Jesus

It's started: "Dad, tell me about Jesus". So here we go, during the most appropriate season there is, advent.

The first conversation occurred while the four of us were on the way to Longwood Gardens a few weeks ago, to see the lights, trees and ice skating. Griffen asked about who Jesus was. Susan and I shared our similar belief that Jesus was very special and has a lot to teach us. But we both told Griffen that we didn't believe that Jesus was more of a child of God than he was. Then Griffen (age eight) and Susan and I talked for quite a while about what Jesus teaches us and why he was killed. Ella (age four) listened intently. Susan and I both stressed that Jesus preached about love and responsibility, and about the need to help anyone in need. We talked about Jesus hanging out with lepers, prostitutes and poor people, and how he threw "gamblers" (my on the spot translation of "money changers") out of the church. Susan and I parted ways around the idea of Jesus' presence in our lives today. I told Griff that Jesus made my worship very personal, and I've come to feel him in my life like dear, old friend. Susan and I both spoke about how his ideas are still alive and still challenging. We told Griffen that he was killed because the people in power were afraid of him.

The second conversation came a few days ago, just between Griff and me. Griff is fond of talking about Jesus "super-powers" (walking on water, etc.) and we both talked about how cool it would be to be able to do that. He asked if they wanted to kill him after he was born, and I told him the story of Herod killing all the male babies in Bethlehem as Jesus and his family snuck away to Egypt. Griff sat quietly for a minute. "What happened then?" So I told him that there isn't a lot of information about Jesus between the time of his birth and the time, about 30 years later, when he became the minister that changed the world. Griff and I speculated about his childhood, and I was reminded again of Ann Rice's novel Christ The Lord (see this blog post). We ended this conversation with an idea I was shocked to be discussing with him: "Maybe we'll read the Bible together some day", I said. "Cool", he said, and then the conversation moved on to other things, like football, Christmas presents and food. So I will read the Bible soon with my son. Holy Christmas, Batman.

These conversations were echoing in my head as I listed to two episodes of Speaking of Faith, in which host Krista Tippet interviews the "New Evangelicals", or the post-religious right Evangelicals. The first episode was with Jim Wallis, the second with Rick and Kay Warren. Some highlights:

- Wallis describing the exercise he did in seminary in which he and his classmates cut any social justice reference out of the Bible. He described the result as something comically "hole-y".

- Warren's observation that the split in Protestant Christianity between either social justice (ceded to the political left) and personal conduct (ceded to the religious right) is artificial and politically motivated. He observed that this split has not occurred in the Catholic Church, which remains committed to social justice causes and is deeply invested in issues of personal conduct.

- Wallis describing how the religious right is now being replaced by Jesus.

- Kay Warren's story of visiting AIDS orphans in Africa, then being joined by Rick. They witnessed a church which was nothing but a tent helping 25 AIDS orphans. "Like a knife in my heart," Warren said, "I asked myself, how many orphans have we helped. Not one. And I knew that had to change."

- Both the pastors were adamant about removing politics from Evangelical Christianity. And I resonated with that position, and recalled my own concern around the way Quakers use words like "liberal" and "conservative".

These are two committed, successful Christians trying to live the life they believe Jesus is asking them to live. They are deeply reluctant to pass judgments, and both have a sense of humor about themselves that, to me, has always been a mark of a great minister. They, and Griffen, have added a sense of import to this advent season. I hope it brings you joy.

I just finished Anne Rice’s Christ The Lord. I think it is a remarkable achievement, as much for the deep humanity in it, as for the clear vision she presents of 1st century Judea. Some observations:

I am struck by as similarity between her novel and another great book of scholarship I have read recently, Steven Greenblatt’s Will in the World, about the life and times of William Shakespeare. Both books unabashedly use creative means to bring the main characters to life. In both books, the life circumstances of Jesus and Will are described with great care and sympathy, and so the reader slowly falls in love with them, following the author’s lead. In her note at the end of the book, Rice describes an almost palpable dislike for Jesus in much of the scholarship she read about him. It made me think of that unpleasant academic characteristic, which is to look down one’s nose at jus about everything, even the subject you’re supposed to be expert at. She and Greenblatt so obviously love their subject matter, and that love evaporates off the pages and surrounds the reader in feelings, as well as thoughts. This is the mark of academic greatness – the ability to impart feelings which do not detract from the intellectual exercise one is undertaking, but enrich it.

In her note – an autobiographical essay at the end of the book, really – she describes two powerful life journeys which relate to Christ the Lord. The first is sweeping. It is the arc of her faith: the initial indoctrination, the long adult doubt, and the delicate return after a life rich with success and blessings. The second is short and devastating. Her husband of 41 years was felled rapidly by a brain tumor just months after Anne first conceived of the form of this novel. I thought of Lessing, losing his wife so soon after marrying her, then writing Nathan. I thought of Mozart, facing his own mortality, and writing the Requiem. Great artists have this terrible ability to use the despair of tragedy as the fuel for creativity. Anne implies that writing this book through her husband’s death kept her sane. I wonder if she was asking Jesus some powerful questions as she brought his little figure to life. I’m certain the passion in the book tastes of the Anne’s life as surely as Hamlet smacks of Shakespeare’s grief.

Her Jesus is a child, and beautifully child-like. Sent by God to earth, he has a wonderful curiosity about everything he sees, and is prone to find a quiet place in the grass, lie down and listen to the bugs humming nearby. This is my kind of Jesus. He experiences every emotion, and clings to his family for love and support, even though, through most of the book, he is aware that they are hiding something from him, something about his birth. What touched me the most is that, after all the miracles, the super-natural events, his great revelation at the end of the book is two-fold: he was sent to earth to live, and like all living things, he will eventually die. It is his human-ness which continually overwhelms him, not his divinity. Reading her book, I wanted to be there next to him, to shelter him, to play with him, to learn from him. She makes him seem beautifully fragile amidst a rugged and sometimes violent landscape.

I really don’t care much about the historical Jesus. Anne writes that Christ scholarship is so divided and rancorous it’s impossible to settle on anything without picking a side in a gigantic theocratic/academic turf battle. A bit like Will Shakespeare, we’re just going to have to live with not knowing, and bring to life the Will and Jesus we want to see in the world, hoping others will do the same. I’m sure, if I was somehow time-transported back to the first century, and met the historical Jesus, I’m sure I’d be disappointed. It would be like meeting that rock star you idolize. It’s better when you can’t smell them.

Singing Tiny Dancer to Ella tonight, I inadvertently switched the genders:

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand
And now he’s in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand

Jesus freaks out in the street
Handing tickets out for God
Turning back he just laughs
The boulevard is not that bad

Piano man he makes his stand
In the auditorium
Looking on she sings the songs
The words he knows, the tune he hums

But oh how it feels so real
Lying here with no one near
Only you and you can hear me
When I say softly, slowly

Hold me closer tiny dancer
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen
you had a busy day today


Right around the “Jesus freaks” line, I heard what I had done. Oh no, I thought, it’s happening – I’m becoming a Jesus freak. I knew that tonight I was singing to Ella about a new Tiny Dancer, one I had just inherited from Anne Rice. But Ella didn’t care. She snuggled in close to me in her warm dark room, and I just kept singing.

It is the season of solstice, of pagan rituals of death and re-birth; and it is the Christian season of Advent, of the celebration of the deliverance of a magical, divine child in to our care. I have moved from Anne Lamott to Anne Rice. I am now reading Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It is a creative imagining of the seven year old Jesus’ life during his return to Nazareth. It is told from his point of view, as he wonders about who he is and begins to understand the world he is living in. It is compelling to me because Griffen is about to be seven, and I hear him asking the same kinds of questions young Jesus asks in the book: why do they fight? Why is there death? And versions of: who am I becoming? What is God? The book is helping me develop a relationship to Jesus I can celebrate, especially since it is the “Annes”, two creative writers, who have helped me fashion a Jesus in my imagination, who is a friend and contemporary, someone who laughs and cries. The Annes have helped me see that this titanic character has been stolen from me by fundamentalists, and my misgivings about him have been misgivings about them. The Jesus I believe in is all spirit now, and as such he has no gender, no race, no age. But if it helps me, he doesn’t mind if I imagine him as a young man sitting in my meeting for worship with me, arms stretched out across the back of the bench, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling.

I imagine him sitting in the house at People’s Light watching the Panto with me and my children, laughing and gently stroking Ella’s hair, before lifting her on to his lap. She sticks her finger in her mouth and looks at me, a little nervous about being so close to this stranger. But his warmth and laughter sooth her, and I smile at her reassuringly, and she leans back, resting against his chest. We glance at each other in the darkened theatre, He and I, and wonder together about this season of darkness, sleep, and mysterious portent. Then we turn our attention to the light.

Spoke to Yitzak yesterday. He is still in residential rehab outside Baltimore. He called a few days ago to say his wife was filing for divorce. This wasn’t a surprise to anyone, but it left him with a heavy heart. Yesterday’s call was entirely different. He called to say that he has found himself filled with an unexplainable serenity, a great sense that a burden has been lifted from him, and a pure belief that God is looking out for him. It’s what we in The Rooms call riding a “Pink Cloud”. I don’t use that term dismissively. When you’re on a Pink Cloud, I say sit back and get comfortable. And Yitzak is aware of the fleetingness of experience, that he may not feel this way tomorrow. But we spoke about how moving through the thing you are most scared of can be a great purifier. In my judgment, Yitzak has passed an enormous spiritual test: he has lost virtually everything – career, family, home - but he remains hopeful. It is a passage you hear about over and over in The Rooms. It is not a test I have ever faced, and I hope I never will. I am one of the lucky ones.

More and more, I am convinced that this cycle of addiction and recovery is the 20th and 21st century’s version of both Joseph’s Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and the life-transforming experience that Samuel Bownas speak about. It is a metaphorical journey to Hades, actually lived, and those of us lucky and strong enough to make it out alive are spiritually altered, there is no way not to be. The difference today is that we have many ways of speaking about that spiritual alteration, whereas Bownas and his contemporaries in the Quaker community would have said we had accepted Christ as our savior, or that we had opened ourselves to the Holy Spirit. But these are secular times, and so we must create terms like Higher Power, Inner Light or even psychological transformation to describe what is essentially the same thing: the rebirth of the human spirit after getting really close to death. And it is vitally important that we honor whatever language a person uses to describe this transformation, and not demand the supremacy of one language over another. Language is the creation of man and therefore fallible – a central Quaker belief. But the experience of new spiritual life is real, universal and indescribable. It happened to Fox, who afterwards created the Religious Society of Friends. It happened to John Coltane, who never went to The Rooms, but was transformed after facing down his demons, and created “A Love Supreme”. It happened to Anne Lamott, who sobered up, joined St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and wrote Traveling Mercies. And me? I would never put myself in that company, but I can use them as my inspiration.

Speaking of careers, the whole issue of “what ifs” came nosing out of it dirty little hole the other night. I had just finished watching “Lost”, a T.V. series Susan and I are addicted to. Really, it’s a fascinating series, in which a group of people are stranded on a tropical island, and all sorts of inexplicable things begin to happen to them. The second season is gathering around a conflict between Jack, the doctor and de-facto leader of the group, and a character named Locke, who, after being wheel chair bound, mysteriously regained the use of his legs after their plane crashed on the island. The conflict between Jack and Locke is about faith. Jack doesn’t want to deal with it if it can’t be logically explained. Locke talks a great deal about “destiny”, and enters into the situations the island leads him to with a sense of wonder and unquestioning faith, faith that this is what was meant to be. How could I not be gripped?

The actor playing Locke is named Terry O’Quinn, and he and I share a resemblance. Knowing that this series was cast with an ensemble of newcomers and relative unknowns (except for Dominic Monegan, the actor who played Pippin in the Lord of The Rings movies), I was suddenly seized with envy of Terry, thinking: that could have been me. If I had been a bit more adventurous and had given L.A. a try, if I hadn’t been paralyzed with alcoholism, if, if if . . . How I fantasize about acting in a hit T.V. series shot in Hawaii, and how easily I forget that if it were true, Griffen and Ella wouldn’t be alive, and the struggles I endure now would be replaced by others, like the ones Terry had to endure on the way to playing Locke. The darkness says, you’re a loser Ben, and what’s worse, you could have been a winner, like Terry.

What pulls me back into the light is my family and my work. Pulling on the costumes I wear for Jason and exploring these wild and wonderful characters, hearing the extraordinary sound of intergenerational laughter from the audience, feeling my kinship to the artists I work with and to the audience I serve. It’s a kinship I share with Terry O’Quinn, and with actors everywhere, and I am comforted by the truth that it doesn’t matter where you act, it matters that you act at all, and act well.

This morning, we played for a school group of about 12 kids and a handful of teachers (the theater holds 175). Peter, who plays a bunch of roles in the play, was grumpy about having to put on all his make-up for such a small group. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t. Something has changed in me. Others have witnessed it. This summer, my friend Kathryn who was my partner on stage in two of the three short plays I acted in for 30Fest, said to me during a tech rehearsal, “So what’s up with you? You’re different – good different”. Abbey, during a conference about the upcoming season at the theater, commented, “People have been glad to have you around Ben. Please take this in the best possible way, they tell me, ‘It’s like the good Ben is here!’” Here’s what I told Kathryn, but couldn’t say to Abbey: I have God in my life now.

I think, very quietly, and with no fanfare, I have been born again. It took about 13 years, beginning with my surrender to my addiction and having its apotheosis through The Religious Society of Friends. It has been a slow motion conversion. And I feel in my struggle and pain around being denied tenure, I have passed through a rite of purification, and what had been closed up inside has finally unfolded on the outside. It is private – I don’t talk about it unless asked, and then only to those who I feel can hear it without alarm or confusion. And it’s not scripture based. It’s not even Christocentric by any conventional standard, although I was deeply moved by Anne Lamott's account of her conversion. In it, she imagined Christ following her around as a stray dog, and then sitting in the corner of her room, a hunched and shadowy figure, until finally she stood up in her misery and said, “Okay! You can come in!”. Nothing that dramatic for me, but I relate to the sense of being pursued by Something with enormous spiritual goodness. For me, S/He hovers, or sits near me like the angels in Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire. I feel renewed by my Suitor, and I have held the image of Jesus in my mind during meeting for worship, seeing Him sit amongst us, occasionally sliding off his bench to wash someone’s feet.

I have just finished reading the 19th century journal of American Quaker John Woolman. I figured, if I have set out to write a 21st century Quaker journal, I might as well read the most famous one I can find from the past. Woolman’s journal is even more widely read that Fox’s, in part because he articulates spirit-based positions on economic justice that were far ahead of his time, in part because his ministry to abolish slavery is so forceful and so personal, in part because the quality of his faith is overpowering. I confess, friends, I felt ashamed at my puny faith when I hold it against John’s, who could not meet a moment in his life without being completely aware of the spiritual implications of it. He took the principal of living one’s faith to the logical extreme, and famously refused to wear dyed clothes because he felt the use of dyes to be both ostentatious, and leading to the oppression of those forced to make them. I fear that if poor John were alive today, her would throw himself from the Ben Franklin bridge in despair, so deeply into the darkness – by his definition - we have drifted as country.

But I also saw that I can’t be an 18th century Quaker in the 21st century. I feel I am called to Quaker ministry in the terms of my own time, and live in the world I have been given. Too often, I fear, Quakers use examples like Woolman as ways to prop up defeatist positions. The only way John is useful to us today is if he propels us forward into action. We cannot wallow in regret at the sad state of the world, and the inability of our Society to bring Divine Light more fully to earth. We must trust in continuing revelation – that we are just as much agents of God’s will as was John Woolman, each to our own measure.