Bugs Bunny and the meaning of Easter
DAVID SILVA
Every Easter morning, at first light, my mother would wake up the
kids and commence the difficult task of getting us ready for church.
This required a lot of time and endless patience, neither of which my
mother ever had.
As long as she loomed over us, threatening and cajoling every step
of the way, we would steadily dress ourselves to the point at which
we could be seen in public. But the moment she turned her back, off
we would run to do something entirely unrelated to the subject of
salvation. She would go into the kitchen to make coffee, and
instantly my brother Michael was in the living room watching
cartoons, his white Sunday shirt half-buttoned and hanging open.
“What are you doing?” I remember her wailing when she walked in on
him.
“Watching Bugs Bunny,” he replied.
“On Easter?” she shouted. “You’re watching Bugs Bunny on the day
our Lord Jesus rose from the dead?”
“I thought Jesus liked bunnies on Easter!”
“Don’t be blasphemous!”
“What’s blasphemous, Mom?” I asked, having been lured into the
room by the siren song of falling anvils and bouncing springs.
My mother stared at the filthy T-shirt and jeans I had thrown on
and shook her head.
“Blasphemous is going to church dressed like that,” she said. “Now
go put on your communion suit!”
“But it doesn’t fit anymore!”
“Do you want to go to hell? Do you want the devil to torment you
for all eternity?”
“Well, no ...”
“Then go change your clothes!”
It was always difficult to argue with Mom on matters pertaining to
religion. My siblings and I fully believed that, as spiritual leader
of the family, Mom held in her hands the keys to both heaven and
hell. This was a belief she actively encouraged, as it helped keep us
in line. At the slightest provocation, she would whip out those keys
and dangle them in front of you -- well, one of them, anyway. Mom was
famous for her threats of eternal damnation, but I can’t recall her
once saying that if we did something right, we were going to heaven.
But the truth was that despite her familial status as a devout and
righteous Catholic, my mother was one of the least spiritual women
I’ve ever known. She was practical-minded, earthy and rooted in the
here and now, and if anyone ever suggested to her that the best way
to deal with a crisis was through prayer, she’d have died laughing.
Religion was good for weddings, funerals and scaring the kids. The
rest of it, she had little use for.
So she smoked and swore and divorced two husbands and accepted
only so much grief from the church fathers before she lost her
temper.
“You know why priests can’t marry, Father Gordon?” I recall her
saying to the family priest when he came by to tell her divorcing my
father was out of the question. “It’s so you can say things like
marriage is a sacred institution. You try being married to this man
for 15 years, then come tell me that with a straight face. “
But such clashes with the clergy were rare. For all her disdain
for the finer points of Catholicism, my mother maintained a healthy
respect for the Almighty. The same sense of practicality that
prompted her to reject the church’s prohibition on divorce also told
her that it was prudent to keep her bases covered. In this way, Mom’s
relationship with God was like that of a woman with a powerful
husband serving an indefinite sentence. For all practical purposes
she was on her own, but stayed faithful because he could show up at
the door at any moment.
So it was that Mom demanded her children observe at least a
modicum of Catholic doctrine for appearance’s sake. She insisted we
go to church on Easter and Ash Wednesday, and encouraged but didn’t
insist we attend Christmas Mass. It was also a given that at least
one Friday every Lenten season, we were made to give up chicken in
favor of tuna salad or a Filet-O’-Fish sandwich. It was a difficult
sacrifice, but we managed.
One Easter Sunday, when I was 8, Mom woke up all of us earlier
than usual, made us hurriedly dress, and walked us down to St.
Matthias. And there, my brothers and sisters and I watched in
astonishment as our mother knelt in the pew and wept and prayed to
God in Spanish and in a manner we had never before seen. She pleaded
and wailed and beseeched and beat at her breast with her clasped
hands.
We watched, mouths open, not sure if we should be alarmed. I
turned to my sister, who leaned over and whispered that it had been a
difficult year for Mom and that she was praying for forgiveness.
Not two months earlier, my mother was riding shotgun in my
sister’s car when two children double-riding on a bicycle suddenly
shot out in front of them and were struck and severely injured. It
had been my mother’s idea to go to the store that day, and she blamed
herself for the accident.
The sight of her in such a state scared me, and I reached up and
pulled at her arm.
“Ma, what’s wrong? What is it?”
My mother stopped praying and looked at me. Then she suddenly
hugged me and leaned back in the pew.
“Do you know why Easter is so important, mijo?” she asked,
clearing her throat and wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve.
“Because it’s when Jesus rose from the dead,” I said.
My mother shook her head. “It’s because Jesus was God’s only son,
and God sent his only son to die for our sins,” she said. “Do you
know why that’s so important?”
I shook my head. Mom leaned over and held my face in her hands.
“Because I would never do that,” she said with grave seriousness,
then kissed me on my forehead. “Never.”
I didn’t completely understand her, but I understood enough to
smile and lean back in the pew and bask in the knowledge that she
loved me. And over the years, as I thought on her words, I realized
they helped me to understand my mother’s relationship with God more
than anything else ever would.
My mother is a practical-minded woman with little use for dogma or
ritual. But every Easter finds her in her pew, praying to God in his
heaven, because her sense of the appropriate tells her it’s the least
that she can do.
* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)
484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.
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