Chapter 5 - Come Home Judas

Here is my next foray into one of the grey areas of the gospel, The Gospel according to Judas.

Judas has been a seen as a black sheep by Bible readers, churches, and theologians for millenia. In a lot of ways he is. I know that he was the one that took a bribe to turn Jesus in to the authorities. I know he was money-focused, and blind to the true message that Jesus was trying spread. I know all this. I can imagine that he was a hateful, mousy man, full of confusion and torn between his new life and his old. I can imagine all that. And even knowing all that, I cannot force this thought out of my mind: He sounds a lot like me.

I don’t know how we have ignored this story so utterly for so long. I can’t shake it. I am Judas. He is me. When I decide to look at his world from his perspective, things change for Judas. I know we are all responsible for our own actions, but think about this for a second: Jesus chose Judas. Likely he knew from the beginning the role that Judas would play in his downfall, and yet he didn’t exclude Judas from any of the teaching, any of the trips, or of the company of his presence. Then think about this: The day after Jesus’ death, Judas went back to the High Priest and threw the money down, muttering something about I have done a terrible thing. Sounds sort of repentant, don’t you think? Then he went off and hung himself from a tree. I can’t imagine what a frightful state of mind he was in for those 48 hours or so.

I am sure he may have had a different outcome in mind for his betrayal. Maybe he wanted to force a political confrontation and settle this thing once and for all. Many of the Jews wanted a saviour so that they could rid themselves of the Romans. Regardless, I wonder what Jesus would have said to Judas if Judas had survived the three days, when Jesus returned to his disciples to personally tell them it is finished. In his book The Gospel According to Judas, Ray S. Anderson tells the story of how he came across this bit of graffiti in a San Fran bathroom: Come home Judas, all is forgiven. From that bit of writing, Ray is inspired to write a book imagining conversations between Jesus and Judas after the resurrection. Come home Judas, all is forgiven. It applied to Peter, it applies to you and I, why would Judas be excluded?

The more I think about it, the more I feel akin to this tortured man. I myself have blatantly betrayed Jesus for personal gain. I betray him daily. That is the reason I need that forgiveness, it is most certainly not the reason I am excluded from it. All we need, the Bible tells us, is to repent. Judas did. He just didn’t stick around long enough to feel the forgiveness wash over him. Just a couple more days, Judas, and you would your world would have been a different place, like mine is. I suppose Judas knows this by now, but I kind of feel the need to stick up for him.

I told you that to tell you this: I am trying to sort out the dos and don’ts, the shoulds and the shoudn’ts, the traditions and the expectations that have been placed on me from my various experiences in churches left of center and right of center, of Bible College cultrual experiences, of mystified readings of the Word. I am trying to make for myself a set of beliefs that I can stand behind, but allow for openess and characterize the lack of judgement that Jesus has shown. I want to learn to pass on forgiveness freely. I want to teach my children true things. At a time in my life where I feel more akin to Judas and the the tax collector than any other character in the Bible, I hang my head and beat my chest and tell Jesus have mercy on me, for I am a sinful man. It is at times like this that I hear those words ringing through my head, rumbling and unstoppable like a midnight train outside the window tand my world shakes: Come home Judas, all is forgiven. I must forgive Judas because to exclude him from God’s forgiveness excludes me too, and Peter, and mostly everyone in the world. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

As I pull down the walls of my church, looking for the cornerstone, looking for a foundation to build something lasting on, it is here I find the raw materials for the new building: the vast, solid, and profound knowledge that no matter what, I am forgiven. I am home, all is forgiven.

I heard the rooster’s call I threw the silver at the temple wall I couldn’t wait, but that was the first day. I don’t know what I’ve done But though death was on his face, There was forgiveness on his tongue. Halleluia.

Chapter 4 - Everything Changes

I am wondering if there is a time in everyone’s life when responsibilities outweigh the simple pleasures. Somtimes when I think about what lies ahead I get this feeling like a ball of concrete forming in my belly. Some might call it dread, some might call it fear, some might call it an ulcer...but i think it might actually be something I’ve never dealt very well with: reality.

There are mice in our house right now. The pest control expert says that traps don’t do anything. Sure, he says, I might catch a mouse now and then, but it won’t control what he called a population explosion of mice in my house. To be honest, I didn’t really like the sounds of that. That sounds like a lot of mice. The reality of the situation is that there may well be a lot of mice. I don’t really want to find out. The only thing that works, he says, is poison. They have this really powerful poison that dehydrates the mice so badly that they dry up and crumble into dust. Ouch.

So there are many things going on inside me right now. It’s like standing under a tree full of monkeys dodging banana peels. Look up, move, look down, step, look up move, etc. I feel like I am searching for this gritty, real thing with my faith right now, my family is only just gaining complexity with some interesting new situations, and my life has two beautiful redheads that require my attention and affection from time to time. How do people do this? Eventually I am going to step on a banana peel. Actually I think I am smeared with banana pulp already. Whoosh. Down I go. Again. Just when I feel I am getting my feet back under me enough to deal with some of the backlogged life-waste, I get broadsided with something new. Is this what life is like? Is there some other way? I am looking for a manual or something that tells me what to let go of and what to hold onto for dear life. I have friends who seem to know how to live like this. One time we visit them in Edmonton, Alberta, and the next we get an email from them and they are teaching english in Korea. When you move that much, you learn to live with what you need and not one thing more. I have never been so transient. I hate moving. When my friends move I try to arrange it so I am out of town or sick. Not only that but I am sentimental. Memories attach themselves to things and I think I should keep this, it reminds me of my first band...or my first car...or that time I went for a walk downtown by myself...mostly really inane memories, really.

In a spiritual sense, I am the same way. I have a difficult time sorting through the mire and deciding what I need to keep and what I should throw away. I often find myself thinking I might need that someday, i’ll come back to that thought and so I write this stuff down, or file it away. You know how the scientists tell us that we only use 10% of our brains? It’s a lie, the other 90% is landfill. Useless fact storage, like those huge warehouses deep in the catacombs of the Pentagon that have crates of files and military weapons projects that never quite worked. Why keep it? We might need it someday.

How do I decide now what I might need in ten years? This is a very difficult question to answer when I am dealing with bits of personality and spirituality. In a conversation with my friend Graham the other day, we were discussing church services, mostly protestant, and how we have nearly exorcised them of meaning. The protestant church has gone through great pains over the last decade or so to cast off all the trappings of tradition in an attempt to contemporize the message of Christ. It’s not about the medium we said...It’s about the message. The problem is that in doing so, we have cast off the meaning associated with those traditions, such as liturgy, ceremony, and silence. It is true that the message of Christ is not about the medium, but with out medium, the message has no meaning. What do we have left that has a real thought-out meaning? In my experience, services are more often geared to comfort than meaning. Now that I have come to know Christ enough to know I am lost when I am comfortable at church, I long for meaning and challenge.

In the same sense, when I am comfortable in my own skin I start to get complacent about sorting through the junk. When the junk piles up higher, it is harder to get to the core. The bigger the pile, the bigger the backhoe, if you catch my meaning. My problem now, I think, is that I have let the pile grow much bigger than I can handle myself. I can no longer get my bearings because the horizon and the sun are blocked out by my mountains of crap. I can no longer remember the criteria by which I evaluated each piece of junk and cast it onto the keep pile. There are these mice that are running around nibbling at things, leaving half-thoughts and poorly worded prayers and holes where once had solid truth or doctrine. I need help. I need some spiritual mouse poison. I am not sure where to go from here, but I don’t think there is a better place to start as i turn and face that reality:

O God, I need help.

chapter 3 - Where are you going with this, God?

If you have red hair, you will certainly have noticed one thing in particular: everyone comments on it. Sometimes it is the ‘carrot top’ comment, sometimes it is the ‘firey red-head’ comment, but most often it is just pure envy. Women in particular seem to envy red-haired people. Particularly in the case of my former landlord’s slightly creepy over-affectionate british wife, who would stroke my hair and tell me I was such a handsome boy, all while my roommate watched from the basement suite window. Scary. I did not look forward to handing in the rent check, and it was not because I couldn’t afford rent, either.

Women also seem to envy in particular men who have red, curly hair. I confess at this time that I was blessed with this full head of strawberry blonde hair, nice open curls, and some tempting ringlets in the back. The curls never fell in my eyes since one distinct male trait in my family is a fairly high treeline, if you get my meaning. It was thus that I was able to grow my auburn locks out for all the world to admire. Nine years or so of my life were spent parading around with bouncing ringlets, or a puffy pony-tail trailing after me. And then when I was about twenty-five I started to think: What kind of a sick, twisted God do I serve?

You see, the other trait that has fixed itself firmly to my family’s genetic code is the phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of men world wide: Male Pattern Baldness. The only exception to the rule of fear would be Tibetan Monks, who would see baldness as 15 more minutes of sleep in the morning.

When I was twenty-five, I started to notice that my hair didn’t grow as long on top anymore, and some of the locks didn’t even reach my pony-tail. I was in denial for a long time. I refused to believe that it would happen to me. How could God create such a nice head of hair and then take it away so early in my young life? I was dumbfounded. This can’t be happening, I said. It did anyways.

So I got my hair cut. I went home for Christmas one year, and told my mom to cut it off. All of it. She shuddered (this is where my mom and most moms differ, she actually tried to talk me out of cutting my chest-length hair. I think because she never had a daughter she was trying to live her hair-brushing fantasies out in me. Yes, I am permanently scarred, mom. Thanks). Maybe we’ll start by cutting a few inches off, then see how you like it, she said. Cut it all off, I said. Eventually she relented and when I returned to the college people flocked to my office to see me. They had never seen me with short hair. It was strange.

You see there comes a time when everyone faces the things they cannot change about themselves. I am still in process about this one. I don’t want to be bald...not yet. When I am fifty, sure, it will look dignified. But now I am still in my thirties, I don’t want people to see the shiny top of my head. But it doesn’t matter what I want. The clearcuts persist. I am already praying for my son that his fine red hair, which is very similar to mine, and my father’s, will last longer than mine. For now I will remain the butt of the balding jokes. sigh.

I shake my fist at God. It seems petty, I know. I am still trying to figure how to let God out of the responsibility for the little things that govern my life, without letting him out off the hook for the big ones. It is the eternal mystery of God: He could stop my hair from falling out, but he doesn’t. He could stop the genocide in Africa, but he doesn’t. It is the same problem. It is a problem of control, as in who has it?

I will always believe in God. I know that. When I look at the way myself and my world were created, I can’t imagine the incomprehensibly large odds that this was all some galactic accident. I heard it once described in this way: Paint a quarter red. Then cover the state of Texas a foot deep with quarters. Then wander around and at random plunge your hand into the sea of quarters and pull one out. It is more likely for you to grab that one red quarter in the first try, than for the universe to exist with all it’s life and diversity. For me, that is a way bigger leap of faith than believing that there was a design to it. Even the fact that we as humans are driven to create, to paint, to make something new tells me that we are born of the fabric of creation. There is too much complexity to ignore the blood of God crying from the rocks, but it begs the question: Where are you going with this, God?

In university, I had an ex-christian philosopy professor who based his new-found atheism on this one arguement: If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, why didn’t he create humans with free choice, but who only choose the right thing? The answer seemed obvious to me, that without the choice, it is not a choice. But he would not be swayed. Sean, my Mormon friend, and I argued until we were blue in the face, to the disapproving sneers of the 'enlightened' students around us, but to no avail. When someone even passively negates an option for you, it is no longer a choice but a complusion. And it is not that sort of universe that God wanted, I suppose. The result: this beautiful mess.

My reality is that I will never know what God has in mind for this earth. I have to live with this big question mark, parked in my gut just to the right of my large intestine. I sometimes bear the weight of it’s curve, feel the pressure of it’s dot. I don’t know where he’s going. What I am discovering is this: I trust him. Originally it was because I thought that my prayers could sway God’s hand, and it's possible that they do, but I won’t know when or why. I generally pray for the wrong things is my problem. Is the selfish prayer a prayer at all? In high school I kept vigil over my doubts, not letting them creep up too loudly, trusting that God would guide me, and tell me where I was going. Over time, as my body, my heart, and my faith age and mature, and even get world-weary, I find that my trust comes from a different place: necessity. I have put myself in a position where I have no choice but to do the right thing and trust God. I believe in God, and I cannot do so without believeing that he is in control of this merry-go-round. And sometimes I want off, but I trust that it is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God that has created for me a way out of my predicament. He dun found me a loophole.

And so I continue to trust. It is a blind, ignorant trust. Like the trust my son has in me when I swoop him up in the air. Sometimes he is startled and sometimes he laughs and laughs. He doesn’t know the risks, and neither do I know God’s risks. I bet he is doing the best he can, juggling love and justice, both of which complicate our lives immensely, and sobbing and laughing along with us. I bet God cares about my hair, or lack thereof, and that he is sad with me when I stare at the thinning fuzz up north, but perhaps Male Pattern Baldness has a (well disguised) blessing in it’s hands for humanity. I cannot imagine what it would be, but that’s not my job. My job is to trust.

And so I try. Humans don’t take to trust very well, but at least I no longer wonder what kind of sick, twisted God I serve. Instead I wonder when I will feel the brush of his hand or the gentle sound of his breezy voice. It’s been a while, but I trust it will happen again. And I wonder: Do you think God has red hair?

Chapter 2 - Blank Canvas

I have a blank white canvas hanging on my wall. It started out as a high school art project that hung on the wall of my parent’s house for these fourteen years. Last month I decided it was in fact time to let go and find the beauty in the breakdown. I brought the canvas, which was a cheap knock off of a Mondrian, who is one of my favourite artists, home, and I painted over it with white. A fresh start.

Mondrian, in case you don’t know, was one of those artists you can look at and say I could have done that. Piet Cornellis Mondrian was known for his style, even if you don’t recgnize the name, you will certainly reconize the style because it has been usurped and re-employed by corporate branding campaigns, movie introductions, product packaging and pressboard wall decor the world over. His style could be adequetly described as simple, and more often than not a painting was comprised of nothing more than a series of intersecting horizontal and vertical black lines, the negative space filled with primary colours. The names of his compostions where congruously wrought with titles like Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. He was also a genious. A bit mad maybe, but who judges these things, anyways?

Mondrian was obsessed with the infinite. Not a universal or cosmological infinite, but an abstract ideological infinite. He hated green. Perhaps it reminded him of finite organic material, but he was known to switch places with someone if his restaurant seat afforded him a view of the trees. His paintings reached for this idea of infinity. Two lines running parallel don’t touch. A bar of colour reaching off the edge of the canvas could stretch to infinity. (footnote - From David Sylvester, “About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997”) It was his way of making the canvas appear to be more than what it is. He was trying to show a window into a heaven of ideas that are only understandable in terms of colour, balance, and composition. He understood redemption. Maybe not as you and I do, but in terms of Macros: Small mechanisms illuminating the larger ones.

I too am trying to understand redemption. When I hung the blank canvas on the wall, it was because I didn’t have anywhere else to store it. We have a small house that we bought to avoid the piling up of too much junk, but the house defies us and piles it up none the less. Over the next few weeks, however, the canvas would slowly become a metaphor to me. There is something expectant about a blank canvas. It is new, full of anticipation. I am full of anticipation, trying to re-create my faith. I am trying to open myself to the guidance of God and to allow him into the important things in my life again. I am trying to become a blank canvas. I have allowed the old part to be painted over, and I wait and see what paint God will apply. What style? What colours? Perhaps he will paint a Mondrian; reflecting eternity, simple strokes full of colour. Perhaps it will be a Michelanglo; more classic but readily identifiable. Or most likely of all, he will apply to the blank canvas of my renewed faith a few bold lines, some scribbles, and a house, like a child’s drawing. Very much like a child’s drawing, I suspect. A home.

I am trying to stay out of it. When I get a sense of where God is going with this, perhaps I may pull the big white square off the living room wall and try to follow his brush with mine. But for now I stay white
and expectant.

Chapter 1 - God’s Secret Agents

I swear that music is the only think keeping my faith alive sometimes. The funny thing is that it is not the music that I would expect that usually gets me. I can’t seem to find a common theme or style, but once in a while a song will hit me and I think that is the song I need right now. The thing is that when I feel this I am not always sure what it is that is affecting me at the time, and so I have to listen to it over and over again until I either figure it out or I wear off the magic by listening too many times.

This happened a couple of months ago with a song from a new Frou Frou album. I generally don’t buy electronica, but when I do, it has to have plenty of originality, and plenty of depth. I remember listening to Depeche Mode when I was in jr. high school. I bought myself a Walkman Sport (if ever there was an icon of the eighties gadgets, that was it. The iPod has nothing on the Sony Walkman) and I would clip those little earphones in and I feel the anticipation of full immersion. Then i would palm my little yellow machine and thumb the play button and close my eyes, falling backwards into this music that spun around my head, with small flashes of sound from every direction. Enjoy the silence became my theme song...words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm. Didn’t St. Francis Asissis say something like that? if necessary use words. Frou Frou is like that. Space. Crisp. With nice warm tones and lavish orchestral pads. I needed that space.

With the projects lined up in the garage, a new family to contend with, and work following me around like an old black lab; nice to have around but a bit annoying because it’s always underfoot, mental space was not something I was flush with. Low on mental bling.

I feel that we owe God a bit more credit these days with the arts. God is, after all, the guy that created creativity. We have set up these nice categories for our music: Is this a Christian band? Did you realize that Christian Music is the only music that is evaluated for it’s subject matter, rather than style or proficiency? There seems to be an idea in mainstream church culture that Christians should only listen to Christian music, but why? We listen to make sure the song says God in it somewhere as proof that it is suitable for our virgin ears, but we often forget to listen for a good melody, well arranged sounds, and sheer talent. I will readily admit that there are some bands that Christians should shy away from listening to, but to categorically disengage from culture not only limits God, but limits the ways he can speak to us. I will admit here that there are people who struggle with all sorts of problems and addictions, some of which may be exacerbated or encouraged by music of dubious morality, to those people, don’t take this as a licence to stumble. Listen to God, he’ll tell you what you should do.

Which brings me to my point: Listen to God when you listen to all music. The Holy Spirit, who is in us all, was put here for the purpose of guiding us through the quagmire of this life. We need to let him speak. If you listen to Frou Frou and get a dark feeling of dread...well, turn it off. I personally feel that there is a level of artistry in music, movies, and art that all artists achieve with the same spirit of creativity, given by God, even if they do not know they are using it for his ends. I like to think of them as God’s secret agents, except the secret is hidden from the artists themselves as well. I do not know where the people behind Frou Frou’s song Let Go stand on their journey to God, but I do know that when I needed some encouragement, and some way for my mind to find the space to sort some complex life junk out, he cast his spirit into the words and sounds of the song and let me revel in the combination.

So let go, let go
Jump in, oh well what you waiting for
It’s alright, because there’s beauty in the breakdown.

And so I listened, and God worked on his own grand symphony in which I am nothing more than a note on a staff, played by the angels and distracted by the demons. In the end it all seems to come out like he planned in the end. The saints and the secret agents all work for him, the Singer...and I am sung.

Just don’t tell Frou Frou that they are now a Christian band, they might be ruined in the knowing.

Intro - We have people for that.

I am writing this thing out of desperation, really. I may as well be honest. I have made it to what I feel is not the midpoint in my life, but certainly a midpoint. I am at that stage of life where I make the decisions and set the patterns for the rest of my years. Here is the fire in which I forge my future. Here is the storm to which I set my compass. I am 31 years old, married, one child, two cars, a small yellow house in a nice small town in a beautiful area of Canada. I have a career that I like, and wish to stay in for a while longer. I have a double garage and more projects than I can reasonably accomplish in one lifetime. I have come to the time in my life where I see the value in paying someone to finish my half-finished projects. The vintage scooter in the garage needs some engine work. I love working on engines, but I think now that I will love riding the scooter next spring more than I will love tinkering on it this winter. I have a file full of furniture designs that I have wood cut for, and the wood has already been waiting for almost half a year to be assembled. I have a ‘71 beetle out back that needs the tranny pulled and put into our ‘74 beetle that pops out of first gear...that was supposed to be a summer project. Unfortunately I couldn’t do it because the extra stall in the garage is taken up by nearly 1000 board feet of custom-cut timbers for the studio I was supposed to build for myself by mid-fall so our 6-month old son could have a room in our two bedroom house. My office currently fills one. I have one wife to whom I wish to stay married for a good long time, and a son who I would like to recognize when he walks into the house at age 16 and asks to borrow the keys to the beetle.

I also have one lack-luster faith that needs some serious elbow-grease and so far no-one else has volunteered to handle the job of fixing that, so again it falls to me. Many projects: I am ProjectMan. But there is hope. As my friend Steve says: We have people for that. Reading backwards along that list, I realize that the order of priorities is nearly inverse to the way that I have listed them, and if I need to start fixing something, it should probably be my faith first.

You see, I am a man trained in the word. I have a degree that tells people i should know better. I lived, learned, then worked under the protection of my Alma Mater for nearly 8 years all tolled, and now that I have a job far away from daily enocouragement in my faith, a lot more responsibility falls to me. That is what time of life it is: the Alot More Responsibility Falls To Me time of life. It has been a few years since I have felt challenged about God, and it has been about the same amount of time since I have challenged myself to do anything about it. I am finding my life thin, anxious, frustrating, and tiring, and I don’t think it is the scooter in the garage that is causing the problem...oh I hope not. And so now, as I start to write this, another project that has been no more than an idea in my head for six or seven years, it is not to impress you with wit or knowedge, nor is it to fill you with metaphors and flowery prose. It is a desperate attempt to dig back to a spiritual past that felt a lot richer than it feels now. It is a knot on the end of a long rope, and my burning hands are clinging to it with the conviction of the damned...or at least the nearly damned, if there is such a thing.

I feel close to an edge. Some of my scrabblings have cast small pebbles into the precipice of faithlessness, and I didn’t hear them land. And it scared me. Last week my wife said to me for the first time I want my mike back and at that moment I lost some footing. I always swore I would never let myself lose myself. My days as a bachelor were spent living in small basement suites in Vancouver, playing in art-rock bands, and taking whole summers off because I could. I did little more than indulge in my addiction to self-examination. I wrote songs about myself. I thought about myself. I filled small notebooks and margins of school notes with the iconography of inner struggle: Knives, faceless bodies, wings, boats, and eerie eyes peering up from the deep. I wondered what it all meant. Sometimes an image would come to me on the edge of sleep and I would draw it out the next day and pour over it, seeking to understand it’s mysteries.

I have no regrets about that time. I would recommend it for anyone. A bit of navel gazing does a body wonders if the end result is that it makes a person more balanced, truthful, and self-aware. As a warning to those wishing to move to the next stage of their lives; that much self-time can get a bit dicey. Move in then move on. But I digress.

At the edge of this precipice, I have caught myself thinking things like am I still a christian? and is it really worth it? and do I really believe the same thing as these nuts? The answers have been coming back more and more vague and the truth is: I no longer know what I believe. For a guy who has discussed the intricacies of feminist hermeneutics, disected the word dynamos in greek lexicons, written songs, read Chesterton, preached Romans, and believed in Jesus since he could remember, this is a significant revelation: I no longer know what i believe. (I say it again for my own benefit. You must remember that this is an exercise for me, not for you...I am back to navel gazing again).

Now here’s the crux of it: the reason I write this is to re-trace the rich path of my spiritual growth. I wish to linger on the porch and ask God to remind me what he is like, then stick out my thumb and wait for some thought to carry me somewhere. I want to note signposts, to toss pebbles in the pond and count the rings, to smoke cloves in corncob pipes in a pew of long grass. I want quiet inside, not just quiet outside, nearer my God to thee and all that. Perhaps at the end of it I will again be able to tell you what I believe. Perhaps not, but at this point my options are limited...sink or swim, don’t they say.

It reminds me of the joke about the two fellows sitting in a boat. One baits his lure with Dynomite...the other is a game warden come to see how this fellow catches so many fish. When the warden sees the other man’s lure of choice, he berates him mightily about his ears with a torrent of angry words. The fisherman calmly lights a stick of TNT, plunks it in the warden’s lap and says “You gonna talk, or you gonna fish?”

I think i’ll fish.

confessions of a blog addict

This is my second blog. I have will confess that the first few entries are copied and pasted from stuff I have been writing over the last 6 months or so. I am not sure quite what to do with it, and I kinda want to know if it's worth keeping writing.

That's where you come in: Let me know what you think.

I will restrain myself from getting to wordy here, and rather let the writings speak for themselves.