I've been thinking about Jesus. People argue over whether it was Aristotle or St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who said, "Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man." I'm now more than seven decades removed from my first Sunday School class, and my ears still perk up when the conversation turns to religion. For some reason I had a brain-fart this morning that made me ask myself, "Did the Gare St. Lazare, Paris' oldest train station, get its name from the same Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead?" It didn't take much digging to learn that Lazarus and Jesus were best buds, and Jesus used Lazarus' digs as a place for him and his twelve disciples to hang out. (Or maybe Mary and Martha, Lazarus' sisters, were the attraction.) At least one website makes the case the Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead as a way of proving he was the son of God.
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| Lazarus |
The website provides us with a picture of the dude (on the right), and maybe it's Lazarus' good looks we should be investigating.
If it were not for all that virgin birthing, raising your friends after death, and walking-on-water shit, I could get my head around identifying as a Christian. My grandmother gifted me as a kid with one of those Bibles that had all the words attributed to Christ himself printed in red, so I became aware early on that if you stuck to the red and ignored the parts where you bash the brains of the kids of your enemies on the rocks, you'll get a pretty cool image of this guy Jesus. No way I'm going to sell all that I have and hand the cash over to the homeless, but I think his heart is at least pointing in the right direction.
It's not hard to separate the real Christians from those faking it. Big on the agenda of America's Christian Nationalists is making sure the many thousands of folk who are in the U.S. illegally get deported, whether to Mexico or to their countries they were fleeing for fear of persecution. Which raises the question, did red-letter Christ's "Love Thy Neighbor" pitch deliberately leave out the adjective "American" or did those failing to protect asylum seekers from real risk simply turn their backs and say "Not my problem!?"
Since I'm not a card-carrying Christian, I have no theological obligation to stand by America's asylum seekers. But I don't get my moral code from the Bible. I find the Bible morally depraved in large part (It's not just those kids' brains, there's the fact that God is said to have seen the Amalekites as enemies for all time of the Israelis, and thus worthy of being wiped out (1 Samuel 15:2–3, NKJ) to the last toddler. I prefer a secular code that begins and ends with an injunction against violence and deceit (I know, I know, the devil is in the details).
My beef with Christians began with my awareness that so much that is wrong with American society, the racism and centuries of anti-semitism, the Calvinistic failure to recognize how much their values open the door to greed and self-righteousness, and probably most of all, the homophobia so strong it led author and scholar, Eric E. Rofes, to title his book on gay suicide, I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves.
I gave up church-bashing, some years ago now when I learned to stop lumping together a group that shares a set of beliefs that are harmful from a similar group whose beliefs are benign, and to put my efforts into seeking common ground. It was my friendship with Jews whose "religion" was less about theocracy than about simply "being Jewish" that led me to understand my upbringing imprinted on me a cultural Christianity that won't let go was no different. Brahms' German Requiem and the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral resonate in my bones and I care not one wit whether the artists whose legacy I share with millions over the years were motivated by a firm belief only adults should be baptised or a simple understanding that they possessed a talent for making beautiful things; we share common ground.
I was taught that prayer only counted when your were talking from the heart with God and in total sincerity - which meant that all the canned prayers were suspect and done so that you could get to be seen to be praying - going through the motions. That led to the conviction that Catholic (and any other rote) prayer was insincere and to be avoided as not real prayer. Somewhere along the line, though, I got hooked by the beauty of the Elizabethan English in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer. I mean really. What's not to love about the public confession that goes:
Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. |
I mean "no health in us" is a bit over the top, for sure, but the rest of it is a pretty good turn of phrase, don't you think?
On the Catholic front, I had a thing for Pope John XXIII and will treasure forever the opportunity I had to watch him celebrate mass at St. Peter's in Rome on Easter Sunday up close (just to the left of the main altar). I had a thing for the Argentine pope, Jorge Bergoglio, despite his arguably conservative leanings, because I saw him as a warm-hearted grandfather. And these days I'm quite taken with Leo, the American pope currently on the throne of St. Peter. He and I speak a similar form of American English, so he's easy to listen to, especially when he takes on Donald Trump for his hostility toward immigrants - which is, I guess, another way of saying I see him as an authentic, not-fake, Christian.
One nice thing about growing old. I've lived long enough already to recognize that just because it has taken years to find common ground, it doesn't mean it isn't there...
