Vachon Imagined

It has confused me since I was seven years old how people talked about Jesus.

The first time I understood that this man from a story was supposed to have some enormous significance was when a pastor told me I needed to accept him or go to hell.

At seven, I had questions, although at the time I don’t remember being scared so much as confused. I remember thinking, If he’s here, what exactly is everyone in such a hubbub about? Why are you trying to scare me like I’m about to be sacrificed to a pack of ravenous wolves?

You’re telling me this man is eternal, he existed before me, exists now, and will exist forever, and I need to accept him?

Accept him where?

Is he coming over?

Because if he’s eternal and he’s here, why am I looking around the church for him like he’s running late to Sunday school?

Is he in the parking lot?

Did somebody forget to tell him we’re waiting?

I apparently understood the basic problem with the theology before I understood long division.

And then came the part about Jesus coming back.

Again, at seven: From where?

If he’s eternal, isn’t he already here?

Why are we acting like he’s going to knock on the door one day and say, “Sorry I’m late. Traffic was terrible. Also, Vachon, we need to talk about your cursing and ridiculous cheeseburger consumption.”

I remember standing in the pews, which could have used a good shining, wondering, What are all these people screaming about?

Then an old woman with the most peculiar smell began speaking in a language I was fairly certain meant she had been possessed by aliens.

At that point, I wasn’t looking for Jesus anymore.

I was looking for the exit.

Talk about trauma.

Or, more accurately, what in the fuck is going on?—just in seven-year-old language.

Forgive me. I can be wholly irreverent, mostly just to make myself laugh.

But what has always fascinated me is human behavior. I have spent a lifetime trying to understand it, and I suspect it started that day.

Give humanity a good romance novel or a compelling story, and we will do one of two things with it: treat it as sacred and speak about it only in the most moral, almost goth like terms, or become so determined to prove we’re too intelligent for emotion that we practically need a scientific journal to explain why we don’t have feelings.

Which is usually how you know someone has a tremendous number of feelings.

They’ve simply buried them under an anger so enormous it could fill the sky and still have room for a Costco.

Here’s the thing.

Jesus was a man who was human and claimed to be God.

That’s really the summation of it, if you take away the gore, the cross, the people murdering him, and approximately two thousand years of humans arguing about what everybody else is supposed to believe about him.

And here’s where human beings become fascinating.

We take something that may not have been about ego at all—he even said, my Father and I are one—and turn it into a God.

Then we build institutions around him.

Then rules.

Then denominations.

Then arguments about the rules.

Then arguments about which denomination has the correct interpretation of the rules.

And eventually someone is angry with someone else because they used the wrong kind of bread and grape juice instead of boxed wine.

This is what we do.

We take something alive and turn it into a system.

Or we take it and turn it into something to be damned.

And somehow, people who don’t believe in UFOs can believe in a man making a trip through the earth to separate the good ones from the bad ones.

That tracks.

I don’t get it.

I may never will.

But here’s one thing I do know:

The spirit of Christ, or simply the spirit of humanity and the intelligence in all things, is alive and well today.

And that’s where Jesus becomes something larger than Jesus and certainly larger than an institution.

I’m not saying Jesus and consciousness are the same thing. I’m saying that the life of Jesus gives us a story through which we can examine something that exists beyond any one person: the movement of consciousness within a human being.

Jesus becomes the story.

Christ becomes the expression.

Consciousness is the place where we experience it.

That’s the part we’ve gotten wrong.

When we say Christ is eternal, we keep imagining a person somewhere outside of us, waiting to return.

But what if eternal doesn’t mean somebody is coming back?

What if it means something is already here?

In you.

In me.

In the human capacity to love, to forgive, to sacrifice, to create, to transform, to see another person’s suffering and decide it matters.

Jesus showed humanity what that movement could look like in a human life.

And then we did what human beings so often do.

We took the experience and put it outside ourselves.

Well, that can’t be me, I’m wonderful. Aren’t I?

We took something that could have pointed inward and turned it outward.

We took the mystery of what a human being can become and put it in one man.

Then we worshipped the man.

Then we built institutions around the man.

Then we built rules around the institutions.

Then we started killing each other over who understood the man correctly.

Which, if you think about it, is a spectacularly human way to misunderstand a message about love.

And that’s what keeps fascinating me.

I don’t know whether Jesus was God.

I don’t know whether he was the Son of God, a prophet, a mystic, a revolutionary, a man who believed something extraordinary about himself, or some combination of things I don’t have the language to explain.

But I do know that something happened around his life.

Something happened in the people who followed him.

Something happened in the people who hated him.

And something happened to humanity in the story we built around him.

That something is still happening.

That is where Christ becomes interesting to me, not as a person sitting somewhere outside of humanity, but as a name for something that can move through human consciousness.

Love.

Forgiveness.

Sacrifice.

Transformation.

The dissolution of the self that believes it is separate from everything else.

Call it Christ.

Call it consciousness.

Call it humanity becoming more fully alive.

The name isn’t what fascinates me.

The experience is.

And that’s why I don’t need to worship Jesus to remain fascinated by him.

I’m not as interested in whether I can prove that he was God as I am in understanding what human beings do when they encounter the possibility of God.

We turn it into a story.

Then we turn the story into a mirror.

And eventually, we forget that we’re the ones looking into it.

Will I ever worship him the way people worship the NFL, President Trump, collagen supplements, or Taylor Swift?

Not on your life.

Although I will admit that some people seem to have approximately the same level of religious devotion to all those things.

But I will continue to become more familiar with the way we judge ourselves and then place that judgment onto other people—praising them, condemning them, elevating them, destroying them.

Because that is a story too.

And although I don’t believe it is happening in quite the way we think it is, I am fascinated by it.

I probably always will be.