JESUS 1.0

WRITTEN: JANUARY 2005. I took a religion and philosophy class my senior year of high school, and we had to write two assessments of our religious beliefs: one before taking the class, and one after. This was the assessment I wrote in January for my final, after attending the Bridge Church for several months. This is still the most honest I've ever been about my religious beliefs...

"When someone is seeking," said Siddhartha, "it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O Worthy One, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose."

10 AM on any Sunday of the month and you've got a hundred tired, sweaty teenagers packed in a youth room hearing about Jesus Christ. Maybe you're simultaneously checking out the guy in front of you and nibbling on a slice of Starbucks' reduced-fat blueberry coffeecake, or calculating whether or not you have the time and money for the matinee showing of The Aviator. Probably the kid next to you forgot to brush his teeth, and all during worship you can smell the cold pizza he ate for breakfast.
But, this is church; this is religion for the millions of apathetic Christian teenagers who've somehow lost sight of who God is. These are the rich suburban teens who were raised to think being Christian meant being happy all the time, or being safe, or following rules.
All of this has been a lie.
Jesus didn't come to fix everything, to swoop down like a superhero and snatch us from the molten rubble of our wasted lives. What I see in those packed youth rooms are empty souls, kids wanting a hit of Jesus like acid to get through their week. And this was never what Christianity was supposed to be about.
Where I see Jesus most of all is this dirty building on 2nd Avenue in Portland. He's there because that's where the pain of this community is-- the drug users, the pregnant teens, the homeless, the cutters, the artists. When I was little and learning parables in Sunday school, Jesus was the guy who was friends with all of these people. And as I grew up, Jesus changed because I changed, because I lost touch with who these people were and what it meant to love them. My preschool version of Jesus, Jesus 1.0, got replaced by the bigger and better version, Jesus 2.0, each year, Jesus 3.0 and 3.5, or maybe the Jesus deluxe edition, when I learned that Jesus doesn't just love people, he judges them too. What I started with, this bundle of love on a cross, became a bundle of blood-soaked love writhing and juding and dying, so that the most important part of Jesus ceased to be love and started being these half-truths I'd collected from camps and sermons.
It was at this point that I looked back over all that I had absorbed through my second-hand spiritual sponge of a soul, and realized I ddin't believe it. The more I learned, the more I realized God was intangible. He was a being so perfect and magnificent that any attempt to describe him would be an instant perversion of beauty. Until this point I had only seen God through the eyes of another human, a Sunday school teacher or youth pastor or my parents, a copy of a copy of a copy. This wasn't really God; this was someone's idea of God that I accepted because I couldn't grasp Him myself.
And this is where the good Christian child begins to feel trapped. You're born into opinions you can't escape. Even the rebellious ones who break off and "explore" other religions-- they come back to the same conclusion: this stock character version of Jesus and of Christianity that's been stamped on our minds. It invades the way we perceive everything, so that Mormonism becomes a threat, Buddhism a tragedy, Hinduism a lie. We learn to challenge and poke holes through every faith that isn't ours.
We can question everything.
Except Christianity.
I fell into that rebellious batch and over-analyzed myself into a spiritual depression. What didn't work for me was Christianity, and it didn't work because I wasn't sure if I believed it because of my education or because it was the truth. What also didn't work for me was everything else, because, in the depths of my being, I couldn't deny my faith, and I was afraid to walk away from it and be wrong. Everything I believed, or tried to believe, was bittersweet.
After a while it got to be that I didn't even fit at my church anymore. I was too much of a sinner. Baby Christians are taught that the church is the only place where you don't have to hide. But the only place I ever felt unreal was sitting in that stupid, cramped youth room worshipping a God I didn't know in my heart. The church claimed Christ made life better. When I repeated it to others, I could tell it was a lie.
What Christians see when they look at me is probably a lost soul. Wednesday nights, I visit my old church and see a concern for me I used to feel for others.
It hurts.
But no part of me feels lost.
In the past year, Jesus has become more important to me than he ever was before. What has become less important is Christianity, the hierarchy and red tape that keeps me from understanding god for myself. I go to a Christian church, but every week is a battle for us to stay open. Conservative churches won't help us (their "brothers and sisters" in Christ) because we're a church of sinners. We allow gays in our congregation, and our pastor is a female. We swear in our sermons. There are people in our church... who aren't even Christian.
I understand why other Christians condemn us for this. I understand it because, a year ago, I would have done the same thing. But when I walk into church on Sunday I get a sense that something right is happening in that place. It takes me back to Sunday school, to Jesus 1.0, that big bundle of love on a cross, the only thing we can ever truly understand about God: that he loves us. And so, when I feel like people are judging my relationship with Christ, I think about that. I don't care what they think about what I say or how I act. What I care about is that God loves me and that he loves everyone, no matter what they do. I've gathere this idea of God as love because Jesus 1.0 is all my childish mind can handle. I've broken it down to simple religious arithmetic, some formula I can have faith in, a result I can be sure of. Certainty and simplicity is what I'm seeking. Certainty and simplicity would bring me peace.
Like, CIARA + JESUS = SAVED.
It's still so hard to believe real life could be that easy.