The Prophet of Paradise

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

THE MORNING MEETING with Danella Kernan churned in Janey Musgrove’s mind throughout the day as she taught her comparative religion classes at George Mason University. She arrived home in the early evening and walked from her car with a few plastic sacks of groceries she’d picked up for the long, lonely weekend. In the courtyard formed by four apartment buildings, two teams of Pakistanis were engaged in a spirited cricket match. Janey had to skirt around the edge to avoid interfering with the action.

From the open windows of the apartments she passed came a symphony of scents as residents prepared their evening meals: Chinese five spice, North African harissa, Indian curry, Guatemalan cardamom.

She heard an equally varied array of languages: Spanish, Hindi, Farsi, Mandarin, Arabic.

For most of Janey’s neighbors in Fairfax County, Labor Day weekend had little meaning other than that schools were closed on Monday and many people did not have to go to work that day. Their holidays followed different calendars—spiritual observances unfamiliar to Christian culture and historical events of importance to nations other than the United States.

Though still technically in her native country, Janey was a world away from her hometown in Chippewa County, Minnesota. The loneliness began to overwhelm her and the grocery bags felt like concrete blocks in her tired arms. She had traveled to several exotic locales around the world to study minority religions, from the Pacific South Sea Islands where Prince Philip reigns as a god, to the Kalahari Desert where the San Bushmen have practiced the mystical beliefs tied to their hunter/gatherer lifestyle for millennia.

But these had always been observation expeditions, a few weeks to study the native culture, interview the locals, experience the unique flavor of the area, and attempt to grasp what they believed and why they believed it. Then it was back to the States and a resumption of her academic pursuits in her own environment.

Now she felt that she was the one being observed, that hundreds of people from distant parts of the world had traveled to Northern Virginia to see what her life was like. Only they weren’t going back home. They were here to stay. They looked upon her unquestioned customs and beliefs with speculation and amusement. “Labor Day?” If it’s a day for labor, why is everyone not working? Whose labor are you celebrating? The more she thought about this, the more she questioned her own acceptance of this holiday. She wondered how many Americans, born and raised in the US, knew anything more than that it meant schools were closed and most people did not go to work, just like the Pakistani cricketers, looking forward to a day off on Monday with no idea why.

After trudging up to her third floor flat, she dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter and gazed out the window at what to her was a foreign sporting match being held in her own front yard. It had been the blandness of Chippewa County that inspired her to specialize in fringe religions, to study people whose beliefs and values were so strikingly different from what she considered “normal.” In Clara City, where she grew up, everyone she knew was white and most were Lutheran. The main extent of diversity was whether someone’s ancestors were Norwegian, German, or English. No one there questioned the point of Labor Day, nor did anyone ever wonder how it came to be. The phrase “Pullman Strike” might spark a faint glimmer of recognition among the most erudite of the populace. But few, if any, could have explained the connection between the labor unrest of the 1880s and the three-day weekend the entire United States now observed.

Yet the holiday had become firmly entrenched in American culture, signifying the end of summer (pointless to those who measure the seasons by southern hemisphere cycles), the start of a new school year (relevant only because it had once been necessary for children to work on the family farm all summer), the kick-off of the professional and collegiate football season (a misnomer to those who considered “futbol” a game in which one actually manipulates the ball with one’s foot). To ladies of Janey’s mother’s generation, it meant the last day of the year when it was socially acceptable to wear white.

It occurred to Janey that Labor Day in the US meant no more to the Pakistani cricketers than Guy Fawkes Day meant to her. Neither had a religious connotation. Yet they both provided an element of cultural cohesion, requiring only that the celebrants corporately agreed that it was a holiday worthy of their observation.

Was there a potential premise there? Rather than trying to milk fringe religions for a third book, perhaps a study of secular holidays around the world, what events inspired their inception, what gap had grown between the original impetus for the observation and the unrelated practices that had been adopted (such as celebrating the strength of the national workforce by doing no work)?

She heard shouts of exultation from some of the cricketers outside. She had no idea what they were saying, but the tone and fervor suggested something along the lines of “God is on our side!”