jesus is my boyfriend/banksy/blank cheque

July 15, 2009 in getting over myself

I travelled with my friend to Michigan to attend a conference last week. We arrived on the 4th of July, dropped our jaws at the sheer volume of the fireworks and opened up our notebooks to capture the pearls from a couple of seasoned preachers.

I wrote a lot down. But I think I’ll share a story that was told by the third on the bill, a guy who spoke in oxymoron and whose second session I skipped in favour of some mindless task back at the hotel.

There is a woman whose baby has just died. Her grief is paralysis. Her world thrown out of time. Her infant – too fleetingly acquainted with life – now cold and rigid, is held fast to the woman’s breast. The days are paced out by eternity, the sun and moon no longer dictating the tides of sleep and work. Her body and mind wage a civil war upon each other; the one prepared to nurture the infant that never lived, while the other tries to comprehend its death. The one thing she knows for sure is that she must find a reason for this loss.

And so she asks people. She starts with the holy men who live nearby, dead baby at her breast, the single-worded question on her lips. They have nothing to say. She asks the magicians. They remain silent. Finally she makes her way out of the town, up to the saint who lives on top of the mountain. Why? she asks.

He says only this; go and find a handful of mustard seeds from a family who has not suffered.

She leaves and starts her new quest, visiting as many homes and families as she can. At each one she asks about their own suffering, and at each one she hears a different story created from the same ingredients as her own.

Finally she understands the saint’s plan; to see her suffering as part of a chorus, to hear her question echoed across the hills. Then, and only then, can she bury her baby.

‘Suffering needs empathy, not answers.’

With these words the speaker closed the story out and we all enjoyed a brief silence punctuated by our own internal ‘mmmmmmmm’s.

But while I enjoyed the moment, I have to say that I’ve never really been much of a fan of asking ‘why’ when it comes to suffering. Perhaps I’m a slacker, but it’s struck me that the question is both completely impossible to answer on one level, and utterly easy to respond to on another; why do we suffer? Because we live in a world of action and consequence, because imperfection is part of our story, because crap happens.

That’s not what I wanted to really say about the story though. What I wanted to say was that I sat cynically throughout the guy’s first talk, resisting the urge to roll my eyes with each pseudo-heretical quote he sent up like the previous night’s fireworks.

And I realised that life comes full circle. As he criticised the vogue in contemporary worship for songs he called ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’, he spent considerable time reciting a list of provocative, artistic, creative ways in which he and his community of believers had engaged with God. It was every bit as narrow-focused as the Boyfriend thing, and in the car on the way to lunch I declared that his ‘Jesus is my Banksy’ theme made him just as limp.

I felt pretty good about that line. And I felt pretty good about writing off whatever else of his talk I remembered. And I felt pretty good about planning what I was going to do during his next session on the stage.

The circle completes. I become the fool I sneer at – or what I despise in others is highly likely to be at the root of my own rubbish. I end up unable to tell the difference between his myopia and my own. And I’m reminded of the time when I first realised that if you put an extreme right wing fascist in the same room as a hardcore dictatorial left wing nut-job, they’d probably have a good old chat about the best ways of silencing whoever happened to be winding them up at the time.

So, with that in mind, you should check out Peter Rollins and mine the wisdom for yourself.