SENTIENT TIMES Dec/Jan 2001

A Pagan Speaks to Jesus
By John Darling

I just saw a button that said, "I love Jesus. It's his fan club I can't stand." I laughed. Must be true. How often in life I've tried to imagine what this pervasive, persistent deity-man was trying to say and teach. And how different, how nearly opposite is the image and history of his followers, especially the enthused ones.

Ask anyone what Jesus was trying to teach and they'll likely say: Well, he was trying to teach you to really open your heart to love, to love your neighbor and not resist evil, sort of like Gandhi, to forgive those who've hurt you and not to judge others and also to just stop carrying around a load of guilt about past bad stuff you did and just let it go and start over today, as if it were the first day and to recognize that he and God or whoever you call it isn't mean and harsh. They love us. And if you can do all that, it makes a great life.

I think that's the mythos of Jesus. That's how most people see the message and the man. Or the god, if you will. That's why so many people have come into the religion, especially in the cultures with poverty and oppression. It's a message of relief, of setting down the heavy load, of having another shot at inventing yourself as a good person who loves and is loved.

It's about love. That's all it's about.

It's a profound and beautiful message. I was raised in the born-once Protestant tradition and tried to go there as an adult. Couldn't. It was the fan club. The bad music didn't help either. I went on to study the ancient religions and to explore the indigenous, new age, Goddess and earth religions and found them a lot more relevant and truthful for me.

But these spiritual ways didn't teach that unique sense of grace and fire that Jesus did-that personal and soul-transforming love. Sometimes, I find myself just sitting with him and feeling what an outrageous being he was to stand up to the Romans and Jews and say: Hey, you're off track-it's about love. All the scripture and temples and yammering of phrases and the sad looks when you're fasting and the grandiose rituals and tithing and, worse than nothing at all, the violence and hatred in the name of religion-all these don't mean anything. Nothing. These are just forms. Things. And the proof is the endless killing over religious differences in the "holy land." All that matters is love.

When I study the ancient world, which is a lot, I am amazed at how radical was this new preacher in his milieu. He transcended everything, all the genders of gods and goddesses, their rivalries, violence and affairs, all the futile and hopeless poverty, tyranny, conquest, and disease in life-and he showed you how to carry a piece of heaven right here in your heart.

I think he wasn't a god, but I think he became one by stepping across that line and giving all to love. And to him, love was God and vice-versa. We are the sons and daughters of that. To do this, he had to conquer fear. In conquering fear, he learned that it was love that made his soul immortal. Then there could be no death.

I think when he said he was the son of God, he meant we are the sons of god and he also meant daughters, but that didn't get taken down. He said the kingdom of God is at hand. I think he meant that divine love and heaven and all that is at hand now and not at some end-of-the-world judgment day. And, if God is love, then "thou shalt have no other gods before me" becomes: Put love ahead of everything.

I've puzzled long about the fan club. I've asked him how I might find a way to forgive them. And how I might lose my fear and judgments of them for the Inquisitions, infidel-bashings, clinic attacks, for the witch-burnings, fear-mongering, hellfire preaching, for the Crusades, the pogroms, the gay-hounding, the died-for-our sins guilt-tripping, the empire-building, the destruction of indigenous religions and the general demonizing of sexuality and dismissing of nature in favor of the next world.

These are all tools of socio-political domination, not of spirit. We often see that slogan, WWJD-What would Jesus do? What he would do, if he were here seeing all these things done in his name, is barf on his sandals.

Organized religion beckons followers to several all-too-human cravings-the need to belong, the need to flee our freedom and individuality by submerging in groupthink, the need to find security in reducing all life to One Way and that most alluring and misguided need to be right, which becomes righteousness and worse- claiming to speak in the name of God.

I pray they do not come with torches and pitchforks for me, an iconoclast. I pray they do not gain the presidency or sweep over the world, as they have so often, like avenging angels. I'm not one of them. I feel afraid of them. Holy trance is fine, but it's not love.

And so, I found myself talking to Jesus. I found that he answers. I found all deities answer. They answer with a mute power that shifts understanding and makes things start happening in unexpected ways. For the better.

His answer to me was suffering. It's kind of like him, isn't it? Something happened in my life that slammed me into a wall and woke me up and made me look at everything as someone who had answers for nothing. That might be a definition of humility. The wound. The ego scrambling as it denies, gets angry, bargains, then accepts. The stopping of the mind. The opening of the heart. And, without understanding why, I wept.

It goes on in little things. I was about to honk at an "idiot" in traffic and I suddenly found myself saying, my god what am I doing? I saw myself. This rudeness of me is just a sliver of the human cruelty in the world but it's here, right inside me, doing its meanness. Instead, I just waved. I tried to look in the other driver's eyes. I found myself smiling.

So, on we go. I'm taking Jesus back from the fan club. They hijacked him, but they don't own him. He's what he says he is: A messenger of love, who, when he died, discovered the way to make all guilt and shame go away. He held the light up for us to see how the puzzle was solved. He did it as we have to do it. He did it with love.

John Darling, M.S. is a writer, counselor, philosopher and mystic living in Ecotopia.

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