No drive-throughs on the road to enlightenment

“DRIVE THRU CRUCIFIXION. Weather permitting. No charge. Everyone welcome!”

With so many drive-through nativities, I guess a drive-through crucifixion was bound to be next.

An anonymous e-mail directed me to the website www.reallivepreacher.com, where Gordon Atkinson, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas, posted a photograph of the sign. I’m not sure where the church is.

I Googled the name on the banner, Friendship United Methodist Church, and found churches with that name from Damascus, Md., to Humble, Texas. Few of their websites are up-to-date. Those that are make no mention of a drive-through crucifixion.

Atkinson’s comment about the sign is a Merriam-Webster dictionary definition: “Incongruous: lacking congruity, not harmonious, inconsistent within itself, lacking propriety.” What I think he finds incongruous are the eight words at the bottom of the sign: “Come Share the Joy of Easter with Us!”

The crucifixion is a Good Friday thing. Not a joy of Easter.

I have no idea how many people a no-need-to-get-out-of-your-car crucifixion might have attracted. Of them, I wonder how many will come back.

A lot of the shenanigans churches use to get people through their doors call to mind Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” He believes that by wanting complex, difficult things to be quick and easy ? and convincing ourselves it could be so ? we diminish our experience of everything worthwhile, including news, art, politics, philosophy and, yes, even religion.

Elsewhere on Atkinson’s website, he has posted a list of books he found at an airport bookstore, among them the “One Minute Pocket Bible,” “One Minute Prayers” and “Fasting Made Easy.”

I know from experience that in-flight food can make even unintentional fasting easier. But good heavens, as good as hostage for even the shortest flight, aren’t you bound to have more than a minute if you’re going to read the Bible or pray?

As a preacher, Atkinson, like Jesus, is a storyteller. One of his stories is “The Richest Man in Town,” his own colloquial retelling of Mark 10:17. In it, a wealthy young man asks Jesus what he must do “to find favor with God and to receive the joyous, timeless kind of life that comes with that favor.”

To the man’s distress, Jesus makes it clear. “There are no secrets or shortcuts. There is no magic here,” he says.

For Jesus, there was no drive-through, get-it-done-quick crucifixion.

Although the Easter marked on most people’s calendars took place two Sunday’s ago, and the Monday that Dallas Morning News religion writer Jeffrey Weiss fondly calls Half-price Candy Day is long over, my mind’s still on Easter for a couple of reasons.

Just as the week of Easter ended for Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians, Easter, or Pascha, for Eastern Orthodox Christians commenced.

This week following Pascha is called Bright Week. During it, Orthodox Christians who typically abstain from eating meat, eggs or dairy products on Wednesdays (to remember Jesus’ betrayal) and on Fridays (to remember Jesus’ crucifixion and death) will not fast at all. Tomorrow they will celebrate a major feast, the Feast of the Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God, the Fountain of Light and Life.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about Easter is an exhibit at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibit, which opened April 2, began as “Pysanky: Ukrainian Easter Eggs.”

It has since become “Pysanky: Rite of Spring.” Don’t ask me why.

Plural for pysanka, pysanky (PY-san-kee) comes from the Ukrainian verb pysaty, which means “to write.” Pysanky are eggs on which a pictorial story is written using an ancient ink-and-wax technique. The egg itself is a symbol (for life), as are the colors and motifs used in its design.

Traditionally, they are made from goose eggs and chicken eggs, the yolk and white having been blown out. The method for painting them is similar to batik. Now some are painted wood or covered with beads.

In the late ‘80s, when I lived in southern Germany, a Ukrainian friend named Daria shared her traditional collection of jewel-colored eggs with the preschoolers I was teaching. She explained how they were made, told them something of their story, and they tried to make their own, with paint rather than ink and wax.

The craft itself predates Christianity in the Ukraine. So many folk tales belong to the eggs. One tells how the fate of the world depends on pysanky: As long as the eggs are decorated, love will trump evil and the world will be safe. Should there ever be too few, evil will consume the world.

When Christianity came to the Ukraine, the eggs, long associated with life and renewal, became a symbol of the Resurrection at the Orthodox Easter.

If you have never seen a pysanka ? intricately patterned, astonishingly colored and handmade ? you may want to visit the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s exhibit before it closes on May 7. Information about the museum and exhibition is available at www.cafam.org.

If you can’t get to Los Angeles, you may at least want to peruse illustrations of pysanky on the Internet. I was surprised by how many web sites I found when I Googled the word.

My favorite is “Luba’s Website,” at homepage.mac. com/lubap/Menu50.html. The top link on the page is called “My Pysanky.”

Luba doesn’t say much about herself. She seems to be a Ukrainian-born obstetrician who lives in Canada and travels a lot. She has been making pysanky most of her life, and she’s immensely talented.

Her website offers almost endless photos of her and others’ eggs, both traditional and nontraditional. She also provides downloadable handouts of the history and legends of pysanky, their symbols, the symbolism of their colors, some patterns (suited to beginners) for making them, and a paper titled “Everything you ever wanted to know about Ukrainian Easter traditions!”

I’ll take the pysanky and leave the drive-through crucifixion.