Personal jesus.

****Some of the following is potentially offensive and controversial, even by my standards. If you're going to do me the honor of reading it (and you really don't have to) then at least pay me the respect of reading until the end, and holding off on judgment until then. As always, much appreciated. - J.

"All I do is follow this hollow you around...." - Bright Eyes


I got to know Jesus through everything he wasn't...


...This was as a child, in Sunday morning catechism and 9 years of Catholic school. A strange amalgam of idiosyncratic beliefs, some disavowed by the mainstream, some the exact motivations behind church schisms. People I grew up with wore brown scapulars, a cloth necklace with two small plastic tiles, because if they were to die suddenly while wearing it, they would automatically be forgiven of any committed sins and go to heaven. A worn blue palm-sized book held prayers I recited, some worth 9 months deducted from my eventual time-to-be-spent in Purgatory, other longer appeals worth over a year. I spent a year saying a prescribed regimen of prayers and upon completion believed its assertion that as a reward, one angel from each of the 9 different levels of the heavenly hierarchy would follow and protect me. At the church I attended in Linesville, Pennsylvania, Jesus was a pastel-robed mosaic with a giant corona behind him composed of tens of thousands of small tiles. At the Spanish mission style church in North Hollywood he was a giant statue in a torn loin-cloth with a physique from a P90x "after" photo. 

...This was also during college, after I'd left the Catholic faith for an agnosticism bordering on atheism. This was the Jesus that was thanked publicly and repeatedly on Facebook by Orange County girls for being their daily inspiration- the same girls who fucked on the second date. That were simultaneously fucking 3 of my friends. The ones that were best friends with other OC girls on their way to their fourth abortion during sophomore year. That then unfailingly voted anti-choice Republican. The Jesus of the Georgian presidential candidate on his third marriage, deriding liberals for their lack of morality and family values. Then vowing to keep assault rifles as accessible as supermarket discount cards. The Jesus claimed to be followed devoutly by a massive group of people that time after time after time after time after time vilify the poor, when they're not just flat-out ignoring them. The Jesus with as much real depth as the bumper sticker they screen-print his image onto.

...This was also in 2009, while backpacking around Europe. I spent 3 months assembling him by piecemeal, along with Napoleon Bonaparte, Da Vinci, Goya. In a weird, lonely, Jungian collective unconscious sort of way, those are the additional types of friends you pick up while backpacking extensively. Beyond the hostel roommates and local girls you struggle through broken Turkish with, if you travel long enough you inherit people like Napoleon for companionship. Vincent Van Gogh. Ernest Hemingway. Eventually Jesus Christ. Self-portraits by the same artist painted at different times in their life, stringing a connection together from the Prado to the Louvre to the Met, to wherever. Battlefields following birthplace, museum relics to mausoleum. You're reliving the lives of icons in geographic rather than chronological order. And that's exactly how these dead men can live forever. Reincarnation by proxy. 

When it came to relics from the life of Jesus, who is spiderwebbed throughout a continent he never set foot upon, my skepticism prevailed. Not that of an agnostic, rather my inner historian doubting the integrity of a 2,000 year old chain of custody. I believe that Jesus existed as an individual, but I didn't believe that the moldy blood in a gold-trimmed vial in Bruges was truly his any more than I believed that church's claim it liquefied every Wednesday at 1 p.m. with the precision of a German train. The already dubious assertion that if the infant Jesus ever slept in a crib it somehow survived and ended up in Rome became laughable once I learned the same church used to display what they presented as authentic breast milk of the Virgin Mary. But still I kept going and paying my 3 Euros. Because my inner 9 year-old loves a scavenger hunt. And because as an observer, watching pilgrims meekly approach objects in darkened vaults was more beautiful than seeing them cram into Southern megachurches, arenas where the image of the evangelist on the jumbotron dwarfs the size of the one on the crucifix. I related with those that chose the conquest rather than the congregation. 

Visitors beside me fell to their knees before the wooden Holy Grail in Valencia, they whispered and pointed at the crown of thorns at Notre Dame in Paris. They arrived in buses to an otherwise obscure Roman church containing a piece of the cross, 2 of the nails that bound Christ to it, and the "INRI" sign that hung above him at the crucifixion. I personally didn't believe I was any closer to divinity, but just being there at all was enough for me.

That particular casual scavenger hunt came to an end for me days ago in Palestine and Israel. For my devout mother beside me, this meant pilgrimage, like the faithful in Europe. On the surface we were seeing Jesus' birth cave, his tomb, the rock upon which he was executed, his father's carpentry workshop- a dozen other places associated with perhaps the most influential person to ever live. As in Europe, my reaction was removed. I felt far more relief at the contentment I saw in my mother's face than any emotions of my own. It didn't surprise me that I didn't experience any revelation in the gilded Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I'd already learned in Rome The Vatican was stunning as buildings go, but a pretty poor venue for faith. 

A day after leaving Jerusalem for calmer parts of Israel, I stood on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, in a footnote of a village called Capernaum. The ruins of 2 buildings and a post-modern church built hovering above the ancient foundation stones believed to be the house of the apostle Peter's mother. Believed, even by the most skeptical historians, to be the house in which Jesus started talking about philosophy and dogma with his first followers. It was here that he really began to think.

Only the slightest outline of small buildings on the far bank of the Sea were visible in the hazy fading afternoon light. The thinnest of miniature trees protruded in clusters just out of reach from shore, encircled by lazy grey water. Low-hanging clouds dotted beneath several higher layers of the same. The day wasn't gorgeous, only pleasant. Uneventful, typical, but most importantly serene. An average afternoon that would have looked the same that day as it did hundreds, or even two thousand years before. It's where you would go if you wanted to find Jesus, rather than Christianity. A Jesus separate from televangelism, hollow belief, and hypocrisy. Even a Jesus separate from religion. But one that was inspired to think a little deeper, push himself a little farther, and compel others to do the same.

I don't believe in God. But that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. It isn't that I'm cold and cynical, although I am. It's that what I'm cold and cynical about isn't congruent with what the majority of society is as well. Away from all the distractions and the false images of Christ I've been inundated with my entire life, I realized I actually like and agree with a lot of Jesus' teachings on morality, like I agree with a lot of the Buddha's, and of Far Eastern sages. Because it's basic. Fundamental. I don't see how asserting that he absolutely rose from the dead or that Muhammad unquestionably took a night journey to have a conversation with Moses and Abraham makes what either of them said any more logical or any more relateable. But I do see, from near-constant experience, that the insistence that it does makes me not want to listen to anything further one might have to say. I'm frustrated with myself that it took me going all the way to rural Israel to figure this out. Worse, that I'm not the only one to blame.