As a poet, I understand that the goal of writing is to tinker with viewpoints, to present things in a particular way. As knowing subjects, we all experience reality more or less differently, and the poet utilizes this truth to create new avenues of experience. And this doesn’t have to be a threatening, dangerous, or evil thing. After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, i.e., there’s more than one way to solve a problem. The fact that you can solve a problem does not hinge upon there being only one way to solve it. The only problems that have one unique solution are in pure mathematics—and even those have proofs that can be said in different ways. You might point out that if a problem can be solved, then in a more abstract sense there is only one way, of sorts; this is a rather keen insight and is really better suited with more delicate language, like, “There is only one set of ways that a problem can be solved.” I would go so far to say as this is where Christianity has really missed the boat. Rather, it’s not so much that the Christians have missed the boat, it’s that there is a ferry that takes people on the hour, every hour, and the Christians are standing by the lines of travellers waiting to board, preaching to them, “All of you need to use my ticket to get on. Our Lord has indeed spoken, ‘All must have a ticket to board the ship. Behold, I leave ye, my disciples, the ticket to heaven: I am the ticket of life.’ Repent, and use this ticket!” And the Christians are wagging their tickets at the passengers, even though most of them already have one in their pocket.

     Now Christianity is not evil, and Christians aren’t all bad. Besides, I am one. There are plenty of people who don’t know about the boat in the first place, and by happenstance were walking along the embarcadero when a Christian comes up to them and tells them about this other shore, the boat, and the Christ-ticket, and they are just delighted to have a ticket with a little Jesus emblem on it, and so the Christian escorts them to the boat line, next to all the other people in the other lines. Then there are others who were given a counterfeit ticket, and when they get to the front are turned back by the ferryman, but the Christian gives them a means aboard. And there are others who forgot their ticket at home or it just fell into a puddle or got left in the washer the night before, and they only need to get a replacemet. For these people, the Christians are doing a tremendous favor. But, these aside, there are problems that are very hard for Christians to address in themselves, because their critics stand on the outside of the church, or, worse—from a different denomination. I’m not speaking from outside Christianity here—I’m speaking from the very center of it, from the core, from that moment when Jesus was dead on the cross and then his hopeless body lay in the tomb. It’s a dark and baffling day, Holy Saturday, and unfortunately is by nature overlooked or understood insufficiently. What I’m presenting is not so much a contradiction to Christianity or an argument against it, but the edge of its exosphere, where the vacuuous outer space infringes upon our little habitable bubble. After all, it’s there that Jesus went for our salvation. Who knows what he saw on that Saturday, sent into that great darkness beyond?

     Back to the tickets. I claim the statement “I am the ticket” is much stranger than it would seem at first glance. It can be understood in two ways which are both consistent with Christianity. “I am the ticket” can be understood through a zoomed-in view, where Christ’s universality is contained and equivalent with his particularity: he, a man in a particular time and place, with a certain color of hair and height, etc., is the very definition of God’s way, and so faith in him is likewise singular, one-pointed, and though it may be culturally and demographically inclusive, it must at some level exhibit an exclusiveness characteristic of treating particularities as essential. “I am the ticket” can also be understood from a more zoomed-out view, where Christ’s universality is connoted (rather than denoted) by his particularities. There is a thread of continuity between the two views because Jesus passed through the veil of death, bread and wine, and came out the other side.

     The problem is that the zoomed-in view is inherent with a character flaw. It obscures the reality of the zoomed-out, and by doing so incites hate toward they who are not zoomed-in. The zoomed-out view, on the other hand, affirms the zoomed-in view. It is a tragic repetition of Cain and Abel. It’s also why Jesus died: the orthodoxy hated him. After all, Jesus was blaspheming by all standards.

     It’s all too easy to look back on the Pharisees with 20-20 hindsight, and see them as Trumpian caricatures. First of all, Donald Trump is horribly misrepresented. He is not reducible to our cartoonish pictures of him, nor is he reducible to what the media portrays of him, nor is he reducible to what he says or does, nor is he reducible to how he appears to us or even to himself. He is always different from anything we can understand of him. The reason why people feel so emotionally about him is because their understanding of him has crossed from being objectively open into an internally verified representation—people see his unfiltered conduct and return the favor in kind: they do not condition their understanding of him, he is whatever we think of him. And the media and politicians capitalize on this slip, they feed into it, and encourage us to keep treating him like a cartoon, as if we were all fourth-graders who take insults toward other classmates for truth. The Nazis did the same thing to Jews, though they took it much further. It’s categorically the same act, no matter how big or small the scale. We must not reduce people to caricatures in our hearts, ever. This should be our aim in all our social affairs. (This does not mean representations are utterly wrong, though it kind of does; nor does it mean we should do away with representations altogether; it means we should do away with taking them for reality itself.) The Pharisees were not what we distort them to be. Rather than being crooked wealthy women-hating devils, they were probably sort of good, sort of bad, and it just so happened that Jesus did things that made “Error 404 – Not Found” show up on their screens. They couldn’t help but see him improperly and get mad at him, as I’m sure some of you, my dear readers, are upset with me while reading this. That someone is strange does not mean they are your enemy. Oftentimes, their strangeness indicates they have something that could solve one of your unsolveable problems. Because Jesus operated in new, unusual ways, he was, according to the best judgments of the Jewish leaders, sufficiently heretical to be put to death, even though he followed the Torah to a T (and more so than they). It is no wonder Jesus identified with the weird, the dirty, the poor, the disfigured, the sick, the sinful. Please keep your hostility to yourself, dear conservative.

     Secondly, even if we are utterly bad apart from God, as the Calvinists believe, this does not mean that a human understanding of moral badness congrues with a divine understanding of our sin. Our conscience is easily warped by performance-based standards that bonk us on the head when we’re bad and demean others when they’re bad. We transmogrify criminals into demons and inflate bad conduct into something that needs to be fought and burned at the stake. Further, it is insufficient to understand God’s mercy as meaning the mere absence of the head-bonking. God’s mercy cannot operate under the same paradigm as that of performance-based competition. In a time when it was radical to not pay into a self-righteous, sexist, classist moral and political hierarchy, Jesus chose to be gentle to sinners. This was not him merely putting on a show of being nice and offering mercy, this was actually how he felt toward them. Our understanding of righteousness is often shallow, assuming that outward appearances of goodness toward others are enough. So we think God’s mercy is in contraposition to his wrath, that God is choosing to withhold his just anger against us by instead expressing love and affection. Far from it, God is not a man and thus his mercy, not of human origin, cannot be inauthentic. Jesus’ affectionate compassion was toward everyone, and the only people he got mad at were the religious leaders and the temple moneychangers. At the end of the day, the Pharisees’ pursuit of the perfect led them to kill the good. They had lost touch with an Edenic holism and sought an asymptotic ideal. This is not some crooked behavior of a pompous elite ruling class: it is the inevitable outcome of a conscience thinking and comparing in terms of itself. We are under an illusion whenever we conflate God’s attitude with the mannerisms of our conscience.

     Rabble-rousers by their recklessness stir up the orthodoxy; supposed saints are unkind to pagans. The orthodoxy cannot see their flaws because the heretics fling back; the freespirited don’t see the virtues of formality because the religious implicitly demean them. Do we want the illusion to thus perpetuate in its fiery cycle? Who will submit in kindness toward the other aisle? And what are we left with when we undermine both formless heterodoxy and formalist orthodoxy? Perhaps the more important question is: if it is the case that adhering to the zoomed-in view of “I am the ticket” produces implicit attitudes consistent with those behaviors observed in the act of killing Jesus, then is there any real objective order to anything at all? What exists in this black of night, where neighter ghost of fright nor fact of light can reign? And who is Jesus, anyway?

(I will refrain from answering my own question until tomorrow, on Easter. Stay tuned, dear reader.)


April 11, 2020
San Luis Obispo