I was raised by a small, compact Irish Catholic woman who believed that Jesus Christ, as represented by the Pope in Rome and his cardinal boys, was God, Saviour and cosmic policeman all rolled into one.
My mom brooked no arguments about Jesus and she didn't get one from me until I was a teenager, when I argued with her and everybody else about God (god?) and everything else.
I never trust those "good" little teenagers every staid adult always likes. To my mind there's something wrong with a kid who never rebels or at least sneaks around making faces behind the grownups' backs.
Anyway, at about 12, I read the New Testament for myself and realized that the historical Jesus bore little relation to what my Mom, and the parish priest, Father James Lunn, a choleric Irishman from somewhere around Boston, were laying down.
Their Jesus was a disciplinarian, the Jesus of the New Testament was kind and favored the company of working folk, including a reformed hooker (Mary Magdelane wasn't no Avon Lady, yo).
Even when I walked away from Catholicism at 18, I kept my fondness for historical Jesus. Life being what it is though, I couldn't live very long without some kind of spirituality. Life is too hard at times to deal with alone.
Having been raised by Catholics, I couldn't become a Protestant. I'd seen too many crazy things done in the name of Fundalmentalist Jesus back in Cincinnati, on the border of Kentucky, to go for a personal saviour of my own creation.
And the priests had poisoned me against Luther and King Henry the Eighth, so Reformation religions were out. Like many of my Boomer colleagues, I turned East, to religions even older than Christianity.
I became a Buddhist-sorta. I sat with some local zen meditation groups in the '90s, and even went on a couple of one-day meditation retreats on Whidby Island once the new monastery was built there by some disciples of a well-known Japanese zen master.
The meditation made me slightly quieter and slightly less opinionated-that's right, it was even worse before. But I don't know that I believe any more in Buddha than I do in Christ. What I do know is I meditate every day and say a few prayers every day.
I just call the Diety (or my imaginary friend) I pray to God. Everybody, after all, even the terrorists who claim Allah wants them to kill-there's nothing in the Koran I could find advising folks to kill those folks who don't agree with them, but there's nothing in the bible against card-playing and having a drink either-call God something.
Different names, same feelings: we are here, sooner or later it gets scary and we hope to God (god?) there is Somebody (somebody?) up there who cares about us.
We can't be here all on our own, can we?
I bring all this up because a reader contacted me and claimed I was a godless atheist. His rationale, as close as I could figure, was that since I didn't support Bush in Iraq, and I did support equal rights for gay folks, I must hate all that is good.
The correspondent's certainty, not his opinions, are what scares me.
Old-time Christians had their own jihad. It was called the Crusades, and they truly believed killing infidels would get them closer to Christ, their God, who said "blessed are the meek," not blessed are the killers.
Certainty, whether it is in god's name, god's will or Bush's adventure, is a bad thing.
If you think, you wonder-if you are really thinking.
If you think and become certain, you aren't thinking in the first place.
Go with God, and may Buddha, Allah or Shiva be with you.
Like it or not, nobody really knows God's real name or the future of Bush's (to me) misguided venture into the desert. The depth of your certainties really only shows how deep the fear that you don't know for sure runs.
Opinions after all are like... well, you know the punchline-everybody's got one (including yours truly).
Dennis Wilken is a freelance writer living in Queen Anne. He can be reached at qanews@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
