I'm off. I'm going to the gym. And then I'm going to see Passion. I feel a bit apprehensive, truth be told.
As a child, I was told in Sunday school about what crucifixion is like. You do not die from the nails in your hands. You die from suffocation. You cannot hold your head up.
I was very impressionable (or, I prefer to think I was just imaginative, and already an actress-type, trying to imagine my way into other people's shoes) - but that image of Jesus suffocating haunted me. Even more so than imagining your head being cut into with a crown of thorns, or the nails in your hands and feet. It was the suffocation that terrified me. I lay in bed agonizing over it. I kept trying to imagine what it was like to have your body dragging your head down ... your little spindly neck trying to hold your head up ... It horrified me. As it was meant to, obviously.
And so I do not feel that I suffer from a "lack of reality" in terms of my (albeit cursory) understanding of what Jesus went through.
I would sit in church, and stare up at the placid statue of Jesus, imagining his head being dragged down.
This was before they replaced the statue with a post-modern rendition of the crucifixion - so post-modern that Jesus doesn't appear in it at all! It's now a shiny wooden sleek cross, and way up at the top, wrapped around it ... is a thin silver crown ... but I'm sorry, it looks like a basketball hoop.
Anyway, as a kid - there were actual statues on the altar. Jesus on the cross, his body bent to one side, but his face was placid, serene. It was not one of your blood-and-guts Catholic churches. We were a University campus congregation and so a bit more progressive. We had youth masses. Daisies were handed out. There was a little hippie-ish band, who played guitars, and the drums. And sang: "A---a--amen...A---a---men....A-men, A-men, A-men..." Not exactly from the Catholic hymn book.
But I would stare at Jesus' placid face, and literally feel, in sympathy, as though my head were being weighed down.
I don't know why that image or vision took such a grip on my imagination, but it did.
I do feel I need to see this film, because it's an important event. It's an important event, and I want to see it for myself so I can decide for myself.
Posted by sheila