I Believe In Jebus

“Flanders, how do you stay so happy—and don’t say Jesus!”

- Homer Simpson in "I Won't be Home for Christmas"

This last year has been a fragile one for me. All events have been objectively good, but whether inflicted by medication or buried emotional trauma, it has been a difficult one. There was a point at which some friends and I were discussing our faith, or for some of us, what was left of it.

"Is that supposed to be enough? Just that Jesus came back is really supposed to be sufficient to put up with life?" I realize how much some of us were sounding like ungrateful children. Perhaps we are.

Months later, and only a few days ago, I started crying uncontrollably during the singing of "Because He Lives". Of course, my tears dried up during that verse that comes out of nowhere gushing about babies, but came back for the chorus and the bit about the victory in dying.

But seriously, if dying is going to be so great, what is there to hold a Christian to the earth? There's a lot of doctrine about propagating the species and sharing the word of The Lord, but spending my life pregnant and then telling my offspring that the life I gave them is just awful until they die doesn't seem appealing to me.

Something I realized just today is that I have been cherishing the words of Dostoyevsky in my heart even more than the things I feel I was taught in church. Specifically:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

There are even more powerful declarations of hope and victory given by Jesus himself, but it is hard for me to access those sometimes. It's hard for me to remember the words of hope from a being who so many use as a weapon against those they choose to hate. To too many, it seems like Jesus came not to save the world, but to condemn it. Because my pastor has yet to promise hell to anybody in any of his sermons, I bet there are many who would condemn him to it. Why WOULD a sinner want to hear from another sinner how somebody else's god will destroy their very soul (unless, of course, they unconditionally abandon all life experience to share all the beliefs of the messenger in this scenario)?

Children ask their parents if a certain person is going to hell, and the parents feel authorized to answer "yes" or "no" (for family members it's "yes"; celebrities, "no"). I knew the story of the sisters who raped their drunk father in the Old Testament before I knew male and female had different genitals, or the word "genitals", or the concept that gender was tied to anything other than hair length. [Sidebar: that version of myself would be shocked at my hair now; would I think I had gotten a sex change?] It feels like more than anything, "The Church" wanted to push me out, to keep membership only to those with the greatest sense of entitlement.

I believe in the cleansing power of Jesus. Not because of anything "The Church" ever did for me, but because of something I feel inside myself. I came back to church not because of anything anybody in "The Church" did, but because that feeling inside me knew it was time. And I think that feeling is Jesus, or God, or whatever you choose to call it. I've made it this far, and it would be an insult to the misery I survived in my youth to give up any time after. So yes, that is sufficient.