Jesus Is King

Every Hour

There's churches I haven't been to in so long that I don't even know if they're real or not. They could just be memories, or dreams. The holy water could all be evaporated from their fonts. There's stained glass that I've seen that's nothing more than a blur of indistinct colors, telling stories I couldn't recount, or saying nothing at all. There's a procession of carvings that line the walls, anecdotes from Testaments I've never read. The only thing I can clearly see is the altar at the end of the hall, and above it, the figure of Christ. He's too far away to touch. I see him there, immobilized on the cross, with still bleeding from his lacerations. He can only look down at me, but never down on me. His skin looked as if made of painted and polished clay, soft enough to sink into. I stood there, looking up at him, with only my mother present. It was the first church I'd ever entered.

Follow God

Long after our first meeting, when I met you in a different guise in a different state, I rebelled. Where I came from, no one really cared what you believed or if you believed. But here, in the South when we were young, learning the rudiments of morality, everyone read their Bibles, or at least pretended to. They'd throw pages from it at you like stones, while kicking at you with the points of their cowboy boots. As I entered middle school, I left our heavenly Father for another father-figure. A blasphemous father. Satan, in a white suit with feet covered in tar. My allegiance switched to the forces of evil and heavy metal, and the only Sabbath I recognized was Black. Soon after, my notebooks and homework were covered in pentagrams. Everyone I knew joked that if I ever stepped into another church again I'd burst into flames. But, my commitment wasn't anything more than an aesthetic and a combative posture.

Closed On Sunday

Other than family visits on holidays, I didn't seriously step into another church until much later into adulthood. Although ever since I was a teenager I claimed the mantle of atheism, the Satanic blood refused to drain from my body. But, it cooled. From a chance encounter, a friend of mine invited me to the Bible Study they went to every Wednesday, somewhere in a building on campus for the university I live by. The denomination was Episcopalian. I got to meet the campus missioner, for the sake of anonymity let's call him Father J.

I liked the Bible Study and the people there more than I expected. So, I kept going. After a long enough time, I became a regular fixture and even brought other people who had never been before. Someone even made me my own rosary, black and gold. I went for my friend, my new friends, and Father J. He always had an interesting presentation for us and we always prayed in the style of Lectio Divina. While we talked about the Scriptures, I was able to speak freely about what I thought they meant or how they resonated with me. Usually my explanations were long winded tangents that had something to do with Marx, Hegel, Lenin, or Althusser. They were the prisms through which I interpreted the Word of God for myself. At one point I even brought up Spinoza and tried to explain to everyone the whole Deus Sive Natura thing as best as I could. Some of our Wednesday meetings were less enjoyable for me than others, as I'm not a particularly big fan of the steel-stringed acoustic guitar I wasn't hip to the Bible Study that integrated musical improvisation, but I went along with it.

One night I was in the building alone. It wasn't a really a church, but one of the rooms had been converted into one. A small space with its own altar, and various Eastern Orthodox icons and more abstract paintings adorning the walls. I went there after drinking heavily. Full of an unspecifiable amount of alcohol, I started listening to Transilvanian Hunger on the television. When I'm drunk, all of my emotions and impulses are a lot harder to control. My most impulsive thoughts won the day, and I went into the kitchen to grab a knife. I tried to cut myself but I realized even the biggest kitchen knifes weren't sharp enough, so I grabbed one with a serrated edge. I brutalized my left arm until it looked like mince meat. Then, I walked over to one of the icons. Of Mother Mary and the infant Christ. I stared into her eyes, which stared back, and asked her to blink. Or move. Or anything. Something to fill the silence. When I realized she wouldn't, I started to cry. I never told anybody about this. Months later they'd see me on the outside cameras, vomiting and passing out on the floor outside, after I gave myself a cigarette stigmata on my left hand. It was only then that anybody said anything about my drinking.

God Is

My interest in Christianity is more theoretical than practical, which is to say I'm more concerned with theological system building than questions of how to live as a Christian on a day to day basis. It's a fault I think I can be forgiven for. Father J was someone that I could talk to about the finer points of theology, even if the closest thing I can call an understanding of the subject is my juvenile reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit. I've yet to traverse the great cathedrals drawn up by Augustine, Aquinas or Duns Scotus. When I mentioned my interest in the long tradition of Christian Mysticism, he managed to point me in a couple of helpful directions.

I've spent a lot of time trying to imagine what God is and if such a verb could even be applied to them. Do they speak in one voice or many? My preferred image is something like a white hole, a completely alien intelligence which expels the universe from itself unendingly. When I read of various Islamic conceptions of God the figure that stuck with me the most is God the Most Merciful. I tried to imagine what it'd be like to be forgiven for everything I've ever done wrong, even the things I don't think I should ever be forgiven for. I imagine God sitting patiently, scanning through the events that lead up to all of my worst choices, and somehow accepting them through a logic I can't comprehend. It makes me think of those I despise, then I wonder if God could forgive the rich when I couldn't. Could God ever forgive the Holocaust? Another image I've come across is God as somehow headless and escaping all earthly attempts to escape the Divine itself, continuously reinscribing himself even when one thinks he can't be. It's my least favorite.

Eventually, I came to the idea that my personal preference would be to live my entire life without ever encountering God, but for his wisdom and forgiveness to only show itself at the end of my life, either during a traumatic death or peacefully during my Last Rites, with the three figures of Christ, Satan, and Judas all there to take me to whatever afterlife I deserve, or to none at all.

1,228 words.

Special thanks to Father J and Kanye West.