by Trish Ryan
As if anticipating that I’d balk at this strange assessment of my hopeless state, the Apostle John laid out three types of sin I’d find if I gave myself an honest look: a preoccupation with gratifying my own desires, the urge to acquire and accumulate, and an obsession with status and importance. Do I do that? I wondered. I was so accustomed to affirming my universal perfection as a beloved child of God, it never once occurred to me to root around inside myself for evidence of my inherent selfishness. But there it was, clear as day:
– Preoccupation with getting my own way? Check.
– Stockpiling material things, yet still wanting more? Check.
– Obsession with status and how people perceive me? Check.
Unbeknownst to me, I’d been living out the sin trifecta, thinking I was a regular nice person walking around. Which, according to the Bible, I was, as nice as any of us could be, anyway, on our own without Jesus. But if I synced up with Jesus, John said, my life would be different. Different how? I wondered.
For starters, John promised, if I said yes to Jesus’ offer, I’d somehow have the ability to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. I’d know how to shake loose from my endless selfishness, insatiable desire, and concern over how the rest of the world saw me, and live a happier, better life. That sounded good. And yet, I didn’t get why Jesus was necessary—couldn’t God just forgive me?
The Old Testament prophets went on for pages, I noticed, about God’s justice and righteousness, and how sins require a sacrifice to make things right again. I read gruesome instructions in Leviticus about how under the Old Covenant, Jews were to slaughter bulls and goats and sheep and doves to atone for various transgressions. This was God’s old system of substitution to allow people to make it up to Him when they blew Him off and went their own way. There was a set price for various sins, a number of animals to be brought to the priests and killed as an atoning sacrifice. It wasn’t pretty, and it was relentless—anytime you made even the smallest slip or error, you weren’t right before God and needed more blood to restore you. Life was a constant struggle against a system you couldn’t conquer. Kind of a hell on earth.
This was, I realized, what happened after Adam and Eve accepted the serpent’s offer and ate that fruit from the forbidden tree, the one that gave knowledge of good and evil. Before, they knew only good; evil they chose on their own. And now, my inability to stay out of the mud or steer clear of bad decisions was a direct result of this, the Bible implied—because of their choice, I was born cursed with a bent away from God. It might not be a profound, serial killer–style bent; I might be just a few degrees off course. But it was there nonetheless, leading me step-by-step away from the life God created me for. For every mistake, I learned, there was a consequence—something was needed to atone, recalibrate, set me right again before God, something more substantial than my own feeble “Gee, I wish I hadn’t done that.” My heartfelt regret, the Bible implied, didn’t do any good. Blood was required, as I’d literally sold my life to the devil to get what I thought I wanted.
Crap, I thought. No wonder no one talks about this stuff. I didn’t know what else to do, so I read on, hoping to get to the “good news.”
The tangible atonement—the blood—the Bible said, comes from Jesus’ death on the Cross. Because he was innocent, without sin (like all those bulls and goats and doves), he could offer his blood in our place, literally dying so we can live. This is what it means when we call him “the Lamb of God Who Takes Away the Sins of the World.” (Reflecting on this, I immediately forgave all the people who tried to form me as a Catholic child; I never realized what they were up against, trying to convey this grisly message via coloring books and craft projects.)
Jesus’ death put an end to all the sacrifice and bloodshed, the Bible said, paying the price for my mistakes, bad choices, and moments of willful disregard. This was the New Covenant: we still can’t help but sin, but God so wants to forgive us that he gave Jesus as the atoning sacrifice for all of our screwups—past, present, and future.
This was a lot to swallow. All I needed to do to get back on track was say yes to Jesus, repent, accept forgiveness, and move on? It seemed too easy. The new age/enlightenment path taught that I needed to struggle to overcome my past mistakes, that it would take work. (Spiritual people love to talk about their work; my new age conversations often sounded like a self-improvement edition of This Old House.) Jesus seemed to say that all it would take is him. I didn’t know what to do with this, but there it was, in black and white: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves,” John said. But “if we confess our sins, Jesus is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Okay then.
BEFORE I COULD sort that out, things got even stranger. The Bible also said that God was not the only player in the spiritual drama going on around us. Indeed, the same evil being who convinced Adam and Eve to eat the fruit was alive and in the world today, it said, tempting, taunting, and lying to us in order to lure us away from God. The Bible described the devil—a fallen angel, not a cartoon with horns and a spear—as a spiritual being whose sole goal was to ruin our lives, tempting us with things that aren’t God’s best for us, the same way he tempted Eve. It called this being Satan, a serpent, the Deceiver, the Accuser, the Enemy, and the Prince of This World. The Apostle Peter described him “prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.”
I had no mental grid for the notion of a Kingdom of Evil actively seeking to thwart God’s best for me, or the suggestion that we were all warriors in a cosmic spiritual battle. The warlike imagery synced up with my childhood sense that something big was going on around us, though, and explained why there were so many inspiring movies about good triumphing over evil, none of which involved the hero turning his back on the villain and saying, “You’re just not real.”
I spent hours dissecting these passages with Amy, begging her to make sense of this craziness. “Do you believe this stuff?” I asked, wondering if her business colleagues knew about this prowling lion thing.
“Yes I believe it,” she assured me. “I’ve seen it; it’s real.”
“What’s real?” I pressed, baffled that this seemed so natural to her, that she woke up each day believing that Jesus could protect her from mistakes and regret and shame.
“Jesus is real,” she started. “And Satan is real, too. The Bible tells us there’s a war between them going on all around us here on earth, and that the only way to win it is through Jesus.”
“What about the people who don’t know Jesus?” I countered. “What happens to them?”
“They get caught in the middle—in the crossfire,” she acknowledged. “It sucks, because they don’t even know what’s happening to them. Why do you think some believers can be so obnoxious in sharing their faith? It’s because the stakes seem so high and they want people to know that Jesus is the only way out of hell—eternally, but also here in everyday life.”
I stared at her, wide-eyed. I had no idea what to say to that. Here was a girl I respected: she was smart, normal, gainfully employed. There was no reason for her to fall back into some crazy religion to make her life work; her life worked fine. And yet she believed this stuff. How? I wondered. Why? I thought back to that day at Kristen’s house when I’d tried to meditate; how I’d been chased from the room by that vision of a giant man with a sledgehammer, then overwhelmed by the feeling I was being shot through with poison. Was this the kind of evil Amy was talking about?
If the Bible was true, I faced some major changes in how I thought about life. I had always believed that spirituality was about mastering my positive thinking and burnishing my personal wholeness and self-esteem. I had never imagined it would be about Jesus, admitting that I was entirely sin-prone, and fighting off an evil being who wanted to devour me. Suddenly, this Christian thing seemed like a bizarre Star Trek episode where I had to master the hidden forces of some new galaxy in order to survive. But as I re
ad the Bible, I felt God saying, This is the self-help book you’ve been looking for.
Chapter Fifteen
Another Notch in the Bible Belt?
I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be one though—a “Christian.” The word carried so much baggage. Gandhi once said something to the effect of “I have no problem with your Jesus; in fact I rather admire him. It’s his people I can’t deal with.” As I explored Jesus from the safe confines of my seeker-friendly Vineyard church, and my “Yay, I have a life!” small group, I couldn’t help but notice that our gentle approach to salvation wasn’t the norm in other parts of the country. I read in the paper about a group of midwestern Episcopalians who drove a bus all the way to Maine to stand in a town square with signs reading “God Hates Fags!” Christian television was rife with proclamations about who was going to hell, offering lists that categorically included almost everyone I knew. People with gruesome placards lined the streets in front of Planned Parenthood, multivolume novels about how unbelievers will be left behind dominated bestseller lists, and a girl in church leaned over to me one day and whispered, “Do you think Jesus could love a Democrat?”
I prayed about this. A lot. “These are your people?” I asked, incredulous. “These are the ones you picked to spread the news that you’re the one true way to God?” I read the hysterical declarations of Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, who claimed that the attacks of September 11 were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and the People for the American Way,” and Pat Robertson, who told his television audience that feminism caused women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Southern feminism must be quite a movement, I mused. (Admittedly, I had my own doubts about feminism, but more because I couldn’t see how flinging my bra into a tree would help me succeed in the workplace.) The idea of aligning myself with these fundamentalist wing-nuts made me want to spend my days as a follower of Jesus hiding with my dog under the couch.
The more I studied Jesus’ words in the Bible, though, the less the rhetoric of his most strident supporters made sense. These fundamentalists and their coalitions were always battling some other group’s agenda—the liberal agenda, the gay agenda, the feminist agenda. And in a certain way, I saw the connection—Jesus busted everyone’s agenda; it’s kind of what his life was about. He threw the money changers out of the temple, he berated the religious experts for their legalistic attempts to manipulate God. He told all of us that the most important thing we need to do is to love one another (which rarely stays on my agenda for long when tested by someone who bugs me). But the thing I noticed about Jesus that I didn’t see in many of his front men was that he really got in there and loved people. He loved them in a personal, relational, helpful way, not in that arms-length, “love the sinner–hate the sin” kind of doublespeak that any sane person recognizes as Christianese for “I don’t know you, but it’s clear that you’re doomed, and I have to at least try and make you change.” Jesus, I found, rarely drew these types of distinctions.
Perusing the new arrivals section at the library one day, I came upon a book called When Bad Christians Happen to Good People. What I read in its pages was daunting. Following through on this Jesus quest, I learned, meant aligning myself with not only Falwell and Robertson, but with legions of culturally disconnected believers across the country whose idea of fun evangelism was giving gifts like flip-flops that leave Jesus Loves You footprints behind in the sand, or a tie tack in the shape of fishing fly so you can tell curious friends, “Like Jesus, I’m a fisher of men.” I read about everything from golf balls to “testa-mints” breath fresheners inscribed with scripture passages, all the better to share the gospel while duffing or combating halitosis among the unsaved.
A month or so earlier, I would have found the book hysterical—one more example of how Christians are the silliest people around. Honestly, how many people find salvation through a breath mint? But now I read with a different perspective—I had one foot in this crazy camp; I was in line to be sized for my flip-flops. Jesus needs a new public image campaign if these are his top representatives, I thought, reading page after page of ridiculous stories. He might be the way, the truth, and the life, but honestly—who wants an offer of salvation from a middleman sporting weird accessories and raving about the fiery pit of hell? Tacky is not a witness for the boundless love of Christ. I wondered if I’d been duped —if my Cambridge church was a bizarre anomaly, a gathering of the only normal Christians on the entire planet.
I was saved from my despair by a CD Amy gave me on the way home from church one day. “Take it,” she said. “Let me know what you think.” The girl on the front cover was pretty, and normal looking, so I decided to give it a try.
The singer’s name was Nicole Nordeman, and her lyrics pierced me like a needle as she sang about colliding with a new agey girl who sounded an awful lot like me. The girl was reading a yoga magazine, talking about the healing power of her crystals, and wondering about her past life, in which, she was certain, she’d been the wife of a plantation slave.
I was mortified. That could have been me, waxing poetic about my advanced spiritual exploration to a baffled stranger. But the song’s chorus surprised me, changing the whole direction of the song. Nicole admitted that she’d dismissed this girl, until God reminded her, I created her in My image . . .
Nicole was talking about me, I realized, but she wasn’t saying that I sucked or that I was doomed the way so many other people had. She was speaking to them—the others—reminding them that no matter how off track I might be with my crystals and my curiosity about past-life regression, God made me. Which meant that they were charged by Jesus to love me, and when they couldn’t (which might be often) they were supposed to ask him for help, not dismiss me as one more purveyor of some evil agenda.
I bought Nicole’s next CD, and listened incredulously as she asked Jesus, “Help me believe . . . don’t let me miss any miracles.” Her words made me feel like perhaps it was okay if I didn’t “get” this Jesus thing automatically. I’m not sure why I needed someone famous—and far away—to tell me this, why I didn’t believe Paul and Pascha when they assured me of this very thing. Despite their efforts, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they got it, and I didn’t, and this discrepancy created an insurmountable barrier between us, an ever-widening chasm I couldn’t cross. But if Nicole—a professional Christian, for Pete’s sake—put out an entire CD that said things like “Help me believe,” perhaps it was okay if I didn’t understand quite yet. Her music gave me hope that not all of Jesus’ people outside of Cambridge were crazy; that some were thoughtful and sophisticated and talented and open about their lives. In my mind, I followed Nicole around like a pesky little sister, traipsing through her songs again and again trying to learn the way to Jesus.
At the Vineyard, I found people more like Nicole and less like those other Christians, people who spent their time wondering what Jesus was leading them toward, rather than obsessing over the wayward direction of others. They reassured me about a thousand things—that followers of Jesus can wear cute shoes, that I could still love my gay uncle, that it was okay to go home for Christmas dinner without asking my parents if they wanted to pray the sinners’ prayer. Armed with this, I made it my goal to be the most normal Christian nonbelievers ever met (knowing full well that here in New England I might be the only Christian they ever met). I couldn’t stop the bad press, or the busloads of agenda-fighting believers whose approach to Jesus differed from mine. But if Jesus was real, I decided, he could come up with results that overcame that other stuff. My life, pre-Jesus, was a disaster. If following him makes it better, I thought, who cares if people think I’m a Jesus freak? And yet at the same time, I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted to be; I still didn’t know what it meant, exactly. But I was sure I was faking it well enough to fool the true Jesus freaks around me.
Oh how wrong I was. I was hanging out with Paul and Pascha a few night
s later, when Paul asked me, point-blank, “Trish, do you understand what happened when Jesus died on the Cross?”
Shame filled my body like hot black sludge, and I sunk down low in my chair, waiting for them to chastise me, to send me home in disgrace. For the first time in my spiritual journey, I was being called out as a fraud. “No. I don’t get it,” I admitted quietly. “I’m so sorry. I’ve tried. But I don’t. The blood, the death—what does any of that have to do with God? What does it mean?”
“It means,” Paul said gently, “you can make a mistake and it doesn’t have to cut you off from God. It means that for all your ‘stuff’—your baggage, your issues, the times you’ve tried and failed—you can say, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to do that again, I don’t want to be stuck with this forever. Jesus, help me . . .’ and Jesus will take it all and give you another chance.”
