An Interfaith, Pantheist UU Is Called By Jesus: The End

Excerpted from a forthcoming book on my monastic journey.

Leaving All My Playhouses

I decided not to tell anyone that I’d seen Jesus, afraid of what talking would do. Cynical voices were already murmuring in the background of my mind, scornfully deriding my “vision” as “grandiose nonsense,” “self-centered delusion,” and “just imagination.” If I opened my mouth, they might take over.

But that Friday, I had a dinner date with an old friend. She belonged to a liberal Jewish synagogue, but was basically a spiritual skeptic. We always met at the same campus Chinese place. It was cheap, yet had surprisingly well-prepared food.

“So, what’s been happening with you?” my friend asked casually as the waitress set a pot of tea on the table.

There were a million decent responses to this question that left my vision alone, but did I use one? Nope.

“Just last Wednesday at the monastery, I had this thing with Jesus,” I chirped.

As soon as the word, ‘Jesus’ left my mouth I knew I was sunk. Shoot! Shoot and a half and three quarters! Why did I break my silence?

My friend regarded me with a lopsided, quizzical smile. She reached for the teapot and poured. “Oh? Really? With Jesus?” she asked.

Embarrassment rose like the steam from the pot, heating my face and turning my brain to mush. She was going to think I was some kind of bible quoting, personally saved, Jesus freak!

Lifting a cup to my lips with a knowing, academic chuckle, I rushed to cover my tracks. “Of course, there may not have been any actual, historical human being called Jesus. It hardly matters. He could have been some teaching myth created by post-exilic Pharisees to spread basic tenets of the emerging, book-and-synagogue-based Judaism. It’s the radical social teaching that counts, anyway… not that any of that is unique to Christianity, either. ”

As the words left my mouth, I cringed inside, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “In fact, there’s not much Jesus purportedly said that wasn’t taught by Hillel or other major Jews at the time Jesus was supposed to have lived. You know, ‘the essence of the bible is don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself, and all the rest is commentary'”

What pedantic, intellectual crap! I kicked myself. Hard. But it was too late.

By the time the waitress set a little tray with our bill and fortune cookies on the table, I’d cut my vision up into little pieces and scattered them to the winds. My mouth felt tacky and my mind was dust. All my intense, sensory experience had dulled into overblown, invented drivel.

I berated myself for a coward all the way home.


* * * * * * * *


I was still kicking myself the next morning as I stood on the front lawn surveying the flowerbeds, deciding where to plant a flat of pansies.

It was very dry.

“Looks like we’re headed for drought this summer,” I announced to the garden.

Wisps of cloud crossed bright, blue sky and a warm wind blew from the west. Great weather except that we’d had little snow that winter and little rain all spring.

I began digging the pansies into the soil.

Why had I belittled my vision to my friend when it had been so exhilarating and real?

I sighed as I patted soil around the last plant and sat back to see how they looked. The pansies were a rich, velvety purple, almost black. I touched one petal. It was soft and slightly moist.

My sense of Jesus had been as real as these petals. It couldn’t have been “just imagination.”

“Even if it was ‘imagination,’ is that so meaningless?” I muttered as I dragged out the hose and began to water the pansies. “What is 'imagination,' after all? Maybe it is simply the human organ for perception of the divine, just as eyes are our organs for perception of light.”

I sighed again.

The truth was I believed Jesus had been a real man who actually lived. I believed that man, Jesus, had embodied unconditional, all-embracing, divine love. Jesus had shone the divine love-energy clearly, without the ego confusion that obstructed most of us. Yet this was simply a brighter version of the same love-light-energy that was in me and in all things – the true, core substance of all life.

And I believed this great, divine Love-Being had invited me into personal relationship. So why, only days later, was I busy denying him by smothering my vision in long-winded, academic obfuscation?

I made my experience socially palatable by waffling on its reality. Did it matter if I’d met Jesus or Christ or my own soul? The problem was, it embarrassed me to have a personal relationship with Jesus. God-the-ineffable was easier. Christ as non-personified, universal energy was easier and much more familiar. But the one I’d met, that Jesus, had felt singular and personal, a once-human “he,” not an “it” or an “all.”

“No waffling. I’m going to have to simply accept that I met Jesus,” I told the pansies.

A morning dove flew down from a spruce in the middle of the lawn and looked at me. Maybe it hoped for bugs from the soil I’d turned over. It was young, like one that had watched from the roof of my car as I came out the day before. On the radio I’d just heard about a man dying of AIDS whose partner was already dead. The man said, “In the hole left by my partner Jesus has moved in.” The guy was radiant. He wouldn’t change a thing, even having AIDS. His disease had created the space that allowed Jesus in, and he wouldn’t trade that for anything. Being with Jesus, his suffering became peripheral.

“Perhaps embarrassment isn’t the problem,” I thought as I turned off the hose. “It could be that Jesus is offering more relationship than I’d bargained for.”

Because accepting Jesus meant leaving all my playhouses.

I was too small to know God-the-All. Jesus held open a door, showing me another way. My heart and joy said, “follow,” and they were the most reliable guides. Could I let go of my fear and walk the way Jesus offered?

Maybe. Maybe.

I picked up the empty flat and headed in. It was time for lunch.

© 2007 R. Elena Tabachnick