For dramatic affect I must add that I am technically homeless, or “alternatively housed”, which all together places me in my own little “marginalized” category. Again, do not for a minute think I am complaining, whining, and believe that society owes me anything. On the contrary, I owe society my honest reflection on my experience.
As I’ve said before, God must see something in me that I don’t.
Of these categories “gay Christian crazy”, my Christian identity is literally the only identity that I’ve chosen. I did not choose a “religion” per se, as if out of a vending machine. However, I did have a choice, as there are plenty of belief systems out there including the non-belief system of atheism. I do not on the other hand get to choose whether I have a mental illness or not. And I do not get to choose to be gay or not. That is fixed no matter how hard I have tried to ignore it. The fact that I chose to believe in Jesus, in God, says a lot. It says more about God than about me. It’s like what they say about friends and family. You can’t pick your family but you can pick your friends. It’s fair to assume that your friends are people you WANT to be around, and family –blood relatives– are sometimes (let’s be honest here) sufferable. I know I’m personally “sufferable”. Somebody else chose those people for us. Sometimes feels like a curse, sometimes a blessing. It’s Russian roulette, luck of the draw, anyone’s game. Or at least it feels that way sometimes when you’re looking at a family photograph.
I hate having manic-depression. I don’t hate being a lesbian, but given that it is not necessarily very popular (though it’s more okay to be a gay woman than gay man in our culture –that’s another post entirely) I can’t say the privilege isn’t without its bitter as well as sweet.
I believe that my being alive is completely divine –that God created me. I believe that God is not an opiate I concocted to help make my miserable days happier, as Karl Marx believed. Everyone is a child of God’s conception and design. But it is equally true that we all have a choice whether to believe this or not. It’s a little concept we call “free will”. Jesus made it clear that his job was to point us to God. We are not very good at it I guess. He also asserted that he is the way to God, the revelation (i.e. truth) and incarnation of God, and that he personally imparts life to the sick and dying (which is all of us). I believe he said he “is life” which is a ballsy thing to say if you’re just a guy who can’t get past the age of 33 without getting executed as a state criminal.
As I’ve said before, I am an armchair theologian. I don’t presume to be able to wax intellectually the tenets of my faith. I know I make mistakes in spelling out my theology, and I’ve had the pleasure of knowing people who like to point this out. Yet I like to think that monotheistic faith (faith in one God), though complex in that it appears incongruous with the hard “realities” of this world (war, death, suffering, taxes, hangnails, etc.), is simple. Faith is simple. It is, in essence, loving God and loving others the way he helps me love myself (by example). But few of us can honestly say that faith is simple. I can neither see God nor hear God. Faith in God is risky for that reason. It is also difficult. Being a good person, an honest person, a “moral” person who loves justice and mercy and humility, is difficult. Maybe there are people out there who have all that in the bag. I personally need help with these things. That’s what I was thinking about in 1988. That’s when Jesus came into focus.
In 1988 I “became” a Christian. What people refer to as being “born again” which I guess is what happened. My experience was life changing. Yet my experience is not even close to universal. I would never presume that any other person will find their way to God the way I did. Or better, that God would woo anyone else in the same way he wooed me. God would not be that petty as to require replication. It’s not God’s style. Have you noticed that? I remember when my friends and I would sit around and try to decide whether people (please forgive me), like Catholics for example, were really “Christians”. As if it was so simple. But I was very young and I knew everything, right? My experience is uniquely mine. You’ll see that it was a gift from God. And by gift I mean a kitchen appliance gift that a husband gives a wife. Seriously! Very practical.
My best friend in college has often expressed her amazement that I didn’t kill myself in the way I recklessly careened through my college experience. I hate to be one of those “born again” Christians who trumps up her past in order to prove to you how lost she was when Jesus found her so that Jesus looks even better, more heroic. I once was lost but now I’m found. Unfortunately is moderately true, as my friend can attest, that my life was somewhat of a wreck. What was surprising to me at the time is that even though I suddenly became a total Jesus freak, my life still tended to careen out of control. In all actuality life did not become easier, I just had someone to fall back on…and occasionally blame. In some ways it became harder in that I suddenly had to live up to the moral expectations of a perceived crowd of onlookers. Onlookers that seemed to have it more together than I could ever manage. But let’s save that for later.
First I want to tell you about my interesting encounter with God in fall of ‘88. I tell few people the whole story. Primarily because I cherish it. I hold it close because in sharing it with others I risk it being trampled on and misused. Most friends might know the basic story that I “became” a Christian at a Christian retreat put on by the university ministry The INN, that I “prayed the prayer of salvation”, and that I “committed my life” to God. What most people don’t know is that I saw a vision, and the reason I don’t tell people this is because I cherish it…and it also sounds kind of fishy. Especially fishy when you consider that I was a regular drug user AND very probably, upon distant reflection, in a moderate manic state at the time. Yet I’ve never ever, ever, ever questioned the reality of what I saw. God gave me a vision that autumn day as a gift because, and I know this for a fact, I would never have allowed myself to buy into the whole Jesus thing unless he had. In fact, he gave me the gift because I asked for it.
I like to tell people that for years I was like a 4 year old with God. You know. Most of us are. It is like when someone tries to introduce you to their normally gregarious child, but the instant you reach out your hand to the kid she scurries behind her parent’s legs, peering at you skeptically from between his thighs. There’s curiosity there, but no faith or trust. For years I’d flirt around with the idea of believing in God, and acting like his existence and personal involvement in the world really made a difference. But I couldn’t make the leap. I’d skip around the idea and then suddenly hide behind my skepticism and mistrust. In the spring and summer before my final undergraduate year, I began settling into a pragmatic search for God.
Many of my Anthropology classes at that point were at least partially centered on religions, religious customs, and how spirituality and belief shapes culture and vice versa. I distinctly remember a class, in another department, about Greek & Roman Mythology. I was fascinated. Not so much by the mythology and extraordinarily repertoire of dysfunctional gods, but by the articulation of morality the culture wrote into world history. There were other philosophers of other cultures too, but the Greeks & Romans caught my attention.
I was intrigued by the ideal morality that Greek and Roman philosophers wrote of. I would read and think, “I am not a moral person.” Please don’t argue with me. My friends and family saw me as a good person on the most part. I wasn’t necessarily one of those tortured individuals wrestling with unseen personal demons…well, maybe I was. I just knew what I knew about myself. I could be terrible, and beyond that I couldn’t find it in me to be my own moral compass. I knew my hidden record…I was a thief, I drove around drunk, I cheated, I slept with people I didn’t even care about, I hated myself, I liked people who treated me badly, I was an adulteress, I was a terrible student, I wasn’t a contributing member of society. It is all subjective, you know. Though this rap sheet includes some quite entertaining and poignant stories, at the end of the day I seriously feared my moral compass was irreversibly broken.
By that summer I was fully engaged in some kind of spiritual quest for truth. I had no idea what I was doing. But don’t we all embark at some point, or at many points in our lives, on this kind of quest? I had a nerdy kind of boss at the pizza place who reminded me of the stapler guy in the movie The Office. He would sit and read during his lunch break. I decided to join him one day and discovered too late that he was reading a bible. Wanting to appear nonchalant, I settled in with my salad and asked about his family. He was really a decent guy who unwittingly (or maybe wittingly) drew me and my skepticism out into the open. I saw a book under his bible titled, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (or Verdict that Demands Evidence, I can never remember). I asked what the book was about, and when he described the premise I was astonished.
What I haven’t told you is that by the time I had talked to my boss I had systematically gone through all the major world religions with my red correction pen, crossing each one off as personally and universally implausible. Yet I kept getting hung up on Jesus Christ. That man, that story, was different. Perhaps one could presume that my interest was due to the fact that I was more comfortable with Jesus because I was raised in a culture that is nominally Christian. However, I have seen and heard many stories from many people who were not raised in a culture steeped in Christianity, but for whom Jesus became a welcome character who’s spiritual plausibility was hard to dismiss. So, I was getting hooked up on Jesus like a fishing net on the rocky ocean bottom, and was looking for more information. I’d gone into a Christian bookstore near where I lived but rushed out with nothing but an enduring dislike for Christians. Too happy, too kind, too fake, i.e. too untrustworthy.
That book, which I borrowed from my boss, turned out to be very instrumental. It wasn’t sentimental. It spelled out the facts like the evidence brought forth at a trial. Oh, well, that makes sense since the author is a lawyer. Josh McDowell.
Jump ahead. I’d returned to school with my brand new mountain bike at hand. I’m in heaven because all my classes are my beloved anthropology classes. A new friend, who I soon found out was a total Christian, was in 3 of my classes. We got along because we have the same sense of humor. In one class, for example, we sat and listened painfully to our interim professor prattle on in her monotone voice. One day I raised my hand and asked if she could spell, “thdoiik mnmmoms thmommbik.” I know. Not too nice, right? But my friend laughed with great mirth at my sarcasm. That made her a trustworthy Christian in my eyes. One who was compromising and sarcastic. I’m just kidding of course. She is not compromising, but that is an example of how I sifted people out. I didn’t think she was fake, hypocritical, irritatingly flaunting her high morals. I still don’t think that way about her. People who made a spectacle of their high morals threatened me. I still don’t think it’s right.
By this time I had decided that in order to get deeper information about Jesus and what in the world he had to do with God, I was going to have to go to church. NO WAY! I did not want to set a foot in a church. I said, “Hey God, if you do exist I’m letting you know that I refuse to go to a church.” I talked like that. Really.
Churches were filled with too much preaching, too much smiling, and most likely too much pretending. I was stuck. One day I was buzzing around campus on my bike, flying over staircases, curbs, and anything that would increase my agility and make my stomach flop. I stopped to look at the posters on an information kiosk in Red Square at the center of campus. I still sometimes go back to that same kiosk up on campus just to look at the spot where I saw the poster that changed the course of my spiritual quest that day. It was a poster for The INN, a Christian student ministry that met on Tuesday nights. It was at night, so it couldn’t be church! I was excited. I knew I would learn something more there.
Later that day I told my anthropology friend that I wanted to go to the INN. Much later she told me she just about passed out when I told her this. Not only had she been praying for me to turn to God, but she also was a faithful INN attendee. I won’t get detailed about the time between that day and the retreat. Suffice it to say I became more and more intrigued and less and less freaked out by large groups of Christians over the following weeks. These were goofy talented people. I liked them after all.
Fast forward. By the time I’d gotten to the retreat I am completely frustrated. “So I’m just supposed to…what? What am I supposed to do? Just accept Jesus? What does that mean? I can’t even understand the bible. How am I supposed to just accept everything without understanding it? That seems just wrong.” So went my arguments. Arguments that served only to protect my heart. I did not want to fall for something that just wasn’t true. I was almost completely certain that Jesus had something significant to do with God, but I wasn’t willing to bet my entire life on it. It wasn’t really unrequited love I was experiencing, it was more like the frustrated tension between two would be lovers who want each other badly. I think we call that sexual tension, and I don’t feel the least bit weird for using the analogy in this case.
Fast forward. It’s Sunday. It’s the 5th and final “lecture” of the retreat. I’m antsy, fidgety, anxious. I barely heard the speaker. I wanted to know what to do about this and was getting nowhere. My search had plateaued big time. I was ready to explode with frustration. After the lecture we sang a song or two. There was one song that spoke to me so deeply that I cried. I’ve never been able to find that song since. I personally don’t think it exists…except for that one time, for me. Then the speaker got up and started praying. He must have prayed something about opening our hearts up to God because everything inside me, all the hope, skepticism, fear, desire, and anxiety suddenly shifted. It was like fog when you’re driving. The fog parts and “suddenly” you see. But all I saw was that I had a window of opportunity. I was still unsure that God was actually there. So I prayed the most audacious and ballsy prayer I’ve ever prayed.
“I can’t make this decision to throw myself off a cliff without evidence that you exist and will catch me. I just can’t do this. I’m sorry. I want to believe with all of my heart but I can’t tell if you are really there or if it’s just me hoping you are. Could you show me that you exist? Jesus, are you REALLY God? Are you really my pathway to God? Don’t make a fool of me. I just can’t invest my entire life and promise it to something I’m unsure of? I want to be 100%, and right now I’m not. If you show me, I’ll never ask you to prove yourself again. I’m ready if you’ll show me.”
I’m telling you this because it is what happened. A girl asked for proof and a big God answered her. It is hard to tell this part because it is a bit difficult to word. I fear it sounds hokey when I describe it.
I had been looking at the floor all that time, but when I looked up I saw a man. Not really a man at all. A figure. Not a clear figure, but spiritually speaking he was Jesus. No doubt. No one would doubt it. My heart leapt and I instantly told him I would never ask him to prove himself to me again. And I haven’t. I said he had everything I could possibly give him, which wasn’t much, and I would not withhold my heart either.
My life changed drastically that day. God has never appeared to me again. I don’t expect him to in my lifetime. Once is enough. Though his presence completely convinced me, it also frightened me in the way VERY good things can tend to do. I frequently live my faith out to its frayed edges, and at the end of my ability, the end of my ability to believe in something so absurd as Jesus, I have that vision. It is a closer. Something I can’t question. I cannot run out of faith because he has answered the end of my flappable faith with himself. He is enough for me in the end. I am fully 100% invested like I told him I would be. I don’t need world peace, fulfilled desires, perfectly logical theology, every prayer answered, or even other people to bolster my faith in God. I believe simply because he took the time to show me his face. I’ll never forget it. That’s all I need. It cannot be taken away from me.
So went the beginning of a torrid and passionate love affair I find myself in to this day. A "relationship" with the God of the Universe sounds strange when I say it like that. Yet it is true. God is big and God is here all at once. Like all relationships there is always something new. Thank goodness. More on that later.
Praying At Gethsamene by He Qi
No comments:
Post a Comment