conquest.
It is the map that people outside the church think all of us inside the church believe. They think we believe that Jesus is God’s only son. They think we believe that his mother was a virgin. As the Red Queen says to Alice, “Six impossible things before breakfast.” After all, that’s what we stand up and say Sunday after Sunday. Not being able to swallow these rather hard-to-take ideas, they turn away. And wonder how otherwise intelligent people could believe such things. “You’re smart,” said the dean of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, her tongue firmly in her cheek, to the performance artist Anna Deavere Smith, “How come you’re religious?”
Jesus never said a word about being God’s
only
son, nor made mention of his mother’s sexual history. These are the words placed in his mouth by those who wished to smooth out a fragmented story, a bumpy road, pointing, now I see, in an entirely different direction.
In my travels, I talked to sophisticated Christians inGeorgia and, in Berkeley, to yearning secularists. A young couple asked Vincent and me to preside at their wedding; another asked me to baptize their baby boy, outside, by the ocean, not in a church. People were in need, I could see, and sometimes the church filled it (where else was my nephew welcome?), but many times it did not.
I kept going to church, one foot inside it, one foot outside, and on the talk circuit, trying to find the words that would reach those inside but not sound too crazy to those outside it. I tried to explain that there were a bunch of us who went to church who were not filled with passionate certainty; nor were we stupid. We knew, for example, that the gospels were written long after Jesus’s death; that Paul’s letters came first, before the gospels; that scholars had figured out, more or less (mostly less), at least some of the words that might authentically be those of Jesus and those that were attributed to him hundreds of years after his death.
All this fascinating information—the historical Jesus, the time lag in the writing of the New Testament, the Gnostic gospels—was not exactly trumpeted from the rooftops in churches. It was, rather, whispered in the back alleys. The church, once it drew its large map, worried about what would happen to the laity’s “faith” if we knew too much.
Now I lay in bed with medical terms mixed with fragments of the old words of the church’s prayers, hoping they would lead me away from fear and into relief. I had no experience with what was prayer and what was not prayer. What floated into the middle of this heap of words was a strange image: frogmen, swimming in my eyes, were workingvery hard to link together cables, like those huge things that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge. (I have not yet discovered where this image came from.) I was entranced. They swam, seemingly without my assistance: pulled, captured a stray strand, linked it to another, bolted it in.
What is in charge of healing? I thought. How does the body know what to do?
What followed the frogmen in my mind was the line from “Suzanne”: “and when he saw for certain only drowning men could see him.” I’ve drowned, I thought, but there’s something in the water with me. And then I thought, Will I see him?
Chapter 7
I N THE MORNING , I started what would be the routine for the next three days, adapting overnight, as human beings do, to complete change. One day I was going to work, driving, writing, producing. The next day what had been on my calendar was replaced with one appointment: Dr. Burks’s office, IV. I had talked about stopping my bizzy, crazy life. Now it—I—was stopped.
I had breakfast, did not read the newspaper. Vincent went to work, looking haggard and determined. I managed to respond to a few e-mails and then went back to bed. In the early afternoon I walked three blocks to Dr. Burks’s office. I noticed on the way signs that said “restoration” work would
It is the map that people outside the church think all of us inside the church believe. They think we believe that Jesus is God’s only son. They think we believe that his mother was a virgin. As the Red Queen says to Alice, “Six impossible things before breakfast.” After all, that’s what we stand up and say Sunday after Sunday. Not being able to swallow these rather hard-to-take ideas, they turn away. And wonder how otherwise intelligent people could believe such things. “You’re smart,” said the dean of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, her tongue firmly in her cheek, to the performance artist Anna Deavere Smith, “How come you’re religious?”
Jesus never said a word about being God’s
only
son, nor made mention of his mother’s sexual history. These are the words placed in his mouth by those who wished to smooth out a fragmented story, a bumpy road, pointing, now I see, in an entirely different direction.
In my travels, I talked to sophisticated Christians inGeorgia and, in Berkeley, to yearning secularists. A young couple asked Vincent and me to preside at their wedding; another asked me to baptize their baby boy, outside, by the ocean, not in a church. People were in need, I could see, and sometimes the church filled it (where else was my nephew welcome?), but many times it did not.
I kept going to church, one foot inside it, one foot outside, and on the talk circuit, trying to find the words that would reach those inside but not sound too crazy to those outside it. I tried to explain that there were a bunch of us who went to church who were not filled with passionate certainty; nor were we stupid. We knew, for example, that the gospels were written long after Jesus’s death; that Paul’s letters came first, before the gospels; that scholars had figured out, more or less (mostly less), at least some of the words that might authentically be those of Jesus and those that were attributed to him hundreds of years after his death.
All this fascinating information—the historical Jesus, the time lag in the writing of the New Testament, the Gnostic gospels—was not exactly trumpeted from the rooftops in churches. It was, rather, whispered in the back alleys. The church, once it drew its large map, worried about what would happen to the laity’s “faith” if we knew too much.
Now I lay in bed with medical terms mixed with fragments of the old words of the church’s prayers, hoping they would lead me away from fear and into relief. I had no experience with what was prayer and what was not prayer. What floated into the middle of this heap of words was a strange image: frogmen, swimming in my eyes, were workingvery hard to link together cables, like those huge things that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge. (I have not yet discovered where this image came from.) I was entranced. They swam, seemingly without my assistance: pulled, captured a stray strand, linked it to another, bolted it in.
What is in charge of healing? I thought. How does the body know what to do?
What followed the frogmen in my mind was the line from “Suzanne”: “and when he saw for certain only drowning men could see him.” I’ve drowned, I thought, but there’s something in the water with me. And then I thought, Will I see him?
Chapter 7
I N THE MORNING , I started what would be the routine for the next three days, adapting overnight, as human beings do, to complete change. One day I was going to work, driving, writing, producing. The next day what had been on my calendar was replaced with one appointment: Dr. Burks’s office, IV. I had talked about stopping my bizzy, crazy life. Now it—I—was stopped.
I had breakfast, did not read the newspaper. Vincent went to work, looking haggard and determined. I managed to respond to a few e-mails and then went back to bed. In the early afternoon I walked three blocks to Dr. Burks’s office. I noticed on the way signs that said “restoration” work would
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