The Beauty Part

Easter's coming, and Christ is on my mind this week. I'm thinking of the extraordinary horizontal painting by Mantegna. And of a book about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ --literally.

This time around, He is Jose Francisco Lorcan Kennedy--known as Jay. He's an immigrant's son from the Bronx. He wears a hooded sweatshirt. He's not handsome in any conventional way.

His story, this time around, is told by an unbeliever, Johnny Greco. Back in the day, Johnny won the Pulitzer Prize; now he's a tabloid hack on the lookout for a good story about a freak. And in America in the not-so-distant future, the Second Coming could be Johnny's ticket to ride.

Consider: America is now a full-blown theocracy. There's a "Chaplain-in-Chief" of the Armed Forces. The second "L" has been removed from the Hollywood sign, and the country's most successful evangelist hosts the Academy Awards. Here's a hit movie: "Sophie's Free Choice," in which "a young mother pregnant with twins, is told by her (feminist) doctor that she must abort one of them or die." (Luckily, she finds Jesus and "becomes an instrument of divine retribution.") Sex is for child creation only, Gay sex is a felony--TV sports no longer shows close-ups of the snap in pro football. BMW makes a car called the Babylon. There is a Great Wall of Trump Towers.

In this mindlessly happy culture, who cares--really cares--about the poor? Jay. He uses the language of the street, but in every other way, this is the Gospel we know. And the same mission: "to reveal the God in humanity and the humanity in God, by teaching, healing, and, if necessary, dying."

Needless to say, Jay is not exactly on the same page as the American Church, which endorses all wars, is excited by the death penalty and has long forgotten that every soul is equally precious to God. As Jay says, "I come, first and foremost, for the losers."

How does it play out? You know. But you'll read to the last page of The Messiah of Morris Avenue.