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aroma

A long time ago, I did a blogbook project called Gospel*. I lost those files when my computer crashed, but I finally transcribed the foreword. So here it is, in case you're interested.

Gospel*

Roughly translated, “Gospel” means “good news.” But here’s the asterisk (I consciously did not say “here’s the catch” because, in this context, you might think I were cutely anticipating a play on the fish language in the Gospels of the New Testament [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—Matthew, Mark, and Luke being the “synoptics” (roughly translated “from the same viewpoint”)], as in the feeding of the 5,000 or becoming “fishers of men.” I refused “here’s the catch” because I know my tendency to be cute with language, and the Gospels, of all things, are not cute.): The Gospel (setting aside the issue of translation for a moment) does not change; rather, our reaction to it changes. Paul, one of Jesus of Nazareth’s followers, years after Jesus’s crucifixion, wrote that the stories about Jesus mix and swirl until they distill into an aroma, a fragrance. To some, he said, it’s a fragrance of life, and to some a fragrance of death. Some people read or hear the Gospel writers’ accounts about Jesus and breathe freely for perhaps the first time in their lives, and some cry “foul!” Either way, the only option unavailable is to shut off the senses—whether we know it or not and like it or not, fair or foul, this Jesus necessarily inspires some sort of response.

I have been responding for most of my life. The first time that I can remember hearing about Jesus is sometime around 1980. I would have been 6 or 7 years old. I went to a large church attended by, to my childhood senses, the following: smelly people (likely the old ones), tall people (usually teachers and people on stage in the chapel, especially the choir), tan people (the popular ones), and quiet people. I was attracted to the quiet people, who, I see now, likely weren’t fellowed with the smelly, tall, and tan. They were the cafeteria workers, the janitors, the people with keys to closets. The attraction didn’t last for long, which I can explain. Initially, though, I think I was attracted to them because, if nothing else, I was neither smelly nor tall nor tan, and I was scared of those who were, those who were different than I. And my attraction to the quiet people was, to me, a mutual one, a quiet understanding between the ungrouped.

I recall a Wednesday evening at church in the cafeteria. Wednesday evening was roller skating night in the gym, and I had eaten ravenously so that I could get to the gym early to secure my spot on the wrestling mat underneath the bleachers where I would sit, in the dark, and watch the girls skate by. I hurriedly walked my tray to the conveyor belt at the front of the cafeteria and, unable to refrain any longer, began sprinting toward the doors. A cafeteria worker, precariously balancing stacked-up trays, stood, about 50 feet away, in the middle of my path. I sprinted directly toward her, this behemoth of a woman, and realized, as I neared her, that she wasn’t going to move, and that, even better, not wanting me to slow down,she would spread her legs a bit and let me duck my head and run between them.

Despite her cursings and anathemas and the now-flying trays (well, yes, I misjudged the architecture of her frame), I was in too much of a hurry to consider that maybe we didn’t share the same understanding. It would be another few hours before I began to consider that maybe I were on my own, that my unspoken agreement with these people were something I had made up, something that I would understand, years later, as a transposition of the desire to be known and understood. After the cafeteria incident, and after a few hours of watching roller skating from beneath the bleachers, I walked over to the concessions counter and sat on a swivel stool with an aluminum frame and red nylon top. I remember these details only because of their association with the moments that followed, the 10 minutes or so during which, I now remember, I first heard about and responded to Jesus.

I’ll distill the moment. The girl working the soda fountain and cheeseburger grill pointed toward the supplies closet and said, “You know what’s in there? In there,” she said, without pausing to let me guess, “it’s dark, and there are rats, rats that will eat you.” She told me that her grandmother locked her in dark closets with rats and beat her with a mop to let her smell and feel and see (or not see, which was the point) what Hell is like. If I thought that was bad, she said, that’s nothing compared to Hell. A hole would open in the ground and I would fall down into the smelly, ratty dark until I landed in Hell, if I didn’t believe in Jesus.

My family stopped attending that church soon after, though they never knew about that night. I, understandably, spent the rest of my childhood and adolescence consciously avoiding Jesus, trying to push the concept of Hell back down my throat. In college, I heard a second version of Jesus—still demanding, but less scary—a Jesus who hated darkness more than I now did, a Jesus who, moreover, had been in that closet and down that hole. I didn’t know then the hermeneutics and intricacies of propitiation and imputation, didn’t understand how or why Jesus could or would do such a thing, but in light of this new version of Jesus—in light of the fact that Jesus wasn’t a threatening, smelly grandmother with a dark closet and a mop, but rather an inviting Jesus who understood how scared I had been—I recognized this: I had spent most of my life giving Jesus the finger, running from him, ignoring him, and turning my nose up at him, not stopping to question the version of him that I carried around in my back pocket, in my rearview mirror, out of sight, out of mind. Ever since my run-in with the cafeteria girl (and before that, I’m sure), I had been mentally complaining that people didn’t understand me, didn’t love me, didn’t care enough to take time to get to know me, so they too received my indignation, my mental wrath. Yet here’s this Jesus, this man of all men misunderstood, maligned, stoned, spit upon, hammered and nailed, in arrears, and he kept saying, “Yes, I know, I know, it hurts, it hurts to be anonymous, to feel alone, to be misunderstood. I know, child, I know you. I know you. I know you. I can handle whatever response you throw my way, and I can love you still, because I know you. Whatever you think of me, I know you.”

One of Jesus’s followers, Matthew, wrote down many of the stories Jesus told. One in particular unsettles me. There will come a day, Jesus said, after he has patiently waited, given people time to aks questions and ponder and weigh, when everyone will give an account of themselves. Some people, Jesus said, will approach him with confidence; they will lay out all the things they have done that seem good in their eyes; they expect Jesus will be as pleased with them as they are with themselves. Then, he said, I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you.”

I know you. I never knew you. Which is it, Jesus?

I’m sure a good commentary or Gospels scholar could give you a better answer. As I understand it, this apparent contradiction has everything to do with the aroma thing. I put my imagination to the Act of Creation. I picture 100 billion pieces of the most broken-down primordial stuff forming into swirl-and-eddy, and as it does, to each piece, Jesus says, “I know you.” I picture an alligator defecating in the water, and Jesus shakes his head and says, “Well, and I know you, too.” I picture a naked man and woman looking at an alligator defecating. The man says, “I called that thing ‘alligator,’ you know, but now I’m thinking I should have called it ‘water-fouling jerkodile.’” Jesus laughs long at this one and says, “Ah, yes, and how I know you.” Every star, every seed, every pontiff, every plaintiff: “I know you.” Every ancient, agnostic, atheist; every orphan, widow, mother; every gypsy, pilgrim, blogger: “I know you.” “I know you” because HE IS; it is in the nature of Being to know—the bush is burning with infinite knowledge. Here is, as I understand reality, fact. Here is, as I understand it, the objective reality that forces our hand, that demands a response. Here is the one the Gospel writers present. Here is Jesus, the smell that stays in our clothes and hounds our senses until we do something about it.

This “I know you” is out of our hands. But he created those hands, and he gives us the freedom to do as we wish with them. Some will like the smell and will waft it up their nostrils. Some will hate it and pinch them shut. To the latter, “I never knew you.”

Maybe I’ve misunderstood. Maybe I’m wrong—God, I hope so. I do not like thinking about it. Though, to my shame, I may add my own foul unrighteousness and, thus, pollute the air, but finally, and to my deep relief, I have no say in the matter. What I would stake my life on, though—no, what I have staked my life on, is that this Jesus, once we have smelled of him, and if we are at all human, requires some sort of response.

In these pages, you’ll find all sorts of responses; we are not synoptics. Some of us aren’t sure whether we believe the stories we read in the Gospels. Some of us would sell our own lives for them. Some of us hate the way they make us feel, and some of us just don’t know what to make of them. But all of us are busy with the act of response, busy trying to separate the facts from the fictions, the abuses from the proper uses. We are not satisfied with one version we may have heard at any given moment. Many of us will likely read what we’ve written a year from now and shake our heads at our present naivete or arrogance. Some of us will wish we could be back in this place. Well, and as long as we’re responding, as long as we’re seeking the source of this smell, we are living well, we are being human. And that gives me hope.

This is how I understand such things. This is why I started this project—I wanted only that others join me in responding, so I said, “Hey, pick a word, a line, a phrase from one of these stories about Jesus, and respond.” Mine is only one of the 25 or so voices speaking in these pages. Read the others on their own terms, through their own lenses; try to understand how and why they respond the ways they do. Then visit our blogs and read some more, get a more complete version, see how our responses change daily and, if you have time, respond in-kind—I can think of few things more worthwhile to come of this project.

So thank you for purchasing this, or if you’ve found it on the street or stolen it from a coffeetable, thank you for reading this far. When you’re finished, feel free to pass it on. Give it to a friend, or an enemy, depending on how it smells to you. This is not an evangelism tract, nor an attempt to convince anyone of anything; rather, it is a record of a handful of voices who have heard the name Jesus and have, for foul or fair, responded. I’m grateful to be counted among that handful, and my hope is that you will, yourself, at some point during your reading, whether you feel like shouting, cursing, dancing, pinching, or laughing, respond to this one called Jesus.

Posted by ghetto monk at October 5, 2007 04:58 PM | TrackBack