Easter
The Master Sergeant, the Messiah and me
The Master Sergeant believed in two packs a day, the Strategic Air Command’s credo of “Peace through strength” and the resurrection of his Lord and savior, Jesus Christ, three beliefs I respected even so far as to respect his dying wish that I dig up our dead Protestant mother and move her remains to lay next to him in his beloved Holy Hope cemetery in the Holy hope his beloved Protestant bride would be welcome in Catholic heaven beside him now that she was in sanctified soil.
I understood why a street orphan altar boy who lived and slept inside a cathedral and stole food money from the poor box and boxed his way up and out would believe in a better life beyond this one. And wish the same for the love of his life.
He’d return from Easter Mass aglow with renewed faith in his fate, the promise of an eternal afterlife secured, and a Marlboro fired up, in spite of his cancer’s progress, coughing and grinning, presenting mom and me with a living Easter Lily.
One Easter I announced at the dinner table I thought the Easter Bunny was as dumb as Santa and I asked mom, “what does all this stuff have to do with Jesus?”
This moved the Master Sergeant to ask the question of the ages. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what is wrong with your boy, mother? Take away his chocolate bunny if he thinks it’s so dumb. The boy’s getting too husky anyway.””
Another Easter I rounded up all the crosses in the house along with my toy knights and created a pint-sized mass crucifixion in the front yard. A scene right out of the movie “Spartacus”. Dad, returning home from Mass, slammed his car door, walked over to me and ordered me to put every Jesus back where each one belonged. “Get Jesus out of the dirt boy. Have you lost your mind?”
And then the annual inquisition began at about the time when I was in middle school. I’d dodge the dreaded question he’d pop between puffs. “Do you believe in the resurrection, son?”
“Um..I believe at least four eyewitnesses claimed he rose from the dead.”
“You aren’t a Goddam atheist like that Madalyn Murray O’Hair nut, are you?"
I’d frantically quote something I’d read somewhere. “Pop, I think it’s a shame ‘He is risen’ was the message shouted from the rooftops across the Mediterranean instead of ‘Love your neighbor’… You know, unconditional love for all living things’ instead of the magic stuff- “
Somewhere out of his Irish heritage would spring the phrase “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, son. You’re a little bullshit artist if I ever heard one.”
Hey, man, I was precocious. I dug meditation, man. It was the late sixties, man. We’re all interconnected, man. Blacks, Jews, the Vietnamese, Aquarians, Buddhists, Christians and even Nixon, man.
“Good God Almighty, boy, you’ll never be Pope.”
I loved the old man’s Ford Galaxy with its metal dash, clunky buttons and space age dials. And I loved the cream-colored plastic Jesus on the metal dash which had melted one summer, and the old man insisted on keeping. With his right hand pointed heavenward and leaning back pop’s Jesus looked just like R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural”, a groovy God truckin’ down the road of life with my dad and me.
As I grew into a young man I’d dodge the touchy questions he’d pop between puffs. “Do you believe in Heaven, son?”
I knew his cancer was killing him and there was no point in me telling my dad I saw no point to an afterlife. I felt for so many their belief in a better life beyond the clouds was an excuse to avoid repairing the world in this life. There will never be a Heaven on earth so why bother, you utopian commie. Quarreling over his vote for Nixon the Master Sergeant would always end up quoting scripture. “The poor ye shall have with you always, son.”
“That’s an excuse to do nothing to end the suffering of-“
“What are they teaching you at college?”
His belief sustained him for years as his body failed him and he turned into a corpus before my eyes, crucified by cancer, carton by carton.
One Easter I drew a cartoon of two Roman soldiers at the foot of a cross, with one saying, “I told you capital punishment is a deterrent. This should put an end to it.”
“Sacrilege,” said the old man. “Dear God. You’re going to Hell, son. I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, pop.”
Hundreds of messiahs were crucified in that era. After the Romans leveled the Temple in Jerusalem the persecuted Jews scattered across the Roman world, carrying various beliefs in a variety of martyred messiahs with them, Master Rabbis, sages, healers and “miracle workers” calling for resistance, rebellion or a revival of Judaism. The early Christian sects, brutally persecuted by Rome, had smartly chosen a Nazarene pacifist as their deity, a Judean laborer who preached peace and love and an imminent intimate God happy to render unto Caesar Caesar’s due.
Their mythology came to dominate the others.
Across the centuries hundreds of millions were killed over their “wrong” answers to the same questions pop had asked me that had earned me a simple wry smile and a sigh.
I wish I’d kept the cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark crucifix he hung over his bed after he died.
At night when I was little, I’d get up to pee and peer into his dark bedroom and see his eerie luminous floating Jesus, crucified, floating above his sleepless head and nearby the glowing end of a perpetually lit Marlboro would float back and forth from his ashtray to his mouth. “Don’t forget to flush, Dave.”
“Night, dad.”
These days I am an old man who renews his spirit kindness by kindness, believing it’s challenging to love your neighbor unconditionally, to give up your coat to the naked and to feed the hungry, and all the more noble, if your only reward is in the doing of the act itself. And not some magical mythic Heaven.
The Master Sergeant was devout to his last breath. And I shall remain devoted to the Master Sergeant to my last breath. I always knew in my heathen heart he loved his Hell bound boy. I never worshipped his God. But to this day I still worship the old man.
Aw man, that was beautiful, Dave. "I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I've got my plastic Jesus..."
My mom, Petty Officer 2nd Class WAVE, would have turned one hundred years old yesterday. She and the Master Sergeant had a lot in common (she was a three-packer/day). And I remember she had the glow in the dark rosary that I swear was three feet long.
I think he would be very proud of his mensch son. Verily.
David, I wish I had known your Dad (and Mom) as the man they produced brings me so much joy and laughter in the most challenging of times. Thank you for sharing your Dad and a bit more of yourself with us, your readers and friends!