"Well, how was Easter around here?"
I asked at breakfast.
"Miraculous," Steve, with his
customary smile. Sarah sat next to him, nursing Sean, but she said
nothing. She has seemed uncharacteristically quiet since they got
back to campus.
“Aside from that,” I said.
“Pretty quiet,” Steve explained.
“Ollie lead a service, a dozen or so attended, a group of us had
dinner together….”
“Yeah, what did you have?” asked
June. She and I spent the weekend with my parents, as we usually do,
and got back well after dinner.
“Excuse me,” interjected Aimee, a
yearling, “I don’t mean to be rude, but do you really believe
Jesus rose from the dead?” Aimee is an agnostic and is somewhat
scientifically inclined.
Steve shrugged.
“I suppose so,” he said. “I don’t
see how the early Christian movement would have come up with the idea
if he hadn’t, and a lot of people did claim to have seen him risen.
But if somebody proved to me that he hadn’t, I wouldn’t live my
life any differently than I do.”
“You suppose so?”
exclaimed Diana, who is also Christian, but takes a much more
literalist approach. “That Jesus was killed and rose again on the
third day is the whole point!”
“I
think the point is that He was alive in the first place,” countered
Steve.
“I
don’t understand you,” said Freydis, speaking to Diana. “We’re
friends, and we have lots of things in common, and then you say
something that makes we think we’re living on different planets.”
“I
believe what I believe,” said Diana,
a little defensively.
“I
know,” said Freydis, “and that’s what I have trouble
believing.”
Aimee
spoke up.
“You’re
the one who sacrifices animals, though, right?”
“Lots
of people sacrifice animals,” Freydis said, a bit defensive
herself. “To hunger, to convenience, to money, to fashion…. I
sacrifice animals to the gods.”
“Yes,
but do you really believe Odin demands goat blood, or something?”
Aimee persisted.
“No,
I believe Odin—and the others—appreciate being asked to dinner.
It’s not like paying my taxes, or
something. It’s sharing, it’s giving something back because they
have given me so much.”
“But
do you really believe it?”
“Of
course, I do!”
“Then
why aren’t you angry that I don’t?”
“Huh?”
“If I
never invited Charlie to dinner because I didn’t think he exists,
I’d expect Daniel to get mad.”
The
idea of Charlie as Teutonic deity made me laugh into my scrambled
eggs. Oddly, the idea kind of fits. Freydis had nothing to say. She
just sat there, looking puzzled.
At the
end of the table, little Sean had fallen asleep. Sarah reattached the
cup of her nursing bra and lowered her shirt. She had been watching
the whole conversation carefully and returned her attention to it,
but I realized she hadn’t
been eating. Her plate contained nothing but a blob of ketchup.
Something seemed “off” about that.
“But
spiritual beliefs don’t work like that,” put in Apple, a yearling
with New Age affiliations. “How each person conceives of the
Archetypes is up to them.”
“And
those are your beliefs,” insisted Hawk, the rather aptly-named
falconer—he gave himself the name, of course. “Diana
wouldn’t call them ‘archetypes.’ I wouldn’t. You can’t
really speak on religious diversity if you don’t accept that other
people’s paradigms are different from yours.”
“Yes,
even the stars have their own beliefs,” said Sarah, and I saw
everyone else at the table frown slightly. Steve looked frankly
alarmed. Again, I had a sense of something being “off.”
“Well,
what do you believe,”
said Apple, challenging Hawk, perhaps. Hawk is Wiccan.
“I
don’t have any beliefs,” he replied. “I know things, or I don’t
know them. And if I can know, I find out.”
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