Jesus

Things to add to permanent memory if only because I may never see them again: Chris dancing around in his t-shirt, his blue cast on his right arm, doing what I like to call his “butt-wiggling” to Erasure. He’s not bad, really, except for the fact that he likes to close his eyes and semi snap his fingers like he’s listening to some beatnik poet while tripping, lost in the beat, only to open his eyes at my laughter. There’s the other, obvious strangeness about the dance, as well...we’ll just call this effect “floppy”—I think you know what I mean.


Easter is a pretty important holiday for me. I take the idea of self-sacrifice as represented by Jesus rather seriously. I tried to fast on Friday but ended up pulling my hair out by 6 and “was forced” to eat something. My friend Saskia gave me the perfect rationalization: in Muslim cultures, fasting during Ramadan is only until the sun goes down. Weirdly, though, as a side note, the sun is going down at about 8:30 here. We have so much less sunlight than in America in the winter that it somehow evens out with a full blast of rays all spring/summer long. Yay higher latitudinal existence!

At 11 PM on Saturday, what must have been every solitary bell in the city was peeling its loud peel. Chris says that this may be because it was 12 PM in Jerusalem when they rang. I have to admit, I was overcome with emotion at this. I know that most of the people that read this blog are not “believers” per se, but...

In my opinion, it is not wholly important that one believe that Jesus Christ was the actual Son of God in order to be a Christian. Most people, even ones that take the Bible literally, pick and choose what they may see as a parable and what actually took place. Many conservative Christians today have a yardstick to gauge whether you, in their eyes, are a Christina or not. This usually includes believing in a whole list of things that meet up to their idea of what the dogma is or should universally be. I do not think, though, that one need necessarily believe that Noah actually built an ark able to house two of every living animal aboard in order to understand the real meaning of the story. Nor is it necessary to believe that Jesus was the “son” of God in order to understand the significance his holy teachings. If the end result is the same, that we live by his teachings, who can say what part of my trip getting there was necessary or not?

So, basically, I believe that the story of Jesus is a mystery in some ways to us (you know, the old conundrum, if God had no wife, how did he have a Son?) If the story of Jesus is a parable, then the sacrifice of Jesus by His Father must have been the greatest one possible in that it describes a parent giving a child’s life for the benefit of others (they always say that the pain that a parent has at the loss of a child cannot be matched by anything on Earth.) This sacrifice, then, was the ultimate sacrifice that God could have made, all in order to send the World on a new path of enlightenment, based on the structure of Jesus’ teachings.

One has to admit, from an historical context, that the teachings of Jesus greatly improved the world. When one imagines how the world was before Jesus and what the world could have been without the concept of forgiveness and love, one sees a dark shadow of the reality that we all now share.

(One need only look to the Middle East to see what happens when a culture still believes in the Old Testament principles of ‘an eye for an eye’ This is a culture locked in a never-ending cycle of paying people back for how they have been wronged, instead of turning the other cheek, and simply forgiving someone who may have seriously wounded you in body, mind or spirit.)

Easter is significant to me, because it represents the turning of the world toward light, allowing Man to shed his shackles of small-mindedness and look to how the future could be. When Christians say “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven”, I understand that a society where we love one another and exist together in peace is possible, because that is what Heaven must be like. Our future together on this world, in the brightest corners of my imagination, is just like the beginning of Spring where Easter is placed, budding, bending toward the Sun, growing like the Phoenix from ashes and dust into a regal bird ready to take flight.

The chocolate also helps.