Daysprings by Sam Portaro

Author:Sam Portaro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cowley Publications
Published: 2001-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday

Numbers 21:4-9 John 8:21-30

There are no readings for the observance of April Fool’s Day, but today’s would do nicely. The derivation of the day and its amusements is not known, though it is believed to have grown out of universal observances associated with the vernal equinox. The ancient New Year began on March 25, the vernal equinox, the turning of time from winter to spring, heralding a new year with all the forces nature can muster. April 1 seems to have been the culmination of a six-day festival of observance. On April Fool’s Day, as originally practiced, the object was to trick others into undertaking some foolish errand, some fruitless search.

Both Moses and Jesus must surely have wondered at various stages in their own pilgrimage of faith if they, too, had been sent on the fool’s errand. Moses in the wilderness suffered the impatience and ingratitude of a people who so whined in their deliverance from slavery that even God was provoked to visit them with serpents. And while it is difficult to decipher much of what Jesus is saying in the convoluted prose of John’s gospel, one thing is abundantly clear in the passage cited today, and that is his struggle to communicate with his disciples and with a world that seemed never to understand him. Anyone who has ever experienced such frustration knows the inescapable sensation that accompanies it: the sensation that one is wasting one’s time, that one is pursuing a foolish end.

Only the most romantic among us escape the frustrating realities of bearing witness and being Christian in modern society. Like Moses and Jesus before us, we are well acquainted with the difficulty of sharing our faith in a world that has less and less use for us and our God. It does not help that we are allied, at least in name, with those whose chosen vocations seem intentional obstacles to our progress. To turn on the nightly news and see bizarre manifestations of Christianity, or of any other religion, does little to encourage. To see people of deeply-held religious convictions offering prayer and praise to God while gunning down neighbors, starving and displacing thousands of innocents, and terrorizing the welfare of the world makes one feel foolish to admit faith at all. To learn of yet another priest or pastor of any religious persuasion convicted of sexual abuse is demoralizing. Taken altogether, these and the smaller evidences of our daily lives inspire some vague sense that perhaps we, too, have been dispatched on the fool’s errand.

And in a real sense, maybe we have. Perhaps it can only seem so for us because the God we seek is as elusive as the mythical snipe, because the ultimate goal of our pilgrimage is—at least in this life—always beyond us. It may have been that our ancestors, even our pagan ancestors, were the wiser. They, at least, had the sense to begin a new year not with weighty resolutions that presume human accomplishment, but rather with a light-hearted game.

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