Easter i

More than anything I could say about Easter, this seems like the best place to start. The letter I have just written on Easter Monday to a one time friend.


The thing is: in my head, on Easter Sunday, I envisioned myself having a much easier time writing this letter. I had pieced out every paragraph detail by detail, and now I don’t know how to say what. Well, I’m going to try anyway. I have always tried to do right by you, but it seems to blow it your face. My face too, but possibly more yours. You will think I am writing this letter to say something harsh to you, or something uninvited, but that’s not it all.
Last year, when that letter came to my house I would like to say that you will have no idea how incredibly angry I was except that I’m sure you had to know how angry I was. That must be how angry you were when you wrote it. And confused, probably. But I never knew what to say and what not to say to you. Kevin, you ought to have helped me along in that. All the time I asked if went to far, and all the time you smiled, sometimes in person, sometimes in mail, and said, “No.” But I have blamed myself for not being able know I was hurting you or making you mad. Life was going pretty sour at the time, anyway, so the letter was just making a bad set of things worse. I stood over the trash can in my room, ripping it into little pieces because I’d already read what you said over e-mail, but even still, I resolved to make things right with you. I believed it could be done, and that this business would blow over quickly. That is what forgiveness is all about. I thought, “eventually he will respond…” but. My bonehead brothers and sisters, who believe in never quitting or never giving up... ah, they didn’t let me give up. I even went up to you in your car and congratulated you on graduation but eventually it did occur to me just give up. And so I did. Your orders had been specific and I had disregarded them: leave me alone. Do not look at me. There’s more you said in that letter, and so I wish I’d kept it. But I don’t remember it now. All I remember is how angry I was and how resolved I was to get past the anger and make things right. And then, learning that things could not be right I just remembered anger and disappointment.
You probably don’t remember any of this. Half of it is probably in my head. That’s how memories work. What can you do?

When you finally spoke to me again, when, to my surprise I learned that you were still here, when I was coming out of Mass one morning, and there you were at the door of the sacristy, let me explain something: what you said was, “It’s good to see you, Chris,” but what I felt was as if someone had kicked me in the stomach. See, after things soured, it was at the end of a very long series of sour experiences, and I was no longer a regular part of any church. I was out in the world working in hospice, care for the dying, but I was not attending church except for on Sunday, and what you had said I took to a great deal of heart. Caring for other people you worship with is a bad an unrewarding business. So I decided not to do it. I had come to church for a bit of piece and there you were.
Well, a while has passed since then to. And I have tried to do right. But I have not actually made any sort of sacrifice or gone out of my way. A Christmas card out of a box of a hundred Christmas cards that we bought at Dollar General three years back does not count as much of a sacrifice. But admitting I am human: that is a sacrifice. And I’m about to come to my real point, which is this: when you said don’t look at you, don’t love you I, at last, believed you. Over Easter, in the last week, I realized: I have not actually looked at you or taken you seriously once in this whole year. I realize that because this is the way I have treated EVERYONE at Sacred Heart. Not in the world, never in the world. Not even in the parish I am active at. But in this church; yes. A half smile, a distant courtesy and a tone of voice that implies: please go away and leave me alone. I’m confessing this because regardless if you feel it or not, I think I’ve used it on you every time I see you. Or don’t see you, but… you know what I mean. And I realized because fleeing from church on Saturday night, right before I exchanged happy Easters with Danielle I saw you talking to her and suddenly, like someone had slapped the crap out of me I SAW you. For the first time in a while I saw people, and I remembered that at a distant point in time we were something like friends, and there were actually good relations between us. I remembered what maybe you can’t remember: things before things went bad. I remembered Bill talking about you and then me meeting you and thinking you were a whacked out freak show, and liking that. Because there wasn’t anyone else like you. And I remember hoping that you wouldn’t change, and hoping that no one would ever make you think you should be someone else than who you were. And I remembered more, and it hurt a great deal. I don’t know that things will ever be easy between us again, and I don’t that it needs to, but I do know that spending three days in church, listening to the life of Christ he was being compelled to do something. He died, the least I can do is write a letter. And I think writing this letter was it. Or part of it.
I hope it doesn’t hurt you, or confuse you, or any of the things that for some reason seem to happen whenever we occupy the same mental space.

Peace,
Chris.