Oh, the wormwood and the gall!

Palm Sunday was today, and around the world Christians started the service by waving palm branches and re-enacting Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, and a few minutes later were intoning "Crucify him!" during the re-enactment of the Passion. I don't know when it started, but churches all over use this dramatic irony: the same people who praised Jesus a few days earlier are, conceivably, the same ones who cried out for his head by Friday. Now that's a bad week.

The hymns we sang today, with titles like "Ah Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended?" and "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" (which, in more irreverent moments, I have suggested commemorates Moses instituting circumcision) create a solemn tone and invite one to ponder the tragedy of the innocent victim. But nothing can beat the splendidly grotesque hymn we sang as children -- not just on one or two days a year, but throughout the six weeks of Lent -- "Go To Dark Gethsemane," the second verse of which would be right at home during a showing of Mel Gibson's bloodfest Passion film.

Follow to the judgment-hall, view the Lord of life arraigned;
Oh, the wormwood and the gall! Oh, the pangs His soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss; learn of Him to bear the cross.

Heavy stuff for an eight-year old, but the original first line of that verse is even more violent:

See Him at the judgment hall, beaten, bound, reviled, arraigned

So we had it sort of easy. We were Lutherans; I'll bet the Calvinists sang the more extreme version. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in this piece published today about the "epidemic" of depression that struck Europe in the 17th century:

Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval; and even Lutheranism, while rejecting most of the rituals, posited an approachable and ultimately loving God. Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.

Strangely, it was during one of the mid-week Lenten services, in which these droning hymns were alternated with sermons about how it was all our fault that Jesus had to die, that I suddenly felt paradoxically uplifted. I knew I was a failure at being a child: my parents smoked and were emotionally standoffish, the biggest kid in my class bullied me, and I was terrible at sports. All this had something to do with original sin, the lost condition of humanity, and the blackness at the center of all our hearts, even (or especially) us fourth-graders. That I was bad, I had no trouble believing; that my badness had, in some magically horrible way, had a hand in Jesus' death was understandable. But somehow I found myself also believing that Jesus had taken on all that evil and somehow overpowered it.

This was more a feeling than an intellectual conclusion, but I think that its irrational aspect actually helped me to accept it. In retrospect, I identify this as a moment of grace. After that moment the problems with my family and classmates and the rest of the world were no longer all up to me. I grasped, all at once, that Jesus' suffering had somehow redeemed my own. It didn't make complete sense then, and the older I get it makes less and less sense. Yet that spiritual conviction has stuck with me and kept my melancholy nature from becoming even more depressive.

So I enjoyed the mournful hymns today. And one of these years I will find some rock-ribbed conservative Lutheran church of the denomination of my childhood with a mid-week Lent service, and see if they are still singing that gross old hymn.

technorati: Lutherans, Lent, childhood depression, Palm Sunday