. . . a child addresses the congregation
The very first time that a ‘youth’ speaks to the congregation in my evangelical church is to give their testimony at about the age of fourteen if, like me, you are already saved. The lines are scripted in the formula for salvation, but in your own words you say that you were a lost sinner destined for hell until the day an uncle, parent, older cousin or sister prayed with you to let Jesus into your heart. Terrifying rites of passage, but now you are eligible to be baptized into the body of Christ. Which I was . . .
Fifty-eight years later . . .
Help !
I think I love him. I want him back.
I’ve lost Jesus.
Where to look? I keep thinking that I should retrace my steps. Will it help if I describe where I was and what I was doing when he disappeared? Let me at least try. I keep thinking that someone in the same boat could help me here. That is, someone who was also a child of evangelical parents and who grew up in evangelical youth groups, believed they were saved, a good christian for some years, maybe even participating as a young adult in evangelical missions as I did till the age of yikes, thirty . . . and then, did this happen to you? One day it’s just gone. It all feels like bullshit.
Life hardly changed except that nothing had be be called God’s will or be a reflection of the love of Christ. Turns out that if you stop referring to God and Christ, the moral decisions you make remain the same. The language is slightly more complex without the shorthand shame and shrug of forgiveness; now there’s an additional layer of moral anxiety, consequences and reconciliation to deal with because God and Christ are no longer continuously available to justify everything you do. A sufficient gloss of social guidance is everywhere in the air anyways to chastise and forgive, or at least distribute some harm reduction points. So you see, I’m serious. I’m way past the evangelical-style guilt or the cynical and satirical fits of rage against that fundamentalist sweep of psychological and political manipulations, and, although it’s taken another forty years, I’m also getting over the array of philosophical alternatives to my once personal relationship with God. Not that I couldn’t easily devote myself to a discipline, a set of cosmic ideas and a stylish practice to go with it, something adopted from any number of religious or rationalist traditions, but it feels more honest to just go back, and forth, to find Jesus who is always sort of there on the back burner anyways. What gives me hope in this quest is that when reading the Gospels, usually the New Testament ones, in light of all the disappointing critical theory I’ve hunted down for guidance, my brain lights up with images of this man dealing with shit on his turf, on his terms.
So tempting to just go down this rabbit hole, high on whatever gets Jesus and me on the same donkey, our imaginary glory. Am I not old enough and suitably irrelevant now to disappear? Oh, I guess I want another real-life companion or two with whom to paddle this river to the sea. And, does the Jesus we find, does he not have to be credible to anyone, anywhere in the world, if we are looking for a saviour? I forgot to say, I’m looking for a saviour for the human species, one which might also help the other ones on earth. So yeah, you can see too that I’m stuck in the global sticky goo of a 21st century cosmology, its screaming media, its clickbait. Jesus will live exactly here if I’m to find him . . . I may already have disqualified him from my search terms. Somebody help me, please ! I promise to love you.
Why have I not understood Jesus till today? Because I’ve been thinking that opening myself to him, he would enter, and within me I would know him, we would know each other. This formula has produced an assurance of who we both are, bonded in a story told, read, reread, a practice, a prayer recited daily, and a transcendence, the ecstatic voices and visions on rare occasions that flood the embryonic soul of a self, myself as they say. All this time it has been what I know, or rather what I seek to know, the questions and the law all in a row, on tablets, in books, on screens. All this time, searching and preaching, preaching and searching, the work of knowing when all along, right before my eyes — those eyes, if I had them to see — was the unknown. An unknown denied, a denial like a Hydro Quebec dam that stops massive energy there on the big river, creates a reservoir for the nation, a flooded-valley cesspool of hope for the future, the dead water released to the river bed, too little, too much, incessantly unrestored. No, it is the unknown river that restoreth my soul. I knew it all along. The potential of the big river unrecognized and lost. If only I had unknown? Is there time to unlearn, to learn another baptism of repentance in cool waters?
Is it an eight-point sermon?
- Why would someone want to find Jesus? If I ask myself, it feels like a very personal question. I answer, because I love him? Devotion? I flatter myself with questions.
- For most people on earth Jesus is a 2100-year-old corpse, one among many revered historical figures; ie, Zoroaster (5000 yrs ago he . . . ), Mohammed (900). Ghandi (75). People we have heard of, but, they are the focus of intense study in other societies and we do not know or think about them. Jesus, however, was a man from the town of Nazareth in Galilee in the province of Judea, a land occupied at the time by Roman Rule. During his lifetime the emperors were Augustus to 0014 and Tiberius till 0037, and two appointed governors, Herod and Pontius Pilate had dealings with him. Somehow, 2100 years later, he is alive in our hearts. How does that happen for some people? How did that happen to you? I would love to hear it.
- The story of Jesus was read into my ears, absorbed within church basement walls shabbily framed with 2x4s and a few sheets of wall board stapled to one side. The approach was down the stairs from the church lobby where coat racks lined both sides; women’s and men’s coats, left and right respectively, jammed on wire hangers, boots and rubber overshoes respectively beneath, crowded; the whiff of perfume, barns and old men hanging in the air; down the stairs onto the concrete floor, a grey expanse for running wild around jack posts, lit in Sunday morning light through high windows looking out at wheels and legs in motion in the parking lot; across this space into one of the rooms, some stacking chairs, a stand for flannel graph. There was Jesus, and Mrs Lepky reading and illustrating gospel stories. Love for her and him crept across my roaming attention, stud walls, concrete floor, a white ceiling of soft fibrous panels drilled full of holes, a light fixture full of flies illuminating the flannel graph. There was a brown hillside beside the blue Sea of Galilee, the crowd, disciples with a basket of fish and bread, Jesus telling them what not to do and what to do instead . . . and, there was I seated among boys and girls in rapt attention.
- Then I lost him. I became an evangelical missionary leading people to Christ. There was a formula for it. You are lost, a sinner, condemned by God to burn in Hell forever. But God still loves you. That’s why He sent his only son to earth to die as a sacrifice for your sin, then brought him back to life and up to heaven where there is now a place for you when you die. If you believe this, you are saved. Now there was a lot to think about. How does this all work exactly; here, me living my life 2100 years later in Lost River at the end of a fiberoptic cable?
- I did my first soul winning at Red Rock Bible Camp where I was a cabin counsellor to ten twelve-year-old boys. I was fifteen. Camp was a psycho-social pressure cooker of childhood torments and confusion among the delights of sparks flying into a night sky around a campfire in the woods beside Becky. You needed to be saved or saved again, or to be sure that you were in fact saved. One day a boy confronted me in our cabin. He wanted to be saved. Wow. A chance to get a notch on my stick. I read the prescribed verses and he repeated the prayer to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart. Then, just saved from eternal damnation, he looked up and asked, Does this mean I have to eat fish on Friday? The next day he came rushing into the cabin in a panic, tore off his clothes and stuffed them into his sleeping bag which he threw under his bunk. As he was rummaging through his suitcase for a change of clothes he said, A bee is chasing me. I have to disguise myself before I go outside. I love this kid; wonder what happened to him. Another one I saved while I was winning souls at North Carolina State University, a math student who said there was employment for math majors at the FBI, called me several years later to invite me to join the Republican Party, that this is how Christ would save America. It’s been fifty years, but now we know he was right. It won’t be long now . . .
- So Jesus. Where did he go and where will we find him? If I was just starting out I’d go back to that church basement and read another Bible story, say, Jesus pissing off a Pharisee that tried to trap him in a legal offence against Rome. In this episode, the question is whether or not, under occupation, a Jew should pay taxes to the colonizers. Whose image is on the coin, Jesus asks him. Well, Caesar’s. So give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and shut the fuck up.
- So now, starting out again to love Jesus I would have to say, Please Jesus, come into my heart. Guide me through this life. Show me how to live for God. Give me a place in your Kingdom.
- Now when I open my eyes and look up at the ones who guided me — my Sunday School teacher who placed the love of Jesus in my heart, the pastor who steered me to Bible School, the rich uncle who warned me of the evils I would face if I went to University — I have a whole new set of questions.
As a historical question, we might want to find Jesus where people have said they saw him. Most recently, the sightings I hear about are not working for me. I feel no connection to Jesus when, for instance, in a certain light at dawn or an angle of car headlights, people see the image of Jesus on the bricks at the back of a Tim Hortons in New Brunswick. Maybe if every coffee that people bought there made them roll-up-the-rim winners, one of those Christian Wealth churches would spring up in the parking lot and save a lot of souls. When I was a missionary in the Bible Belt, the Carolinas, Tennessee, even Florida, I ran across the snake handlers, the holy rollers and screamers, a mega rich construction mogul who asked me to turn all the students at North Carolina State into good Christian boys and girls. This was just before he went to prison under false charges of price fixing road building projects. Another get-close-to-Jesus meeting took place in a living room that would fill with purple light when Jesus was there. That’s how you knew. I even met Billy Graham and helped usher thousands of people to the front of a football stadium to say the words that would let Jesus into their hearts as personal Lord and Saviour.
But there are more credible stories out there. Jesus has shown up in America, Mexico, Europe, where people were healed, saints were named and where shrines for faith tourism still exist. Wealth pours in. I resent the wealth part, so when I got a chance to see the image of Jesus’ body on his burial shroud in Turin Italy, I waited for hours in the heat of a long slow line through beautiful gardens, buying lunch and cold drinks and fridge magnets from vendors along the way in order to get in free. The short line that paraded closer to the shroud was a costly ticket, but I think you could’ve snuck a small balloon of your blood through security and then toss it at the shroud from there. Of course it would hit glass, and by the time a million people saw selfies of it dripping down and you arrested by Basilica police, it would be washed off, not mingled with the dried blood of Jesus at all. Oh well, fantasies. So, to find Jesus in history I keep going back and back to stories that the last people who actually saw him told, the stories collected in the Gospels by early Christians.
Well, one more amusing stop on the way, just because one person who saw Jesus after he was killed was Mary Magdalene, a friend of his. There’s a basilica in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in the south of France just east of Aix that has the skull of Mary Magdalene on display. When she was about 50, the ship she was on lost both its sail and rudder, and drifted ashore near Marseille where she converted many people to the Lord. Now I want to go to Saint Maximin. I wonder if basilica police will let me hold her skull as she did the head of Jesus when they brought him down from the cross. Yeah right.
The Gospels take us to Palestine where, for about 18 months, Jesus was travelling to towns and villages, making friends and enemies, two maybe three confrontational trips to Jerusalem for high holidays; his last stop was Jerusalem. Jesus knew about enemies. They killed him. He said we should love them.
grant loewen 