Schadenfreude.

Yep.

I said it.

That German thing….y’know, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. Most people get their Schadenfreude fix with the weight gain, wrinkles, or divorces of those thinner, prettier, or wealthier than themselves. Think Kirstie Alley. (You smiled, I know you did.) My son and I, however, think that kind of Schadenfreude is petty, especially in comparison to how we felt after learning of the explosion (and, therefore, the destruction) of the student center annex of a local Baptist church.

I watched the local evening news coverage of this event last night and I found myself fervid with desire, a desire that had me longing for nothing other than to go look at the site of the explosion. My son was playing a video game when I interrupted. “Hey—you wanna go with me to see that church that exploded?”

“Huh? Church that exploded?” He was interested enough to actually look at me.

“Yeah—the church that exploded. Kaboom!”

“Kaboom?”

“Yep. Ka-BOOM!”

“Oh yeah. I wanna go. When are we leaving?”

I’m not sure what this exchange actually communicated, or what or how repeatedly saying “kaboom” added to it, but it left us both quite giddy. I told him to grab the leash, that we’d take the dog along with us, you know, to make it an official family outing. (Yes, these are the “family memories” I am providing for my son, the very ones that he will, someday, recount to his grandchildren….other kids will hear stories about trips to their grandmother’s house or vacations along the Gulf Coast….but future generations of the Coyle family will hear stories like, ”When I was a boy, we gathered up the family dog one hot summer evening and went to see a church that exploded….KABOOM!”)

Now I am not exactly sure why the Baptists have, for so long, been the object of my pacifist-natured wrath. It isn’t because they’re thinner, prettier, or wealthier than me (we’re talking about Baptists here, not Episcopalians…who, by the way, seemingly are decent folks). Is it because they pretend not to drink? Don’t shuffle their feet sufficiently to good music? Or is it their tacit tenet of spiritual superiority, their affectation of unwavering and unquestioning religious certitude that thereby places all of those not at their church at a rung somewhere far beneath theirs on the ladder to God? Yep. I think that’s it.

Now I could include the requisite qualification that there are good Baptists out there, that I’ve known some, that some are even my friends…but I'd only do that because I’d like to seem as though I am more moderate and temperate about Baptists than I truly am. So yes, I do have Baptist friends…but don’t let that detract from the fact that I loaded my son and my dog in my car last night to go see the site of the explosion. And we weren’t the only ones there. And we weren’t the only ones struggling to suppress a smile.