Inventing Jesus

When I was four years old I asked Jesus to come live in my aorta, which I had seen in a diagram on PBS. I could feel him inside there, making a fire to warm my chest and belly. Sometimes I would sit really quietly, trying to feel him move just inside the door of my heart. I knew there wasn’t an actual door, in spite of the illustration shown me in children’s church. But I couldn’t help imagining a tiny one with a glass knob that I could twist and pull open to find a perfect, miniature Jesus inside.
 
I whispered to the tiny Jesus when I wanted to be sure my asthmatic lungs would keep working through the night. I told him how great I thought potato bugs were. Before I fell asleep each night, I told him about all the bad things I’d done or wanted to do during the day and asked him to help me to be good.
 
As I grew older, I met new Jesuses. They were all larger than my imagined Christ, of course, but they were different in other ways, too. These Jesuses were Aryan, or African, or they transcended ethnicity altogether. Where I grew up in California, our Mennonite Jesus seemed Gandhi-like—wise and agricultural. In college, he was the progenitor of cultural oppression and unthinking anti-science. Certain ministries claimed he was almost exclusively interested in whether or not his followers told other people about him. He was also an unfathomably kind mystery to my pagan friends in Manitou Springs; a hipster among the urbanites; and a Republican on bumper stickers throughout the Midwest.

These Jesuses didn’t even seem to know each other. But they were all inside me, reciting their niche-y, one-issue mantras. My ventricles and atria became crowded, confused.
 
My Bible was thin and limp because of my Jeffersonian approach to it: I ignored whole books, stories and ideas that didn’t match up with my evolving understanding of who Jesus was. I read and reread specific, small snippets of the New Testament that didn’t upset or embarrass me. Because I read so little of it, I felt like the Bible wasn’t much help for navigating the many Jesuses or figuring out who he really was.
 
After college, I began attending a Bible study where people read whole books of the Bible. The Gospels. Letters. Genealogies. We worked our way through prophets and kings, poetry and apocalypse. I didn't see a Jesus I recognized.

In the gospels, Jesus describes himself as a vine, a door, a way. Which is problematic, of course; metaphors are tricky when salvation or even the “life that is truly life” is on the line. What if you fail to apprehend a nuance? What if you extend it too far? What if the cultural significance of an object has morphed so completely that our understanding fails?

In the Bible, I also saw Jesus in action with no label: Jesus feeding, Jesus praying, Jesus enraged by commerce in holy places, Jesus weeping.
 
Talking to a frustrated boyfriend about something else entirely shed some light on my confusion:
 
Frustrated boyfriend: You do know you don’t get to invent a man, right? You don’t get to combine Eddie’s humor and wit with Peter’s sense of style, Landon’s career and Nate’s amazing family. People are real and they’ve got real problems. But they’re real wonderful, too. That makes them better than what you can invent.
 
Me: Uuumf.
 
Frustrated boyfriend: I’ve got to go.
 
And he did go. And I wished I’d never loaned him "The Velveteen Rabbit" because all Margery Williams’ big words about being shabby but loved and real were coming back to bite me in the ass.
 

Continued on page 2: I was inventing a Jesus... »