The Mystic Jesus
- JP | #Intangibl3
- Sep 21, 2017
- 6 min read
Life is strange.
I have a memory of me, from when I was 5 years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother's car after her and my step-father picked me up from kindergarten, or maybe it was 1st grade. It was a cloudy day, if my memory serves me well, in late autumn or maybe winter. I don't remember it being very cold, but I do remember the stark brown of the leafless trees all about my elementary school. Sitting in the back, when the radio was off, I could hear my parents conversing. The details of the dialogue elude me, but I do remember that they were saying something about a person I had never met; someone I didn't know of. My mother had mentioned the name "God."
Being my ever curious self, I just had to know who this person was.
"Mom," I said, "Who is God?"
I wish I had a clear memory of her response, but alas it is just one more thing from that day that does not allow me to grasp it. The impression I get, though, is that she told me that "God" was the one who created people, the Earth and everything else.
From that day on, I've believed in God's existence. I haven't always believed in His word or His love, but I have always believed that God existed. Back then I didn't question it. Not at all. After all, I was made by someone, so it made perfect sense that the first people were created by someone as well.
The road since then has been long and arduous, as it is for all of us in some respect or another. I eventually learned of the man named Jesus, who came to Earth as the Son of God in order to redeem humanity; in order to forgive us for our sins. Much of my young life was tinged with moral platitudes and judgements; guilt and anxiety. I was taught, whether inadvertently or not, that I could never be good enough to put a smile on the face of the Creator of all I knew.
I would never be good enough.
That realization hurts, especially for a child.
The first church I remember going to was one of maybe a couple hundred patrons. The pastor and his wife lived in a house on the same property, behind the church itself. One day, I overheard my mother talking to someone about the pastor was hitting on her. This shook me a little bit.
Wasn't the pastor married?
Then, at some point after hearing this, I also learned that one of my mother's friends was actually having an affair with the pastor. She was sleeping with him. I may have been a child, but I was not a sheltered one. I knew what it meant and this didn't just shake my faith, it shattered it. I didn't lose my belief that God exists, but I lost my faith in humanity and in all of the silly things I was hearing about love and honor.
I hated the pastor and I hated his mistress and I never returned to that church again, not even to play "King of the Hill" with the twins and the other kids that went there.
From there I guess you could say that I became a relativist, no longer believing that truth was absolute, nor caring if it was. I spent many years like this. I still prayed, oddly enough, especially in the night when I was alone and afraid of the great, wide, ever changing world around me. I hid myself away from any sort of social life for much of my teenage years and I absolutely never let anyone in to understand who I really was. Ever. Not until meeting my wife, of course. She is the star that guided me from increasingly nihilistic worldview.
As an adult I tried, many times, to find out more of who this Jesus was. If the Christian faith was true then I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be loved by my Creator and I wanted to spend eternity in paradise.
As an adult I failed, every time, to attain what I was seeking. Or maybe it wasn't me that failed, maybe it was the world. I guess I don't really know which, but either way I certainly felt that the blame was mine; I certainly felt like a waste of space.
Then, one day, I got tired of it. I got tired of the half-hidden supposed truths, the smiles, the fucking bacon roses. I came to a point where I could no longer allow myself to put so much stock into a belief that so many told me was wrong. But, I still believed in God's existence. Now, I still believe in God's existence. I can no longer live the way that Christians tell me I should live. I can't live how anyone tells me I should live. I stopped giving a fuck.
And I strayed far from the Christian faith. And I'm glad I did. Inside of the church I was boxed in and unable to question why I was in the box to begin with. I left, and I searched, and I cried, and I screamed at the sky. I cursed God and all that his Bible promised.
And then I found peace, or some semblance of it anyway. A kind of peace came to me when I realized that I wasn't alone. There were many people like me who felt wrong about modern, Western Christianity. There were many who would have loved even the smallest bit of external proof that any of it was real.
I discovered that questioning was okay. I learned the hard way that we each have to discover the truth for ourselves, rather than relying on others to feed it to us. As I've often referred to, one lesson of my mother's that has stuck with through the years is a simple five word phrase: "Experience is the best teacher."
Ironically, we must experience the truth of that statement before we can truly understand that yes, indeed, experience is the best teacher by far. One can never really know something without experiencing if first for himself. This is the rub with faith: expecting someone to believe something wholeheartedly without them ever having experienced the thing that they are supposed to have faith in is ridiculous, yet that is what the widely accepted dogma of Christianity requires of us.
Now, why is this post titled "The Mystic Jesus"?
Simply put, the Jesus that the ancient mystics and occultists describe is a Jesus that I'd like to believe in. I don't know if it's true. I don't know if anything is true, really. Beyond that, the fact that this version of Jesus exists somewhere, even if it just in imagination, has brought me a freedom and clarity of thought that I am quite enjoying. This Jesus, the one that has little in common with the tree-hugging Jesus of the modern liberal left in the West today, represents something to me. He represents open-mindedness, power, intrigue. He, being the Son of God, represents, grace, love and might. He symbolizes untethered intellect and reason. He represents truth.
So, whether Jesus was man alone, or God incarnate, I take comfort in the reality that it's okay. Being free from the mindset that I have to strictly hold to the words of men thousands of years dead or I'll burn in hell is a feeling that I cannot adequately describe. I don't know who Jesus was when he walked the Earth, and I realize now that driving myself crazy over trying to figure it out is a waste of time and emotional investment.
I believe in God, and yes I do believe that Jesus is His Son. But I do that because I choose to. I don't believe in God out of fear or social pressure. And, God willing, I'll never find myself in that place again.
If you take anything at all away from this post, I want it to be that you shouldn't conform to anyone's idea of who you should be or what you should believe in solely because tradition and society tells you that you must. Follow your head and your heart and find truth in your way and your time.
Thanks for hanging out with me for a bit, see ya soon!
-JP
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