After some of the posts I've written in the past six weeks, you might be wondering if I'm still Christian, and if so, why. It's very late, so this will probably not be as well thought out as it should be. But here you go.
First of all, please read this post, that I first wrote years ago, and that I edited and re-posted in 2015, and that I could re-post again today with only a few minor changes.
Then the next thing to say is that I still find Jesus to be one of the most interesting, compelling characters in any religion. I've spent a fair amount of time reading about the search for the historical Jesus and I've studied scholars who deconstruct Jesus' cultural presence and etc etc. But I've finally come back around to accepting that what we have in the four gospels is what we have, and the person of Jesus may not be exactly, accurately portrayed there. But the person that exists in the New Testament is still a phenomenal teacher, and always has been. The sermon on the mount is one of the great spiritual texts of any time or place.
And he still resonates. Here is just one example. I can't tell you how many times over the past eight years I've been reminded of the story of Jesus and the rich young ruler in Mark 10:17-22. A young man comes up to Jesus and asks him what he (the young man) must do to be saved. Jesus tells him to keep the commandments, and the man says he has done this all his life. There's not much detail, but reading between the lines, it seems pretty clear that the young man is expecting Jesus to pat him on the head and tell him he's in good shape, no worries. But instead, Jesus looked at him and loved him, and told him to go and sell all his possessions to give to the poor, "then come and follow me." The young man is shocked, because it's not the answer he expected, and he goes away very sad, because he can't bear to part with all his things.
There's so much here to think about. If this young man had been really listening to Jesus before he came to ask his question--and we don't know if he had-- he would already know that he was asking the wrong question. If he hadn't been listening, it means he just strode up and sort of barged in with his demand for approval. Either way, he's misinformed and doesn't really get what's going on.
But Jesus looked at him and loved him. When I think someone is misinformed and doesn't gets what's happening, I look at him and judge him. Roll my eyes. Silently mock him, even if I'm not saying it out loud. But Jesus loves him, and gives him a real answer, a true answer, but not the answer the man wants to hear. I heard a wise teacher, talking about this story once a few years ago, say that the man's mistake at this point was that he walked away. The point wasn't necessarily to sell all his goods, the point was following Jesus, listening to him, learning a new way to think, a new set of values.
I think about that story all the time. And there are moments like that buried all over in the Jesus stories. I'm not the best at finding them-- I have so much hurt and heartache around the way the New Testament was shoved down my throat long ago that I find it difficult to open my bible without a nagging sense of dread that I will be pulled back down under. But I have been gifted in my life with many wise teachers, and they have helped me re-interpret the old stories so that I can see new life in them. I'll never be Evangelical again, but I'm still a follower of Jesus. I still believe in his radical ideas.
One other thing that I'll add on here, and if it weren't very late at night and I weren't trying to get everything I want to say out on the page so that I can close down this blog, I probably would not say this. But a a bunch of years ago I wrote a post about how disappointed I was in how my life had turned out. I knew it was whining when I wrote it, because who is more privileged or luckier than me? But it was how I felt at that moment, and sometimes you have to go with what you feel in order to get over it. And I have to admit that sometimes I'm over that feeling of disppointment, and sometimes I'm not. But about six months ago, it occurred to me that one of the things, maybe the thing, that has disappointed me most is that God did not turn out to be who I thought God was, the way I was raised to believe God was. I know intellectually that's because I was badly taught, I was handed a bunch of worn-out cultural assumptions about God, and about the way we teach our children about God. It was the way I was taught that was the problem, not actually God. And right on the heels of realizing that most deep disappointment, a little voice said, but wait, what if God is true? what if God does exist, not the cardboard cutout I was raised with, but real God? Those of us who are highly educated have been handed a bunch of science to make it so we don't need to believe God exists anymore, but WHAT IF SHE DOES? (I phrase it like that not because I think God is female to the exclusion of being male but, well, partly because there's no way in english to describe a living, vibrant entity that is beyond gender, but also to emphasize that this tiny bit of hope that burst forth is different than what I previously believed). And just that little bit of breakthrough, the crack in my cynicism that lets the light come in, has made all the difference. A deep part of me is (slowly) coming back to life. I can't prove God exists, but I feel it. I'm not re-writing this or editing it, because if I do, I won't post it.
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