Hermes Kriophoros
I just finished
Mary Gordon’s uncomfortable Reading
Jesus, a book in which, as an artistic and literary Catholic realizing that
she and most of her Catholic contemporaries, never read the actual Gospels, sits
down to do so and discover the Jesus in them. She is very candid about the
Jesus she meets who is equal parts charming and off putting and she speaks of
her intellectual and emotional struggles with Christianity and why, in the end,
she remains in the camp of the faithful even if her faith is not as orthodox as
if once was.
But I am not
Mary Gordon. Her father was Jewish and she brings a Talmudic gaze to the Scriptures.
My father was a Baptist and my mother a Methodist before their conversions. and
I brought to my Catholicism a thorough going acquaintance with the Bible as
well as a wild streak of magic, personal opinion and free will possessed by old
time evangelicals. So why was I troubled as well as pleased by Gordon’s book?
Because, as we went through the Gospels together, I remembered that, beyond priests
and pastoral scandals, beyond the hypocrisy, bad theology, mediocrity and
oppression dealt out by churches, there was one real reason I could not
consider myself a Christian in any orthodox sense. I do not really like Jesus.
You’re not supposed to say that. Even an unbeliever is supposed to say, he was
a good man, a great teacher, a this, a that. But the only Jesus we meet in the
Bible is a construct of early Christians, and he is, in turns, confusing,
conflicting, opposed to good living, vaguely anti Semetic then anti gentile,
dense in narrative, dense in perception, capricious, dull, rarely lovable.
.
Well, then, why
do I still celebrate Christmas and Easter and the seasons attached? Why am I
moved intensely by the ancient hymns? Why is there a Madonna and Child on my
altar? Why do I still listen to the same songs I did as a teenage Christian when
really, I could be spending my time making up a whole new relationship to Pan,
or Adonis or Cernunnos? Why do these names mean less, and affect less, than the
name of Jesus?
Some would say
what’s in a name? But the answer is: a lot.There is a lot invested in a name
you have used a long time for the God you live with, and magic and religion are
not cerebral. We make that mistake. Because you are liberal, join a liberal
church or synagogue, because you should feel X, go to Y. But true power is of
the heart and almost beyond reason. On a pure and actual level, as much as I
benefit from thinking of Dionysus or Apollo, I have never met them, and they
cannot be the most familiar names and faces for my God. It wastes a great deal of
worship and energy trying to make them so. I know. I’ve tried. In deepest work
and deepest prayer I can only use the deepest names I have known, and Jesus is
probably first among those names.
Clarissa
Pinkola Estes wrote a not as interesting as it should have been book about Our
Lady talking primarily of her as the Virgin Mary of course, but her thesis
being that this was only the Catholic way of seeing her, and Our Lady was a
thing beyond individual religions. She spoke of how the churches had tried to
make the role of Our Lady small, but she always rose up again through the
peoples’ devotion. Estes is a mostly liberal Catholic who writes for The Catholic Reporter, and she could not
really get away with calling “Our Lady” the Goddess, but any witch reading her
could see she was going there. I think I am saying the same thing about “Our
Lord”. I think I am saying he does not belong to conservatives or white people,
to churches or to Christianity or, for that matter, to the Bible. My Jesus
bears only superficial resemblance to the person I meet, and cannot very long
like, in the Bible. The Jesus of English folk songs and fervent meditations,
has little to do with these. Gordon’s
book ends troubled, because she herself is troubled. At the end of the day she
believes in this world, and for things to happen they must happen in this
world. She believes in the world of imagination, but only as a metaphor. To a witch
all worlds are real, and so the story of Jesus is as real as the actual Jesus,
the mythic King Arthur as real as the actual chief if their was one. The myths
are as true as historical religions claim they are. The Otherworld is as real was the apparent
one. Gordon concludes her book grappling
with the Bible texts and agreeing to sort of believe in a sort of miraculous
sort of resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. I end it called back to the worship of
the eternal Beloved and Lover, the slain Son, the holy prince, the bread and
wine whom everyone knows, who is Absalom more than Isaac, who is Attis and Dionysus,
Adonai and Adonis. Balder. Whose names are many but whom, for me, most kindly
keeps the name I have always known him by, and name which makes me able to talk
to other people about him without the unnecessary and un useful raised eyebrow.
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