So, I’ve been thinking about this guy quite a bit lately.
A friend of mine posted this earlier and for any gay man who was raised in religion – we have a fickle relationship with Christ.
The other day I made a comment on a Facebook page of a Popular priest, a Jesuit, who is working really hard to reach out to the Queer community as a whole. He seems very kind.
However, after I placed the comment about my husband and I, it didn’t take very long for someone to come along and start throwing scripture at me. Leviticus and Romans – mostly. He brought up the Apostle Paul yada yada .
When I was a kid, as church would begin someone would lead the congregation in hymns and someone else would sing a special – and that part of the service always had my attention.
I mean, the love of God that they sang about was so overwhelming in songs such as The Love of God.
The second verse goes something like this:
Could we with Ink, the Ocean fill
and were the skies of parchment made
were every stalk on earth a quill; and every man a scribe by trade
to write the love of God above, would drain the ocean dry
nor could that scroll contain the whole though stretched from sky to sky
or take a verse from It is Well by Horatio Spafford
My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!—
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
Or how Great Thou Art
Oh, Lord my God. When I in awesome wonder.
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made
I see the sun, I hear the rolling thunder
thy power throughout the universe displayed
And then the microphone was put down and in the ten steps from the piano to the pulpit God changed. He went through a metamorphosis.
In the ten steps between the piano and the pulpit God changed from this awesomely powerful, all encompassing loving, being to a twisted, angry, petty, creature akin to a brat hovered over an ant hill with a magnifying glass.
In those ten steps I went from open to the experience of God, not just the message, but my body would react. My heart would beat. I would get gooseflesh and tears in my eyes tooooooo…….. nothing.
Not anger. Not boredom. Not fear.
Just. Nothing.
It is an amazing feat to be a child/ teenager and sit still and stare forward at a man prowling the altar like a lion, shouting, pointing, sweating, and not move a muscle and yet, be as far away as a person could be. This would go on for a couple of hours every Sunday morning, Sunday Evening, and Wednesday night and God help us, if there was a tent revival because then that shit just went on all week.
7 days, often times, seven different preachers, each one of them come to deliver us from the pit of our transgressions.
And always the same, the music was there. I would be enraptured with it. Moved by it. Experiencing God, I believe.
Then. Whamo!
The door would slam shut and I’m mentally redecorating my bedroom.
There was something off about the message. Mostly, I think, it was because we made Christ into some kind of schizophrenic.
My husband has been watching this lecture series on The Great Courses with this professor who is as dry as an accountant’s field manual. Honestly, he’d turn it on, meaning to watch it, and before long I’d hear him snoring in the living room. But I am listening to this guy as I am working and he’s going on and on about the gospels. Not just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John but all the gospels that didn’t make the final cut. The Gospel of St. Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and on and on it goes.
I tried watching him full on, and im glad I had the filter of whatever I was doing because my eyes crossed and all I heard was, “Bueler, Bueler, Bueler…”
I digress…
Anyway, what’s interesting about all of it – and I do mean all of it – is Christ was almost Greek-like in the stories. Like it was Mythology. He was petty, mean, vindictive. There were crazy mythological stories about magic beasts etc etc etc and it dawned on me. These weren’t included because they all made Christ and God by proxy sound …just….human. Petty. Stupid. And it was then I realized that these preachers had done the same thing.
There was no ascension happening. No moving toward heaven. No moving the church toward God. No rapture.
Christ was actually attacked from behind at a gas station, a bandanna soaked in Desflurane was placed over his mouth and he was thrown in the trunk of the grocery getter.
It’s like they couldn’t believe God actually loved them.
They would sing about it.
But when it came to having the faith – that was different.
They didn’t really believe him.
That they were loved.
That they were so loved.
The idea that the grace that ‘saved’ them in their circumstances, would be needed to save someone else they deemed inferior and therefore made Grace as a concept, offensive.
That’s why they hang out in the Old Testament so much. They want a God to punish them.
And they want a God to punish those who they see as inferior to them and therefore become the worst kind of sinner.
A sinner who hates other sinners.
I don’t pretend to know the wisdom of God, but I do know the wisdom of man and I think these men – in not being able to deal with God as he is – had to bring him down from heaven and make him dumber than we are.
I remember when I first started dating my husband. When I realized he loved me. I hated him for it.
I was so twisted inside out with what had gone on in my life and what I’d put myself through – I resented this guy who told me that he loved me. I believed him 100 percent.
But I hated him for it. I knew me. I knew me. I was the least deserving, in my mind.
I sabotaged our relationship. I wanted him to hate me back.
When I asked him later on why he hadn’t given up on me. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You did nothing to earn my love. You can’t lose it.”
It makes me wonder, now, whenever I see a “Real Men Love Jesus” bumper sticker.
Do you love him for loving you? Or do you hate him for loving you because you know you?
Knowing you are not deserving of it.
Thank God, for all our sakes, we did nothing to earn it.