Message To My Son

Jesus is the one teacher who tells us very little about what to do to achieve the kingdom. He abolished rules and didn’t leave behind a step by step road to enlightenment, but he said one thing that can bring us all the way to God: Believe in me. The difference between eastern religions and Christianity was evident to C.S. Lewis:

“We have not got to try to climb into spiritual life by our own efforts…If we only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present…He will do it for us".                                                                                                    

From the moment I met Jesus, all I had to do was “ride the wave”. But waves lift you up and then let you down. It’s not so easy to ride them, especially when there is no coast in sight. The religious sense must be nourished, keeping in mind that we are not feeding an illusion but something that was given to us by grace. I must look after my faith like I looked after my son when he was a child. I wanted to relate to him, so I also become like a child and we had a wonderful time together.

When you were a child, you used to get mad at me if I assumed that you couldn’t understand certain things because you were too young. You thought that children were smart, sometimes smarter than the adults, but now you have changed your mind.

“Jesus said that only those who are like children will enter the kingdom of heaven,” you said. “In fact, in order to believe one has to shut down his logical thought. Actually, one has to stop thinking!”

Maybe, if you try, you’ll be able to recall the way you were just a few years ago and realize that there is no reason to despise that little boy. In his naivete, he was aware of the deepest aspects of reality.

I’m looking at you picture. You were eleven years old, learning your first English words. Look at those eyes! Your gaze was as sharp as a razor. It’s not like that anymore; you are a grown up now. Maybe you have lost something in the process. Try to remember, try really hard.    

                         

                                   

Perspectives From Another World

 

By now you have certainly guessed that my son is playing a big role in my writing. I want to put my thoughts on paper to better defend my new born faith. I have said that I fell in love with Jesus because the religious experience is very similar to the experience of falling in love. When I said that to Andrea I got this in response:

“That’s disgusting! If you want to be a moron, go ahead!”

 I never fully understood where the “disgusting” part came from. When I’m in the mood for flattering myself I think he was jealous. When I’m not, I concentrate on the “moron” and Andrea’s deep contempt for the dissolution of my intelligence in religious tales. But later he found out that even the famous atheists he admires so much have stressed the similarities between falling in love for a real person and for a supra-natural being. The two mental states have in common feelings of exaltation and euphoria, of warmth and mutual understanding. 

Of course these feelings are emotionally fulfilling, and once attained them one will be reluctant to let them go. Religion can certainly be consoling: If we have a problem, it provides hope. If we are living a difficult moment, it gives meaning to our suffering. And it’s beautiful to think that we are somehow eternal. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we believe to keep our peace of mind, in fact other trials may arise when we surrender to God.

 
 I’ve never been afraid of dying. I’ve always been OK with the idea that my Self could be over when my 
body gives up. We are such an infinitesimal part of the universe, so limited by our human boundaries. But there have been moments when I’ve had a perception of a hidden reality, and those moments made me who I am today, a believer in the afterlife.
I’m not ashamed of linking my faith with this vague perception of another dimension, because if Jesus is alive, as I feel he is, he inhabits a dimension that is not our own. I also have a feeling that my father, who passed away a few years ago, is still there for me, watching me from another world. He felt deeply his role of parent, not as one who must function as a teacher of morals, but as one who is responsible for the well being of his children. His tendency to rule our lives, at least from a practical point of view, could become really overwhelming. I suspect that he would have a hard time leaving us on our own, even now that he’s not among us anymore. I bet he wouldn’t rest in peace until he knew that we were safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was watching over me, trying to put me on the right track.      

But I know that it was Jesus who showed me the way. Only when I found my faith I realized that I was wasting my life .

The Humanity of Jesus

My religious "awakening" has little to do with buying into a belief system, but has everything to do with Jesus. I love everything about him, even his bursts of anger, because they make him so deeply human.

In A World Waiting To Be Born Dr. Scott Peck writes that he became a Christian after twenty years of dabbling with Zen Buddhism. He maintains that, without this training, he couldn’t have accepted the paradoxes of Christianity. Like me, he read the gospels for the first time in the second half of his life and that was it. Here is how he describes the effect they had on him:

"I was absolutely thunderstruck by the extraordinary reality of the man I found in the Gospels. I discovered a man who was almost continually frustrated. His frustration leaps out of virtually every page…I also discovered a man who was frequently sad and sometimes depressed, frequently anxious and scared. A man who was prejudiced on one occasion, although he was able to overcome that prejudice and transcend it in healing love. A man who was terribly, terribly lonely, yet often desperately needed to be alone. I discovered a man so incredibly real that no one could have made him up. “

No one would have made him so human, if the purpose was to turn him into God. The evangelists were doing their best to report accurately what they were told, even though they did not always understand it. Those who let the gospels speak to their heart will literally “meet” Jesus, this man who had so little peace of mind but so much wisdom, and will fall in love with him. Christianity is all about falling in love with Jesus, and for the atheist this is both despicable and inexplicable. I can accept the latter, in fact it’s difficult to explain in rational terms the reasons of faith, but I don’t see why it should be despicable. Love is what makes the world a better place, it’s an innovating force. Political leaders have been loved for their ideas, so why not a religious figure? A person who is capable of falling in love with an abstraction (which will be perceived as real in time) is a person capable of a higher level of spirituality, who can see beyond the material world. Religion is not about believing in the supernatural, it’s about experiencing something pure, transcendent, above our everyday concerns. Among Christians one can meet people who take life seriously, who let go of their shields and are open to one another.

I realize now that I’ve never taken my life seriously, rather I’ve lived as if I was playing Russian Roulette. Fun, that’s all I wanted. I never asked myself if I was being the person I really wanted to be, if I was living up to my potential. It was the encounter with Jesus that saved me from my stupidity.

GRACE

                                              

Encountering Jesus is like listening to a beautiful song. The melody grows on us little by little and soon we can’t get it out of our head. It becomes the sound-track of our best moments. It evokes our deepest emotions and a longing that sometimes is painful because the object of our desire is elusive. But other times the music is joyful and then we sing at the top of our lungs. I listened intently, trying to discern every instrument and chord, and a shift in my consciousness took place. I didn’t look for it or take steps to make it happen. I believe that it came from something external because I did not recognize it at first. Let me give you an example.

You are sitting in your living-room watching TV. A friend, someone you knew when you were young, comes in and sits next to you. You haven’t seen her in decades, so you don’t know how to relate to her. You are polite, surprised to see her but quite indifferent to her presence. After a few words you go back to your TV program. She talks once in a while, trying to catch your attention. At first you listen just to be kind, but little by little she involves you in the conversation. You ask her questions, but she doesn’t respond to your curiosity. You feel that she wants you to find the answers on your own. You are confused but you act on her suggestion. Soon enough the room is filled with enthusiasm. You are literally on fire but you don’t know why. Slowly but steadily, you start seeing things more clearly. By the end of the day you trust her completely. You know that she came to help you and that she’ll be there for you, whatever the future holds.

This is what happened to me over a period of months. That woman, the friend of my youth, was not a person or a voice in my head, but was a presence nonetheless. I depicted her as a woman because she was “grace”. My shift of consciousness came by grace, but of why she came to me I have no idea, Thank God she gave me a try.

Easter Thoughts

                                                                                                                           

I remember going to mass on a Sunday and listening to the priest preaching about the gospel story of the Caananite woman. In this passage, Jesus doesn’t seem willing to heal the woman’s daughter. She’s a Gentile, and Jesus tells her that he has come “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The woman keeps begging him, and at the sight of her faith Jesus changes his mind. While explaining this gospel story, the priest used exactly these words: Jesus changed his mind. Then he added:

“He grew in the understanding of his mission.”

Jesus was fully human. He changed, he grew, and these are human prerogatives. Theology teaches that he’s God incarnated, yet this doesn’t mean that he always possessed the infinite wisdom of God. His vocation developed step by step, until it reached its climax.

Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis after him, wrote that if Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, then he was a lunatic, for only lunatics call themselves Messiah. Some contemporary atheists love to take advantage of this paradox to state that Jesus was, in fact, mentally ill. Luckily, no modern thinker who deserves this qualification holds this opinion. Wisdom is not a prerogative of a mad man.

So what kind of man was Jesus? He called himself Son of Man, and only at his trial he admitted his role of Messiah, knowing that this would have led to his execution. Jesus’ actions were spiritually subversive but also, indirectly, socially subversive. He healed the disabled and then sent them to the temple to reclaim their place in Jewish society. He shared meals with the outcasts. He had women disciples. He extended his benevolence to the Samaritans, to the Gentiles, he even healed the son of a Roman soldier. Why? Because he believed that Israel’s God was the one true God, the God of all people. 

Jesus challenged the social structure of Judaism, therefore he was bound to incur hostility and he knew it. He cast suspicion on religious wisdom, he subverted the usual way of looking at the world. When he died, the early Christians behaved in an unprecedented manner, which can be explained only with the metaphysical event that raised this crucified Jew to the role of Son of God. They did not adhere to the Mosaic code, did not circumcise male children or observe the Sabbath, did not defend their territory or themselves. Jesus changed their culture and their religious beliefs. In time, the same happened to the Romans, and in their case it meant the end of the cruel games in the Coliseum and of the prostitution of children. This is the most beautiful interpretation of Jesus’ death: He chose to die to show the world the power of goodness and peace. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King have won seemingly lost wars following his principle of non-violence.                                                                                                                                     

I believe that Jesus was struck by his call to surrender to God. He was scared, but he faced his destiny because he knew he had to fight evil with self-sacrifice. He was an eschatological prophet, not a meek moral teacher or a political revolutionary. He fully took up his role when he found himself capable of healing those who had faith in him, as we can read in his words:

“If I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”

The same message is revealed to John the Baptist’s disciples when they ask him if he was the one who was awaited:

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: The blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised…”.  

Jesus preached perfection, the kind of perfection that men can’t achieve. Yet it’s only aiming at it that we can hope to raise above our weaknesses. He preached the morality of another world, and for this reason his teachings are difficult to follow today as they were two thousand years ago. He did not come to change the rules of first century Palestine, he came to change the rules everywhere and forever. His wisdom was wide and eternal. Each and everyone of the one-sided interpretations of Jesus are inadequate. The gospels offer ground for both revelation and misinterpretation and there is nothing wrong with this, since Jesus challenged scriptural authority. A part of me yearns for words written by Jesus’ own hands, but I know that, being who he was, he couldn’t have left any literature behind. That’s a human business.

The gospels can be read in the wrong way, and there are at least two wrong ways to read them, opposite to one another. Disregard the miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life and you will find nothing but a prophet, although a very successful one, since Christianity is still the largest religion in the world. Put too much emphasis on the supernatural and you will be faced with a fantastic story about a heavenly being who came on earth in some mysterious way only to offer himself as a sacrificial lamb to a cruel God and then flew back to heaven. But there is one more way to read the gospels, as naïve as it may sound: Let them speak to your heart. Little by little, Jesus will become a real presence that will change you, embrace you, guide you. When that happens, you won’t ask yourself who he was anymore, because you will know.

                                                _________________________