That's the thing...I find it hard to name my beliefs using traditional Christian language because that vocabulary has been taken hostage by theological terrorists and tortured beyond recognition (Parker Palmer, introduction to The Promise of Paradox).
So this weekend I took part in two very odd conversations that I haven't figured out yet. Saturday night, staring into the popcorn ceiling of a Hampton Inn hotel room in the Shenandoah valley, I sat listening to a good friend reading aloud from Leviticus (the Gideons provided us this entertainment). I know that when I have been really angry at church (I mean, angry at Christians and physically sitting in a church), I have whipped out Leviticus and read it, glorying in the proof that those many conservative Christians who claim to believe that everything in the Bible is the literal word of God have mostly not read the whole thing, or given it any independent thought.
In situations like this, I am the only thing there to represent Christians, and it is not a role I am comfortable with. Hearing Leviticus being scorned in a hotel room with two of my oldest and dearest (and gayest) friends made me think of how effectively the church has alienated gay people. One of these friends grew up Catholic, and his distaste for church turned into scorn when he was still a child, when he heard the preaching about how only Catholics would go to heaven. He is now an atheist but is loathe to tell people so because, where he lives, atheism equates to amorality-- why, if you didn't have the fear of hell, would you bother to do good things? The other grew up Baptist in the South, and spent his first year in college singing with the Baptist Student Union Choir and pledging chastity-- until he came out and discovered a new world. That new world has not, for either of them, had any place for religion.
And I don't blame them. The conversation saddened me, because I felt obliged to try to explain how I feel about religion / church / God, and I did a piss-poor job. The only thing I guess I can be sure of is that I have sometimes connected with something that felt transcendent. And I get something out of struggling in a spiritual community. And I am heeding the Dalai Lama's advice to practice our own traditions, rather than try to take our Western hearts and minds and curve them entirely to Eastern religious practice. One of these friends, who has experienced similar moments of transcendence, identifies most closely with transcendentalism. The other (and this unaccountably made me sadder) dismissed (he would say explained; to me it felt like dismissed) emotion as chemical synapse-firing. I understand using science to explain things; since the Enlightenment, science has been our culture's religion-- but it seems to me that science attempts to nail down, to explain fully, to take all the mystery out of life. And religion (when it's done right) admits and even celebrates the mystery.
I just hate trying to articulate these ideas, when it feels like I am in a debate of for and against... something I am not even for. Even though we all love each other very much, and I am not a regular Christian (one of Palmer's theological terrorists)-- I don't want to represent for something I don't know, believe, associate with. Sucker.
The second conversation was brief but weird. At a gathering of teacher-friends, we were talking about our Christmas experiences. One had been at a party on Christmas Eve where there was a birthday cake decorated with "Happy Birthday Jesus". Her sister had misread it as Jesse, and then as Jesús, the Spanish-inflected name. They looked around for a little Jesús, couldn't find one, and started asking whose birthday it was. Funny! But then this friend, in explaining further their dismay and hilarity and chagrin when her mom pointed out that it was JESUS's birthday, said something like, "I mean, who's into Jesus anymore?!"
Who, indeed? Even among these straight people, I guess because they are 21st century progressive intellectual types, I am an odd person out for having this vestigial attachment to something so clearly passé and ridiculous. I certainly couldn't explain it to my very secular French friend, as she wondered at my going to church on purpose (she gets dragged by her very Catholic Italian grandfather when she goes home for Christmas). How could I explain it to these people? I can't even explain it to myself.
Then I guess she felt awkward, because she turned to me and asked an even worse question: "Who are you more into, God or Jesus?"
I don't know how to answer that question. God because God is more universal? Jesus because I find the New Testament and especially his focus on compassion and care for "the least of these"?
That's going to haunt me for a while.
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