Easter letter to Jesus

Dear Jesus,

I’ve been wanting to write to you for a long time. To be honest, the reason I haven’t is that my heart breaks into uncountable shards when I think of you. I sometimes try to pray to you in the morning, but all I can seem to muster is “Dear Jesus…. What the hell?”

I remember when you came to me on that winter night in 1973, after walking home from the weekly Wednesday night youth for Christ soirée with Kevin. He was for sure going to be a minister some day and he already, at sixteen, had the high, wavy televangelist hair and the certainty for it. We hugged goodbye and shouted “maranatha!” (“He is coming!”) to each other and I headed along my street among the thick snowflakes dancing down from infinity, each one humming like its own small crystal bell.

I lay in my bed buzzing from Jesus-love and God-mystery and the lingering fragrance of strawberry that wafted from Carol Stevenson’s hair and the pink shine on her Jesus-loving lips.

And you came to me. At first as one of the ten thousand snowflakes drifting down, then growing into the shape of a white dove passing through the ceiling, down, down into my forehead where you burst like silver fireworks through my whole body.

As I trembled, love for everyone and everything coursed through me - even for Troy Ondreczeck and his weaselly little sidekick, Scotty, who tried to beat me up that one night even though we used to be friends, but they had become victims of reefer madness exactly like that movie we saw in health class had predicted. Your words “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” filled the inside of my ears and I felt bad for whatever sadness was inside Troy and Scottie.

And your words “By their fruits ye shall know them,” floated around me, and I knew that’s the only way to tell a true Christian from a false one. I knew that you would always be there as a mirror for me to check my own falseness in, and it would always be up to me whether or not to look in the mirror.

The next day I tried to tell Kevin about you, and about how we should forgive people, and love them, and try to remember that people have a lot going on that we can’t see, and that God is too big for us to understand. And Kevin rebuked me, saying that everyone who is wrong is going to hell and we should not give them a second thought. Then he listed a whole bunch of people who are going to hell – Hindus, and those bald guys in orange robes, and Catholics, and the one that really got me thinking was “people who live downtown.” Also, Charles Schulz, the cartoonist, will go to Hell because the sweatshirt I often wore showed Linus with his finger pointing to the air like a Greek philosopher saying, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” It does matter, said Kevin, and Charles Schulz is going to Hell, and I had better burn my 46 Peanuts cartoon books or I, too, will burn.

So, Jesus, what I’m trying to say is, you’ve been with me for 52 years now and the white dove isn’t the only way you’ve come to me. Remember that time I did something bad and it was tearing me apart inside, and you came to me and took me to that well, and gave me a drink of that cool blue water, and I thought “I’m never going to do that bad ting ever again.” Remember that time not that long ago when I was in the Amazon Jungle, weeping my guts out in an ayahuasca ceremony because I’m so filled with doubt and fear that I'm so damned stupid and worthless and fake and arrogant and stupid, oh I already said that, and you came and touched me on the forehead and that burst of silver galaxy light came again and your words "fear not" rang through the jungle and everything lit up? I try to remember all these times, but still, when I try to talk to you, I just want to weep with dismay.

I can’t help but think of Kevin, and how somewhere he's grown up and out in the world, preaching somewhere. And my other high school friend, Dirk, who went to a giant youth for Christ convention in Dallas and when he came back he was so different, and he asked me if I had been saved and I started to describe how you came through my ceiling and filled me with - - he cut me off, and with his blue eyes gleaming like the sheen on a freshly sharpened sword, he said, “No! You are not saved until I decide that you are.” He's grown up now too and preaching somewhere.

So, Jesus, every time I think of you, my heart breaks. Because Kevin and Dirk are everywhere, and I don’t understand how, but they became your spokespeople. They rolled the stone back into place and re-sealed you in darkness and told you to stay in there and shut up. And that’s why my heart breaks, and that’s why I haven’t written to you over the years even though I have wanted to, and it’s why I can’t make prayers with you.

The thing is, I don’t want to spend my relationship with you worrying about Kevin and Dirk. But they also have those gleaming eyes, and television networks, and that certainty, and lots of guns. And they are incrementally, day by day, giving themselves and their flocks permission to kill me in your name.

And, oh, yeah, there’s this one: when I was in Seminary, and studying the Gnostic Gospels – you know – the ones banned by the early church. And in one of them the disciples ask what they need to do to be aligned with the divine. Fast? Give alms? Make the correct prayers? And you said: “Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate.” That one is floating around me all the time too.  

So, what I’m saying is, my heart breaks for the opportunity you handed all of us, and we failed you. We failed you.

But then I think and my old pals Steve and Deedee, and James Talarico, and the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, and so many others who are also out there preaching what you actually said instead of stuff made up by preachers in the 1800, like the rapture, and when I think of these Christinas I think how easy it is to tell the difference between actual faith and performative piety that covers up the “whitewashed tomb of the heart” that you mention in Mathew 23 – a place that looks clean on the outside but is filled with death and decay inside.

And, Jesus, as I write this letter to you, the most radiant tiny golden finch has just landed on top of the bird feeder a few feet away. She's scoping out the food I've put out, deciding if it's the right food for her. So, I guess, if you can let me know if I’m putting the right food out, I’d really appreciate that.

If I could muster a few words for you, I guess what I’d really want to say is: Jesus roll that stone back again. Not enough of us got it on the first try. Open the doorway again for your people and set them on your path. Roll it open. Please, Jesus, roll back the stone again.