the rix mix

I was watching live video of the show-off portion of the Asbury Park boardwalk Easter Parade. Great weather, large crowd. Black contestants, women & men, had the advantage. They looked like they came from church, & probably had. Easter is still a traditional dress-up event in mainline African-American churches. Women wear new hats, men wear their best suits.

Easter was one of the few Sundays of the year my parents went to church. They might also go on Children's Day & Boy Scout Sunday. Those were big deals at Community Methodist. Dad liked to "sleep" a little late on Sundays, & mom stayed home, too. Dad spent plenty of time at the church doing volunteer stuff, as a Boy Scout leader, building stage sets for the amateur shows, he didn't think he owed an hour on Sunday mornings & he was right. He'd grown up strictly Catholic & he'd had it with obligations.

Easter was dress-up day. It was when I got the new sportscoat from the boys dept at Robert Hall, provided one wasn't passed down from my brothers. Mom & my sister treated it as a Major Public Appearance. The approach & arrival (we walked around the corner from home), the seating (main sanctuary pews, my parents disdained the overflow seats), the exit line past the minister, & socializing outside were all ritual traditions. Afterward, on the sidewalk, one's children were basically "presented" to the other adults, the regulars & the Easter-only. Mr. & Mrs. Whozitz. Miss Whatsername. I received lots of manly hair tousles, hugs from powdered old ladies, & "My you've grown so much" & "Aren't you the handsome young man?" My neck got stiff from looking up at these people.

It was all pretty easy to take. The four Rixon kids were taught good manners, & whether we felt them or not, we knew our parents appreciated when we put them on display; indeed, they counted on it, although all our relatives & neighbors recognized we were inclined toward "shenanigans" - & there was no doubt which side of the family that came from. You had to figure Dad's prankster side was but a shadow of how he was at age 14. (Why was he sentenced to a daily commute to a Jesuit military High School in Manhattan & not St. Patrick's in Elizabeth or Holy Trinity in Westfield?) We siblings were quite devious & adept at tormenting each other, but were at our best/worst when inspired to conspiratorial solidarity.

Also, all four Rixon kids liked to sing, & we weren't shy about it. A pity our parents didn't force us to harmonize together. We might've better learned the benefits of sibling cooperation. At Easter we probably stood out as a separate section. We all joined school choruses & kids' choirs. My sister sings solos in her church. My brother - the one who covered his lapel with 8 years of perfect Sunday School attendence medals - is a United Methodist pastor. I joined a rock band & even ventured some solo singer-songwriter gigs.

Those theatrical family Easter mornings ended when my oldest brother dropped out as an adolescent. Easter itself was a dull day. We had the obligatory ham dinner, bone in or canned. It was one of three holidays we said grace before the meal. The pointlessness & insincerity of those prayers made me appreciate family tables where they were done in earnest, formally or informally (What is everyone thankful for?). We had chocolate bunnies & eggs, & jellybeans.

After my grandmother retired & moved to Atlantic City, Easter was the day before I rode the bus to her place for the week. The week after Easter was the annual Catholic Educator's Convention in A.C., the boardwalk a river of brown & black, as several thousand priests, nuns, & brothers descended on the city. It was off-season. Whatever they did to amuse themselves, it wasn't pinball.

My parents had "values" but no discernible religious beliefs other than vaguely protestant. My grandmother was a strictly observant sacramental Catholic, which was exotic to me because a lot of Catholic practice makes absolutely no sense to protestant kids even when you live with it. What set me apart from my siblings was that I wanted it to make sense, I suppose because I needed to make sense of my grandmother, a contradictory person with a terrible temper but whose love I never doubted. The central belief of Christianity, celebrated joyously on Easter, requires such a leap of faith that I couldn't understand why a religion would pile on so much extra stuff.

It isn't the strictness of religion that matters, but the quality of love. For Christians, Jesus is God with a human face. So the quality of love Jesus has is a quality of love God has, directly expressed. Not a reflection of the love, not a guess at what it might be, not beyond our own capacity to grasp & express, but not the whole of it - which encompasses all things according to their nature, & is infinitely greater than all things combined & beyond our comprehension. The entire cosmos experiences Easter.

Labels: growing up, holidays, religion