A story that depicts Jesus as a man of great solitude, given to silence and isolation, who hides himself from us in mountains and deserts, who speaks to us only in puzzles, who weeps plainly at any daily sight. The story has a refrain, “See that no man know it,” which Jesus says after each parable and to all those he has healed. Though God loved us and wished to redeem us, the story suggests, he suffered greatly in our company.
A story that portrays the Lord as a builder of houses. The first of his houses, which he names Adam, he builds on a foundation of sand: “And the rains descended, and the floods came, and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” The second of his houses, which he names Jesus, he builds on a foundation of rock (i.e., the church): “And the rains came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not.”
A story that presents a series of dreams about Jesus, each belonging to a different apostle, or to another of the figures from the Gospels—Lazarus, Pilate, Simon the Cyrenian. The most interesting of these dreams is that of Judas Iscariot, who imagines himself as an insect climbing the body of Christ, unknowingly stinging him with his poison, in order to place a crown upon his head. Each chapter ends with the same verse: “And he awoke and knew that it was holy, for the dreams of men belong to God.”
A story that consists of only one word: Yea.3
A horror story, based on Matthew 27:52–53, in which the graves are opened and the bodies of the saints walk into the holy city. For three days, between the hour of Jesus’s death and the hour of his resurrection, the saints wander the streets of Jerusalem, heavy on their feet, walking blankly into houses and market stalls, massing at sundown on the temple steps. When the stone is rolled from Christ’s tomb, they collapse into piles of dead men’s bones.
A story that emphasizes as the first message of the Gospels the value of forgiveness. This story also sees many of the parables of Jesus enacted in his own life. In analogy with the parable of the two debtors, for instance, Jesus forgives the debts, both monetary and spiritual, of all his apostles, and Peter, who owed him most, loves him best. In analogy with the parable of the friend at midnight, Bartholomew the apostle appears at Jesus’s door one night while he is sleeping, and though Jesus tries to stop his ears to his friend, the knocking persists, so he arises and lets him in.
A story that depicts the fever dreams of Jesus as he hangs on the cross. Jesus imagines that he has forsaken the path of his calling to live a life of human pleasures, that he has wed and founded a home outside Jerusalem, that he is a contented old man surrounded by the generations of his family. At the end of the dream, he awakens in great suffering and rejoices.
A story which suggests that God became flesh not just to redeem us, but also to understand us, “the most bewildering of all His creations.” To redeem us he became Christ, who contained in himself all that was righteous and pure, but to understand us he became Judas, the betrayer, whom the story describes as “the most frightful sight of his time” and a man “unvisited by any virtue.” The drama of Christ’s last days, then, is presented as a contest between these two aspects of God—between God who wishes to save us and God who wishes to know us.
A story which proposes that Christ has already returned, that he transported his elect to heaven shortly after the resurrection and that the rest of us are living, without understanding, in the epilogue of human history. The story presents the entire record of the modern era as a single strand of the Tribulation: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be fulfilled.”
The literary quality of these stories varies greatly, as do the theological principles that inform them. They seem to speak to both sides of every moral issue, and they subscribe to no one set political or economic doctrine. For every story that champions socialism (“Make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise”), another story champions wealth (“For unto every one that hath shall be given: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”), and another story champions ambiguity (“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”). At first glance, in fact, the Jesus Stories may seem merely a hodgepodge of ideas, as formless and contradictory as the motions of birds in a storm, hopelessly irreconcilable with one another and with church tradition—and indeed, the N. have often been misunderstood. They have been charged with violating the decree of Saint John, who wrote in Revelation 22:18: “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” They have been denounced for lacking piety. They have been mistaken for heretics, atheists, and antinomians by church leaders.
The N. do not seem concerned by these accusations. I asked my good friend J., curator of the Gospel Archives, who has been so helpful to me in the five years of my research, for his stance on this dispute. He smiled and spoke for his people when he said, “Just like you, we are trying to understand.”4Indeed, I believe this to be true. The stories of the N., examined with generosity, enrich our tradition rather than
One last thing remains to be disclosed in this report: the final purpose, one might even say the ambition, of the Jesus Stories. The N. believe that it is our duty as Christians to tell every possible story of the life of Jesus, and that each of us must make a contribution to this project. This is how they interpret Christ’s counsel to “Go into the world and tell what you have seen”: an instruction to the faithful to consider the Scriptures and make them new. It is not without significance, they maintain, that this instruction is followed immediately in the Gospels by Christ’s promise to return. When the final story has been told—the N. believe—when all the possibilities have been exhausted, Jesus will descend from the heavens and the Kingdom of God will be upon us.
Space
A tall white candlestick burns beside me, its wick an orange comma in the pivot of its flame. The light fades into darkness by slow degrees, and beyond it I see almost nothing—not the stiles of the fence, not the spines of nearby rooftops, not power lines roping to the ground, only headlights swaying on far roadways and barbed white stars hovering in the sky. It is as if the city itself has wandered into sleep, fastening its lids over windows and streetlamps and neon signs. The candle flame slants in the breeze with a muffled flutter, the sound of an old filmstrip as its tail slips from the projector. Eric, our son, reaches to settle it, then presses a finger to the rim of his wristwatch. He crooks his arm, exposing the lucent blue pool of a facedial. “Two hours,” he complains, filling each word with his breath. He reclines into the straps of his porch chair. There is the light of the stars, the light of the candle, and between them the steady arctic glow of his watch—dimmer than the others, less hungry, more remote.
The katydids are bounding from thin blades of crescent grass. The stars are wavering in the sky.
Two hours ago I lay in the bathtub, submerging my hands in the bubbles and watching them poke like little buoys to the surface. The water dimpled at my chest each time they rose, then flattened again as they fell. I was searching for a word—what is it?—the name of that force which holds a curve of water above the lip of a glass?—when the lights went out with a soft abrupt tick. As I stood and reached blindly for the towel rod, I could hear the bathwater trickling from my body into the tub, though I could not hear much else: not the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, the mutter and throb of the television, the sigh of cool air through the ceiling vents, the purr of electricity behind our floorboards and carpets and walls. Fastening the towel around my waist, I stepped from the bathroom and into the hallway, where the ceiling fan was languishing to a halt.
In the living room, Eric sat in an armchair before the blank face of the television, pecking at the buttons of a remote control. Damn, he kept whispering. Damn. Damn. Damn.
“What happened?” I asked.
He tapped once more at the keypad of the remote before placing it on a table. I heard sipping, swallowing, the click of ice cubes in a glass. “Power’
s down,” he said.
“Where?” I said. “Just here?”
“How should I know?” He bit into an ice cube, punctuating the thought. “Look outside.”
Standing in the doorway, I gazed out at the stars. They were everywhere, dangling from the arm of the Milky Way in dense silver clusters and floating at the far rim of the sky. The moon was invisible—couched, perhaps, behind trees and high buildings, or hidden in the earth’s shadow—and the lights of the city had been entirely extinguished. I looked from one star to the next: each seemed to flare brighter and larger, dilating like a bud into flower. A broad-winged katydid gave a whirry leap onto the screen of a nearby window, and the night air resounded with a rich lyric chirring. I couldn’t have told you which I was listening to, the voice of the katydids or the voice of the stars. You would have loved this sound, Della.
Now I sit on the back porch, my hands knit together in my lap, and a low breeze rustles through the grass. A narrow gold band is looped around my ring finger, and inside it the candle flame describes a filament of sharp white light. I draw in the scent of the grass and the dark summer soil.
“Either the main wire is down,” Eric says, “or there was an overload at the power station.” He brushes his fingers along his jawline, scratching at a patch of stubble.
A satellite sweeps through the Northern Cross. I monitor the sky for shooting stars.
“Weather seems fine,” I say.
Eric stifles a yawn as he answers. “Maybe somebody fell into the generator,” he says, touching his lips. “Some bum or something.” I listen for a whiff of laughter, but there is nothing.
“Maybe,” I say. Is this what I should say? “But probably not.” Three months ago, Della, the city lay hidden beneath a jacket of snow. A flat glacial light was gathered inside the trees and billboards and houses, and heavy clouds slumbered in the gray air. At your funeral, a man with wire-rim spectacles and a black cassock recited a series of verses: Matthew 28:20, John 3:16, Genesis 49:33. The glare of a suspended lamp shone from his lenses, transforming his eyes into vacant white plates. He spoke in a voice like the rustling of leaves, and when he was finished he cleared his throat with a cough. He stepped from the rostrum. He fingered his cross. We filed past you in mute farewell.
In the vestibule, voices hummed and whispered in my ears, and slow willowy hands brushed my arm and my shoulder. I could feel the weight and stillness of the cool quiet space beneath the ceiling. I could see the dim mosaic of the high windows. Our son stood in a side doorway, his head bowed, his chest and stomach giving a few rough heaves. He pressed his hand to his eyes, blotting them dry, then gazed at his fingers. He watched them as if they had returned suddenly from somewhere far away. When I found myself at his side, meeting his eyes through the gaps between his fingers, I did not know what to say.
“She would—” I began. “She was very—” But I couldn’t finish.
He touched my coat sleeve and told me not to worry.
In the car he rested his temple against the window, and his breath made little clouds on the glass. I wondered whether he was watching this, or the flow of the asphalt, or his own reflection. Sleet and snow thaw coated the roadway: arcs of it spurted from beneath spinning tires, spattered from lane to lane, and burst; a spine of it, gone gray with exhaust, wound down the center of the road between the streams of traffic. Eric unhitched his seat belt, and its blue sash drew taut beside him. “Are you all right?” I asked. My breath hovered for a few white seconds in the car, then thinned and passed.
“I’m okay,” he said, his voice slow and milky. When I placed my hand on his shoulder, he jerked—involuntarily, it seemed to me—and drew away.
“You know, Eric, if you need to—”
And suddenly he was yelling at me: “Didn’t I tell you I would be okay? Didn’t I just say that?” He gathered his breath into a long sigh, then said, “Please, Dad. Please. Can’t we just stop poking at it for a little while?” Above the houses and the thin, swooping power lines, a flock of birds dropped silently into the arms of a single bare oak tree. They seemed like a sudden, dense foliage, and as they lifted again I thought of autumn leaves snapping their bulbs and whirling into the sky. “If that’s what you want,” I said. “I won’t say another word.”
That night I woke from an oppressive dream. Our bedroom was thick with silence, thick with shadows. I decided to pour myself a glass of water. In the hallway, a cord of light shone from beneath Eric’s door. I could hear him behind it: he was sobbing convulsively, gulping for air, and I rested my hand on his doorjamb. A slat of white light covered my socks. “Eric?” I said. He didn’t answer. As I stood in the dark—feeling my heart bat in its cage, wondering if he had heard me—he slowly seemed to comfort himself. The spasms of his voice began to ease, and his breathing began to soften. The silence over the next few minutes grew, broken only now and again by a quick, constricted pant. I listened, and brooded, and cared, but I found myself unable to knock.
In the kitchen, water dribbled from a silver faucet into the sink. The glow of a streetlight hazed in through the window. I stood there wondering what I should have done, my nightshirt lifting with each breath.
Outside, the streetlight flickered above the snow. A strong wind piped between the trees, rattling through their dry, weblike branches. It had blown the sky clear while I slept, and I could see the stars pulsing in the night and the eye of the moon rising far above the earth.
The candle flame shifts from side to side like a flower petal spun between two fingers. It is yellow from peak to tail and black at its focus, with a horseshoe curve of blue dwindling along its sides. Peering into the dark central pinch of flame, I can see an image of Eric’s shoulder and the rim of his chair. When I turn to him, he is leaning in on himself, plucking at his lower lip and staring into the grass. A machine or an animal is making a knocking noise somewhere. It sounds like a woodpecker hammering holes into a tree, louder than the katydids, louder than the cars. Do you remember the day we heard the woodpecker rapping on the oak tree by our driveway, Della? It was our first morning in this house together, our first morning away from the city, and neither of us recognized the sound: you thought it was somebody pounding nails into a board, and I thought it was somebody banging on the front door. Do you remember what you said when our next-door neighbor told us what it really was? You said, “If we have to have holes in our trees, I guess there might as well be birds nesting in them.” I think about this all the time.
“Jesus,” Eric says. “That’s one noisy damned bird.”
“I doubt it’s a bird. Woodpeckers aren’t nocturnal.”
“Whatever it is, I feel like it’s knocking inside my own head.” He mimes firing a shot from a rifle. “What I wouldn’t give for a gun right now.”
A katydid springs into the candlelight, landing on a yellow dandelion head.
“Your mother—” I say, and Eric twitches up, leaning toward me. I can feel something inside him—someplace dense and wary and hidden—becoming white-hot with brief attention, but it falters before I can speak. “When she was a little girl,” I say, “she kept a flashlight by her bed. She told me that she would stand by her window and point it into the sky at night. She would find a spot without stars and shine it there until she went to sleep. She thought that the light would reach a planet one day, someplace without a sun. The people there wouldn’t be able to see where they were going and suddenly—light. She wanted to help. She told me that.”
Wisps of grass cast twitching black shadows in the candlelight. “Where?” asks Eric.
“What?”
“Where? Where were you when she told you that?”
The punctilio of a headlamp swerves at the horizon. I can’t remember.
“It’s been a long time,” I say. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”
“Right,” says Eric, loosing another broad yawn. “Okay,” he says. Then he turns away, pinches to a center, draws in on himself like a tight, snarled knot.
I am
afraid, Della, that as I climb from the well of this time into days of habit and quiet persistence, into weekends and birthdays and sudden new seasons, the things that I know of you will slip quietly away from me. I am afraid that as the glass of my life falls away, I will forget you, and what I believed of you, and what I loved of you. I will sit on the porch steps one brisk fall morning, watching the scissoring legs of the dawn joggers, listening to the warble and peck of the birds, and I will try to call you to mind, and I will fail. I will walk into the living room and find that your face has become just a photograph on the mantel, your name a signature on a yellowed envelope. I will sweep my fingers along the hallway walls and feel them skip against a lappet in the wallpaper, and I will sit at the foot of my bed and gaze into the carpet. I will not remember the timbre of your voice or the cast of your body. I will not remember the breadth and measure of your stride. I will not remember the hunch of your shoulders as you walked against the wind or the set of your elbows as you knotted a scarf. One smoky winter day you sat in an armchair and leaned into the heat swell of the fire, unbuckling the buckles of your boots, and afterward you stood with a foot raised to the hearthstone, drew back the mesh of the firescreen, and spurred the fire, then settled in beside me as the sparks raged white and yellow up the chimney—it’s a small thing, Della, but this too I will not remember. I will not remember the disposition of your mind and heart toward myself or the world or any one thing. I will forget it all, everything that matters. The arc of your laughter, the contour of your face, the tuck of your lip as you arrested a yawn. The treble-drum rhythm of your hand and wrist—one-two, pause, three—as you rapped on a door or sounded a car horn. I will forget that you browsed at corner newsstands and answered jingling pay phones, that you counted during storms the seconds between lightning flash and thunder crack, that you held our son to your chest and let him cry the day a circus clown fuzzed him with blue confetti. The manner in which I knew you, the moment of our acquaintance, whether you were gracious or severe, soulful or sharp, hopeful or frail with regret: all these things I will not remember.
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