Speaker 1 (00:00):

Stories and Other Things Holy - Easter Season. Excuse me.

(00:06):

So I'm thinking of all these words with respect to Easter and this one, this week, a paradox comes to mind, like Easter is a paradox. So story about a guy named Kinzie. You may have heard there was a movie called the Kinsey Report, and this guy started the Sexuality Institute at Indiana University. So the backstory is that he comes from an academic family, he's the firstborn son. His dad is extremely also an academic and extremely demanding to the point that he just wants to get out of there. So he goes to Indiana, he's very successful academically, gets his graduate degree, gets his doctorate, and is teaching there when he meets an undergraduate woman who he falls in love with and then waits until she graduates, and then they elope. They are on their way to his family of origin for dinner post getting married.

(01:14):

And he just reviews with his experience of his dad. You remember that? He's narcissistic, he's mean-spirited, he's self-referential, he's egotistical. I don't know if it reminds anybody. And anyway, this guy is something. And so the new wife is like, I got it. I got it. I'm good. So they get to the house and then they have a classic late 1950s sort of formal dinner around the table. Everybody's wearing ties. And then the dad is, as he is reported, unbelievably just mean to everybody at the table, but doesn't in that kind of polite way, which even makes it meaner, distorts stuff. His wife says the whole thing. It's just like icky and cruel. And the new wife is now watching her husband being treated like this by his dad. Oh God. So they retire to their bedroom, which you sort of think must have been his room as a kid, like a single little bed.

(02:31):

And so there's a lot of Freudian stuff going on, but that wasn't the point of the movie. So they start to laugh about what happened at dinner. And he says, so what'd you think? And she says, he was much worse than I ever could have imagined. And they sort of giggle. And then they say things that he said, "I believe that the fall of the Roman Empire was the product of two infrequent bathing." And then they both sort of laugh. You know how little kids, their laughter morphs into tears in that just beautiful anguish sort of way. Over the course of about 17 seconds, that's what happens to him. He's laughing with her and then he turns away from her and now he's weeping and she's aware that something fundamental has shifted in between them. In the room, she gets up on her little elbow and has a rose colored little nightgown, 1950s nightgown. And she says, what happened, honey? And he says, I'm so sorry you had to witness that. And she says, I think I really fell in love with you tonight.

(03:38):

Damn. I think of the Pieta, which is just such an iconic image in the Christian imagination, in the imagination of humanity. And I imagine Jesus in his in-between space, saying to his mom, I am so sorry you had to witness that. And she says, paradoxically, I think I really fell more in love with you today. So I'm holding this picture of this vibrant, curious, passionate storytelling, lunch sharing, courageous table, turning dude next to the cross where his body was battered or a diaper. And then he whispers in soul of his imagination to his mom, I am so sorry you had to witness that. The mom already knows that transformation has occurred in his battered bodies being welcomed into the ambiguous, certain arms of love. And she says, I really fell in love with you more today.

(05:04):

Easter. Paradox.

(05:11):

Stories and Other Things Holy. Amen.