How What Threw Me Has Wound Up Affirming Me

When I was a kid, I thought my Dad was a Christian. I mean, it wasn’t my fault I was clueless about his agnosticism: he led my parents’ freakin Sunday School class at our Christian church. He appeared by all measures to be all in. Apparently, my parents at the onset of their marriage had hashed out a deal that my dad would be closeted about his lukewarm feelings towards Jesus’s presumed divinity with us kids and loyal to the church my mother was deeply devoted to. All she really asked was for him to show up. But, the perpetual joiner, he couldn’t help himself but to go and be involved.

Even though I didn’t find out about his agnosticism until my early teen years, I credit my dad for his authenticity with the Christian church itself. I think most of the adults, including the pastor, he was upfront with took great comfort in hearing his refreshingly raw honesty: Dad didn’t know about Jesus’s Christ-ness and he wasn’t afraid to admit it.

But when I learned, I wasn’t comforted. 

I was straight-up confused.

How could he go each week? How could he fake it? How could I have shared a house for a baker’s dozen number of years with someone who didn’t share this BIG thing with rest of us (and not know it).

There are two things, in long conversations I remember having late into the night during those years while in the house and a few back for college breaks after I left it, I remember penetrating my thought process at the time the most. Hell, they’ve penetrated it ever since.

#1) Dad used this word often, when I asked how he could be SO Christian and yet not one: 

TRAPPINGS.

He said that he chose to be part of a faith community because he stood for the same things it stood for: the values, the focus on contributing to common good, the priority to care for our community/world in a collective way. But that he would not assume the title, because he could not subscribe to all the “trappings.” 

Trappings.

It made me think he was worried about getting “caught.” Like Christians were out to get him.

(P.S. Lots of Christian ARE out to get people. Thankfully, we didn’t surround ourselves with those).

But it wasn’t his control or independence he was afraid to lose… it wasn’t that he was reticent to belong to something, get swept away by something… it wasn’t that he was too stubborn (although, it’s only fair to note that he most definitely was). He wasn’t avoiding Christianity to make a statement, to be different.

All of these seemed to me to be likely reasons for my dad to have chosen heathen-ship.

Here’s what it really was: doctrine and theological belief – at least in the Christian culture I was raised in – was as necessary to the decision to be a Christian as eating no meat is to the decision to be a vegetarian. And so… if Dad couldn’t look in the mirror and say that he had accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, then he couldn’t say he was a Christian.

And, to him, all that doctrinal jargon was fluff. Unnecessary. Getting in the way. Man made. 

Trapping.

Like there is this artificial shroud of thick, foggy air wisping around Jesus that we people made ourselves and bore into existence between us and him, and that as a result we have to penetrate through all this dense religiosity to get to who he actually is, and that the thicker and more oppressive and less see-through the fog of religiosity gets, the higher Jesus gets elevated into something he’s not.

Dad was saying that it wasn’t himself he was worried would get trapped.

It’s Jesus.

And we did it to him. 

And then, #2) “Have you ever thought of this, Tricia: How would your life, my life, anyone’s life be different if Jesus hadn’t come along?” 

Trishie may not have gotten much sleep that night.

Or the next.

I felt stumped. And it made me mad that, as a person who took her faith so seriously, I didn’t have some semblance of confidence about how the world as a whole would be different were it not for Jesus.

The best I could come up with was kinda canned and chinsy, “Then we wouldn’t be saved?”

To be fair to myself, it was sorta a stupid question… if we are using Christian speak and operating within the Christian framework then it’s obvious that God would have fulfilled his prophesy somehow, if not by the guy from Nazareth. My answer shoulda been, “If Jesus didn’t exist with the whole virgin birth thing and cross thing and stone-rolled-away thing, then it woulda been Fred (with a cloud elevator entrance, then golden dagger death, then mystical pigeon rebirth) or Gina (by way of a clamshell reveal, then circle of fire exit, then invisible mermaid appearance). 

I mean: WHO CARES. 

And that’s just it. That’s JUST what I think Dad was getting at – whether he meant to or not. (Perhaps a more accurate statement is that it’s what I’M getting at these some-many years later as a result of Dad’s provocation):

It’s not the package that matters.

I choose the package of Jesus, because It’s the best-known manifestation of the God I have come to know.

Would I have known this God without the package of Jesus? I say yes. I find my God everywhere.
But at some point ya gotta hitch your wagon to something concrete. And Jesus, I argue, is the most concrete package that demonstrates, incarnates if you will, the God I know… the God with whom not many were familiar at the time.

Which is to say:
a) He is loving (not judgmental)
b) He is peaceful (not violent)
c) He is forgiving (not vengeful)
d) He is humble (not boastful)
e) He works for the poor (not the powerful)
f) He relies on Bigger Understanding (not human understanding)
g) He is accessible to everyone (not just some)
h) He provides a spirit of calm (not fear)
i) He is personal and experience-able (not distant and unavailable)
j) He says we are fully worthy (not 99% or ¾ or ½ or UN)

And lastly:
k) He makes my life simultaneously harder and better

I don’t hide the fact that I get super reflective at Easter-time and Christmas-time about this Jesus guy. I turn him over and around and upside down in my head. Hope he doesn’t get dizzy. I know the process for me is dizzying. 

I guess I just wanna be pretty darn sure He’s the guy for me.

This Christmas season, I turn to my dad for that answer…

..whose surprising admittance to me that he was not a Christian has turned out to be a powerful clarity-maker:

I choose Jesus for the same reasons Dad wasn’t so sure:

#1) I follow the Jesus who is untrapped by our human bells and whistles.
#2) I follow the Jesus who is a concrete package to make better known the God in my heart.

Turns out, that man I shared a house with the first half of my life and I had a lot more in common than we realized. 

(Except the stubborn part… I completely and wholly refuse to believe that I am ever stubborn...like, ever.)