A Man Came Back to Life
I’m driving home through the rain on Maundy Thursday, and I’m listening to Peter Gabriel’s triumphant finale score for The Last Temptation of Christ, and I’m in my feelings about God. The air is full of water, but I can still see rows of cherry trees exploding silently in pink fire.
I never grew up calling it Maundy Thursday, and I wonder if I’m just using the name now because traditional liturgy is fashionable, or even if it’s because I want to wrap myself in the aesthetics of traditional religion, focusing on beautiful images and nostalgia instead of the substance of doctrines I struggle to accept. I wonder if my feelings are mere affect created to meet my own expectations. Yet all week I keep returning to this sense of longing for union with God, and relief when He finally cries that it is accomplished.
In the moment of catharsis, however, I recoil – as if I have re-veiled the holy place, and cannot safely approach. I remind myself of each thing in which I find myself unwilling to do what I feel I should, of each doctrine that I resent, or find upsetting, or too frightening to fully assent to. I feel I ought to do things, and immediately I feel that, I say no. But if I say yes, where does it end? I can’t even flip through the Gospels in order to read of the beautiful hope of the Resurrection, without glancing at the heading “The Sheep and the Goats,” and at once falling again into a pit of fear and angst. If I proceed with catharsis and rejoice with everyone in the Gospel of Easter, will I merely delude myself into a false sense of union, eliding the need to repent and accord with all scripture? I am without, and gaze in sadly, yet even sadness feels illegitimate or affected for sympathy. What am I safely allowed to feel? No one agrees.
To be completely honest, I’m not sure I should write about my faith in this way. I’m not embarrassed, but I wonder if I will say the wrong thing and have a harmful effect, or that the act of trying to feed these doubts into the artistic process is an attempt to narrate a sort of emotional progress without any spiritual surrender. So this project is sabotaged from the word go – I cannot write a narrative with a satisfying conclusion that emotionally resolves into a major chord, just as I feel I cannot actually approach the Cross. But I also will not walk away, so I remain at the foot of the Cross, irresolute.
But however affected or trite this narrative turn may be, Christ did in fact make me and the sun and all the frogs croaking down in the ravine, and in that knowledge I have to trust that He is good and kind, and perhaps that can be sufficient – though a certain kind of stern religion seems to trouble that hope, citing the narrow gate and hard way. I am not sure how to answer that or live with it, yet I still believe in the fact of the Cross and the Tomb, and in that I ask for help.
That’s the thing about my faith that has always made emotional sense to me (not that that is the standard of truth, not at all) – the love of Christ expressed on the Cross has always remained as the final testament to the goodness of God, and the hope of the Resurrection. I am confused and mired in feelings and doubts, but the one thing I remain convinced of is that this world and everyone in it was created with love and by a person who cares about goodness and beauty, and that death was not intended for us. I wrote this because I wanted to share honestly about my faith, and there’s no way for me to do that without talking about the problems at the heart of my thoughts and feelings, which are the great trouble that I am in. But amidst all that, I honestly believe that there is a man who came back to life. Because of that, I continue to look toward the Cross and the empty Tomb for a way through this thicket, and into the sunlight of the coming dawn.
