‘Are you OK, Rev?”
This was the second time in a month that Alice greeted him with something close to affection. Recovering from the shock quickly, Pastor Walter Mitty answered the ill-tempered server, “Why do you ask, Alice?”
“Well, you look like you’ve just lost your best friend.”
“Hmmm, I’m not sure, Alice, but thanks for asking.”
“Pastor, are you OK?” asked Ryan Becker as Mitty sat down at the big round table in a back corner of the Main Café in Poplar Park.
“Ryan, you’re the second person to ask me that in the last 30 seconds. Do I look down or something?” The seven men at the table all nodded.
Mitty searched his interior for an explanation for what he wasn’t even aware of.
“I guess … well I think that it’s partly the service last night. The Good Friday service always makes me feel sad.”
“Really?” said Asch. “I thought I was the only one affected by Good Friday that way.”
“Me too,” Eric Anderson nodded his head in agreement.
“It’s not exactly guilt,” Asch shared. “I think sadness is the right word.”
“The story isn’t a tragedy,” Eric Anderson began searching for words. “I mean three days later Jesus rose from the dead, so there definitely is a happy ending.”
Pastor Walt always felt gratified when his decision to become vulnerable brought out the same in others. After all, that’s a big part of what the Men’s Fellowship was about.
The men sat in silence pondering what had just been said. It was Dominique who broke the silence. “You all know in Florida some of the MAGAs say they don’t want slavery taught in the schools, because they don’t want their kids to feel guilty.”
The Black executive let his words sink in. “Well, guilt is sometimes the right emotional response if you’ve done something wrong, but slavery — at least the chattel kind — ended 161 years ago if I’m doing my math correctly.”
“So,” said Asch, getting into Dominique’s reasoning, “what you are saying is really that the goal of teaching Black history is not to make anyone feel guilty, right? Like, if MAGAs choose to respond to the story of slavery by feeling guilty, that says more about them than it does about promoters of Black history.”
“You know,” said Mitty joining in, “the Church has sometimes been guilty of weaponizing guilt, but we all seem to have reacted to yesterday’s service by feeling sad. That’s more like empathy than guilt, isn’t it?
And Asch added, “You know what’s kind of funny? Feeling sad doesn’t make me feel sad. You know what I mean?”
Pastor Mitty smiled and said, “I know exactly what you mean. There’s a certain sweetness to this kind of sadness. It puts me in a place I want to be in.”
“I just had a thought,” said Eric Anderson. “I react to guilt by feeling like I have to do something, but I respond to sadness or empathy by feeling like I want to do something.”
It was one of those times when the so-called sheep were feeding the so-called shepherd.
On the way home from the Men’s Fellowship breakfast, Mitty stopped in to say hello to Zaphne at the Retro. He liked the young entrepreneur and besides, she was easy on the eyes.
“How you doing, Zaphne?”
“Oh, hi Rev. I can be honest with you. Not so good.”
“Oh, what’s wrong?” Now it was Pastor Mitty’s turn to ask someone if they were OK.
Zaphne paused. “Well, it might be other things, too, but what keeps coming to mind is the thought of Trump getting elected in November.”
The pastor of Poplar Park Community Church waited for Zaphne to finish her thought.
“I’m really scared, Rev. At times I feel real panic.”
The Easter service went well. Everybody said so, and Pastor Mitty went home feeling more joyful than he did the day before.
On the drive up to Manitowoc for a late Easter dinner with Susan and his two nephews he noticed that he was feeling some lingering sadness along with the joy, like the walnuts his mother used to mix in the cookie dough along with the chocolate chips.
It was while he was passing Cedarburg that he remembered what Eric Anderson had said. “The Holy Week narrative is not a tragedy. A death is followed by a new life.”
When he passed the exit to Port Washington he thought, “The Holy Week story is not just about what happened two millennia ago, but it’s kind of a story we can relate to. Like we all experience deaths or losses in our lives and it’s how we respond to the losses that gives us meaning.”
As he drove by Sheboygan on I-43 he wished Zaphne had been with his people that morning in church.