucks to be you! But this lamb is cooked to perfection!"

Fortunately, we in America have embraced Sabbath Lite. By the words of the Constitution, you are free to express whatever faith you have in whatever way suits you. Just once in a while will you run into an interruption of the seven-day retail and recreation week. The term "business day" refers to specific types of business. You face little stigma for doing whatever you want on weekends, because those days are your allotted little share of your precious life, ceded back to you by the lords of the economy.

Sabbath breaking feeds the economy. And it erodes righteousness no more than sitting on your hands for a day would have done. You get the same choices that you would have on any other day about how to treat the people you deal with.

A scheduled sabbath gathering does create an opportunity for regular accountability to the community. Tying it to your specific religion limits that community, however, and might weaken the bonds overall to the larger secular community that provides the real engine of your economy and the legal framework that -- theoretically -- protects you.

"Might" weaken. Look at how the church is pitted against itself right now, between the "open and accepting" congregations and the Christian nationalist theocrats. Quick now: how many protestant denominations can you name in 30 seconds? And that's long after the split between eastern and western Catholicism. Christians have been arguing about the true nature and word of their headliner since about a week after he disappeared from every place in the mortal world except for the occasional miraculous piece of toast, or scam Shroud.

My own family embraced an easygoing philosophy toward other faiths: "One God, many names." It's an easy out if you want to go to a certain church but don't want to get sucked into a holy war. Other faiths of all sorts have their own adherents to the idea that we can all tie our values to a superior or supreme entity if that helps, praying in a familiar language. This attitude drives the fundamentalists cross-eyed with rage.

"One true faith! One true faith! One true faith!" There can be only one. The all-powerful deity needs propitiating, dammit. Now get in here and propitiate exactly as we taught you.

Hard core attitudes like that grow naturally from the exclusionary nature of source texts. If you saturate yourself with one brand of righteousness, it can't help but repel the concept that someone else might be okay too. Maybe you don't make direct war on them, but you know that you won't be seeing them in the Great Beyond. Go a little deeper and you can't associate with them at all. A little deeper yet and you can't even countenance their existence.

I can't tell you how to interpret Easter for yourself. Not even going to try. In most ways it is a day like any other. There is war, sickness, atrocity, suffering, privation, and injustice all unremedied. Nearly every problem is created by humans devaluing other humans. The will to stop it can never come from outside. It's a personal choice.