The Holy Week Kick Off

Mornings and Mondays are always inconvenient and combining the two creates a double negative that can never be turned positive. Monday mornings can only be endured as a weekly rite of passage. It was nice to survive a weekend of everything sham and pseudo Irish -and even get pleasantly surprised when something authentic pops out of the fog of commercialism misting of an ocean of green beer.

The Bally Hotel had its yearly tribute to Finnegan's Wake. There was some friendly wagering on the Coffin Races with proceeds going to charity. I know how to make coffin, it was something I did for a couple of low budget horror movies that went straight VHS .... yeah tape, not DVDs. Next year I plan to enter and I'll race to win. I'll call the entre "stiff competition".  

Then there was the wake itself with Finnegan on display.  The object was to tell him a joke and if you could raise the dead with a laugh you would win a free pint. There weren't that many free pints earned and getting dead to groan didn't count.  Finnegan wasn't the only one to die on stage. Like any wake it feels good to eulogize the dead and be grateful you're not the guest of honor.

The whole exercise makes you think of how many jokes there really are in the world. If you live long enough it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll get to hear them all.  Supposedly Vampires like puns because after a few centuries they have heard every possible joke over and over again. But puns are different because language is elastic and constantly in the flux of change. Puns are like a romance between cousins; memorable now, eventual forgotten and renewed when another generation of new lovers embarrasses their aunts and uncles along with their parents.

Among the Celtophiles is the Cult of the Joking Jesus. A gift from James Joyce in Ulysses that has evolved into the philosophical idea that spiritual communion is through humor. A joke is spiritual because all jokes must have some truth in them, without a shred of truth it's only absurdity. Ever joke has to have an element of surprise to be funny. If you know the punch line, it goes from funny to boring, every surprise is an opportunity for revelation. All jokes have an element of shared knowledge. A joke quantum mechanics has a much small audience that one about death, taxes or cheating spouses.

Life is harsh and the best that can be offered is a cup of tea and a sympathetic ear. At Saint Peter's Gate is Jesus and his buddy Loki to judge us or if we're lucky serve us tea  -and probably in hell is most our friends waiting for us to join them. As the British have given the world polite understatement, the Irish gift to language is sarcasm. 

With Easter coming this Sunday, this is the beginning of Holy Week. Like many other people, I don't think there is any fundamental truths here but I have years of childhood memories tied up in family, food and ritual. In the New York City area channel 9 on TV would play the classic movie epics with Biblical themes. Most of these movies were the big splashy productions from the 1950's when Hollywood was threaten by the emergence of TV. The movie industry saw profitability in making movies that were too expensive for the broadcast corporations to bankroll. Bible stories were public domain with a built in audience.    

Samson and Delilah, directed by Cecil B DeMille and starring Victor Mature and Hedy LeMarr, was one of those perennial favorites leading up to Easter.  The movie made so much money for Paramount that the studio still holds the rights to the film today.

Lushly filmed the movie is adapted from a story in the Book of Judges. Samson and Delilah has become a shorthand for talking about a hot but very complicated romance.  It's one of those dramas that has been referenced in so many songs and other stories. In the battle of the sexes the relationship between Samson and Delilah constantly leaves the rest of us wondering who has the upper hand?

The Book of Judges is an mix of history and commentary. Most people who are not Bible Scholars or Rabbinical Students past through this part of Bible quickly -if ever at all. Chapter 11 is one of the more troubling bits where you have the Hebrew Commander Jepthah. He promises God that if he is successful in battle that he'll sacrifice the first thing he sees when he gets home. Of course Jepthah is successful and the first thing he sees is his daughter.

So is this an example of human sacrifice in the Bible? Even though it says one thing in print, I'm told this isn't exactly what happened. I love some of the very tortured explanations I have heard from hard core fundamentalists on this chapter.

Back to Samson and Delilah, everybody likes to focus on the tragic love story but I was wondering about the end, when Samson brings the temple of the Philistines crashing down.  What really separates Samson from somebody who straps on a suicide belt of explosives and blows himself up in a crowd of his enemies?    

Of course the last time I brought this up I was sitting in with a group of the faithful, the agnostic and the atheistic together. It was sort of like a joke that starts off with a Rabbi, a Priest and a Minister.  Maybe it's another mental exercise, asking if anything and everything can be justified if it's done in the name of God.