©2000 by Steven Schroeder Suicide, 1 The Everyday Suicide of Ordinary Existence Steven Schroeder Visiting Associate Professor of Liberal Studies Roosevelt University 430 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago, IL 60605 e-mail: sh-schroeder-7@a lumni.uchica go.edu Jo Carol Pierce =s Bad Girls Upset By the Truth is a bittersweet celebration of the Panhandle-South Plains that dances just this side of damning with faint praise. It is representative of a tragicomic musical tradition often lost in the Austin sound, an expatriate voice that is Lubbock all over. Pierce =s take on the tradition is a serious contribution to feminist theology that locates God right in the middle of the everyday suic ide of ordinary exi stence, which simultane ously takes our li fe and makes it possible to go on living. In Pierce=s performance, a young woman finds Jesus in ea ch of her many lovers Cnot an approach one expects from Bible belt West Texas, but more orthodox than it first appears. What Athese boys@ are for is findi ng GodCand that =s pretty much what everyone else is for as well. The tragic dime nsion of this is tha t every encounter with GodCevery human encounterCopens a vein. The si nger finds hersel f in the Garden pra ying that this cup be taken from her, a new twist in a religious traditi on that insist s on Apersonal@ encounter with Jesus: God loves the world so much, God just l oves it to death. I This is an Advent me ditation triangulate d with refere nce to three texts: Albe rt Camus = retelling of the myth of Sisyphus, Butch Hancock =s AJust A Wave, @ and Jo Carol Pierce=s Bad Girls Upset by the Truth. In deference to Christia n homiletics and liturgic s, the medita tion takes place in a re ading that weaves old stories, good news, and correspondence into a rhythm celebrating the presence of divinity in the condition of humanity. As is customary in this tradition, I put the old story first: Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a mountain, watching it roll back down, then rolling it up again. His offense, as Edith Hamilton delicately put it in the text from which I first learned the myth, was that he once Abetrayed a secret of Zeus. @ As the story goes, he saw a huge eagle carrying Aegina, who was the young daughte r of a lesser god, to an island. Suspecting (rightly) that the eagle was Zeus, Sisyphus had the nerve to reveal this to Aegina=s father, Asopus, who ca me looking for his daughte r. Sisyphus was condemned for witnessing a rape and naming the rapi st. Camus takes up the story, at tending not so much to the condemnation of Sisyphus as to his punishment, in an essay on suicide that is simultaneously an essay on freedom. Camus declares Sisyphus happy in the instant at the top of the mountain, when he sees the world Awhole @ while the boulder rolls down to the bottom. This instant, like the rolling stone, repeats eternally.