“Very well, sir.” He returned the glass to the table.
“Thank you, Eduardo,” my host said. “Sorry to bother you.”
Eduardo departed. I opened my menu and momentarily buried myself in it. The quality of the dinner conversation was doubtful, but not the caliber of the food. Guests selected a four-course meal: an appetizer, a salad, an entrée, and later a dessert. I gave half of my attention to my order, the other half to contemplating what I was still doing here. My growling stomach answered that question; I had worked straight through lunch.
“What do you think?”
I lowered my menu enough to peek over it. “I think I’m crazy for not leaving when I had the chance.”
“About your order.”
Last time we came Mattie ordered something really good. What was it?
“The veal,” I finally responded. I plopped the menu down, emphasizing my one accomplishment so far that night—deciding what to eat.
“I’ll go with the salmon.”
“Is this a Friday?”
A slight smile curled his lips. “Touché,” he said.
He placed his menu on the table, and the waiter appeared immediately.
“Are you ready to order, sir?” he asked me.
“Yes. I’ll take the stuffed mushrooms, the Mediterranean salad, and veal fantarella.”
“Certainly.” He turned to my dinner partner. “And you, sir?”
“I would like the tomato and artichoke soup, the tortellini salad, and the salmon filet, please.”
An upgrade from his usual bread and wine, to say the least.
As the waiter walked off with our menus, “Jesus” leaned back in his chair, took a sip of wine, and made a first stab at initiating real conversation. “Tell me about your family.”
“I thought you knew everything already.” I dodged the question. “You had Judas figured out. Didn’t help you much, if I may say so.”
He probably assumed I didn’t know anything about religion or the Bible, but I’d served my time in Sunday school. I’d hated every minute of it, of course. After Mother drove Dad away, she used to take Ellen, Chelle, and me to church. She’d tell us, “We need a good influence, for once.” Stacy, sixteen by then, refused to go. I should have too, but being younger, I wielded limited power.
So I went. The lessons served as background noise to the real activities of passing notes, throwing spit wads at the girls, and stealing from the “junior” collection plate. The teachers were mostly nondescript—a few men who wore pasted-on smiles, trying to make it seem as though they actually wanted to be there, and women who thought that boys actually enjoyed flannelboard Bible stories.
One lady, Mrs. Willard, was a classic. Her mantra was “love one another as yourself.” Yet the minute someone so much as twitched an eyebrow, she’d grab him by the ear, drag him to the front, and make him write a hundred “I will do unto others as I would have them do unto me.” Maybe that’s what she did want others to do unto her.
I learned little by example at church, but a few Bible stories did seep through: the Good Samaritan, the Bad Samaritan, the Mediocre Samaritan. I’d caught enough to keep up with this guy for a while.
“Why don’t you humor me?” he answered, ignoring my Judas reference. “Where is your family from?”
I wasn’t about to let him off the hook that easily. After all, he was the one claiming to be Jesus. Now he had to play the part.
“I’m much more interested in your family, Yesh.” I felt a smirk creep onto my face. “Tell me about Joseph and Mary.”
He jumped right in. “Growing up in Nazareth wasn’t exactly like boyhood in Chicago. We didn’t go for foot-long hot dogs and Cracker Jacks at Wrigley.”
“Oh, really?” I responded sarcastically. What I didn’t say was, Funny he picked Chicago, and Wrigley Field, where Dad and I went every Saturday.
He continued. “Joseph was a good father. He had to work a lot, but it wasn’t like today. His shop next to the house had an unhurried pace. Joseph only sped up when he heard me coming. He always tried to finish a project before I could get my hands on it.”
He put his hand on his chin, looked away, and laughed. “I didn’t realize at the time how many of his pieces I used to mess up. He’d be making a table or something, and I’d want to help. Needless to say, at eight I wasn’t exactly a master carpenter. He’d go back and redo some from scratch that I had ‘helped’ on. Other pieces he’d go ahead and use. Some of the neighbors kindly accepted items that had my unique imprint.”
Half of me listened to this spiel; the other half analyzed him. The guys must have hired a professional actor for this part. He actually talked like he had grown up in Nazareth. This guy was good.
I was going to ask about Mary when the waiter appeared with a loaf of hot bread and some spinach spread. “Jesus” reached for the bread knife, cut a slice, and held the board toward me.
“Some bread?”
I took the slice and tried some of the spread before proceeding with the family history. “So Joseph was just a regular Joe. And Mary—it must have been rough growing up with such a revered mom.”
He chuckled, either slightly amused or annoyed—I couldn’t tell which. “She was hardly revered. More like an outcast when I was young. Having a child before the wedding was not—”
“Kosher,” I interjected, trying to get in the Jewish spirit of things.
He paused. “It wasn’t the thing to do.”
“From all the paintings it seems like Mary was always either seeing angels or nursing you or taking you off the cross. Did she do anything in between?”
The question was a bit over the top, I guess. But I had to do something to rock this guy out of his routine. He acted way too natural. Even this didn’t faze him, though. He just took some more bread and went on talking.
“I had a great mother. Her faith kept her going—and her sense of humor. She never let me live down my remark as a kid that I had to be about my Father’s business. Someone would come to our house looking for me. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she would say. ‘About his Father’s business.’ The older I got, the more she would say, ‘Do you think your Father’s business might involve finding a girl and settling down?’”
A smile crossed his face as he talked. He paused, then got more serious. “When I finally started preaching, it got hard for her, seeing her son worshiped one day and demonized the next. It was harder for her than she expected.”
Maybe she should have gone on Dr. Phil’s show. He probably could have helped her out. I was finding this routine a little wearing.
“Look, you haven’t told me anything that someone with a Bible and half an imagination couldn’t make up. You’re going to have to come up with something better than these sappy Joseph and Mary stories.”
“To do what?” he asked.
That was a good question. What exactly did I expect from a guy pretending to be Jesus? I guess something a little more interesting. Larry King once said that of all the personalities in history, he would most like to have interviewed Jesus. Talking with Jesus Christ—or even his impostor—should have been more engaging than this. Surely this guy had something in mind other than rehashing old Bible stories.
His voice snapped me back to the conversation. “I don’t think there’s much I can say that would actually convince you I’m Jesus.”
“Well, that’s one true statement.”
“I have a suggestion. Why don’t you suspend your disbelief for a while and proceed as if I am Jesus? Surely if Jesus were actually here, you might have some questions for him.”
That wasn’t a bad idea. We were getting nowhere with my trying to figure out his real identity. And this had the potential to be interesting. Assuming this guy knew his stuff, this might be the best philosophical discussion I’d had since…Northern Illinois days? We actually used to talk about Kant and Kierkegaard and even Feynman back then. The closest thing I got to that now were those ridiculous parenting books that Mattie
force-fed me.
“Okay, fine,” I replied. “I have one for you. The other day I passed by the church down the street, and their sign read, ‘“No one comes to the Father but through me”—Jesus.’ If you actually said that, I think you’re full of it.”
4
“YOUR TOMATO AND artichoke soup, sir.”
I cringed. The waiter’s intrusion had ruined the whole setup. I had just landed my first blow, had this fraud reeling, when the interruption gave him time to regroup. His dish was served first. Then Eduardo brought mine around and set a plate in front of me.
“Your stuffed mushrooms.”
I looked across the table where “Jesus” sat, making no move toward his utensils. Oh, great. Now what’s he going to do—ask me to say grace?
“I usually say a short word of thanks before meals. Do you mind?”
“Whatever” was my preferred response, but “No, not at all” was what came out.
He raised his head toward the ceiling and left his eyes open. I couldn’t help but follow his gaze, wondering if I had missed something up there. I hadn’t.
“Father, thank you for always providing for us, whom you love.” He lowered his head, took a spoon in his hand, and dipped into his soup.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Is there something else you would like to say?”
“No. No, I guess that covers it.” I grabbed a fork and speared one of the mushrooms.
We sat silently for a number of moments, eating our appetizers. I debated how to circle back to my question when my host solved the problem for me.
“Why do you think I’m mistaken?” he asked.
“Because here you’ve got all these people around the world who believe in all these different things and worship God in all these different ways, and Jesus claimed only his way was the right one?”
“And your difficulty with that is…”
“A lot. Who is to say that Jesus’s way was any better than Muhammad’s or Buddha’s or Confucius’s or…Well, there really wasn’t a specific Hindu guy.” Did he pick up on the fact that I knew which religions had a founder and which did not?
“Do you think Hinduism is true?” he inquired.
“I don’t know. My friends Dave and Paula have gotten into some Hindu stuff, and it seems to work for them.”
He reached for another piece of bread and applied some spinach spread. “I didn’t ask if you thought it worked. I asked if you thought it was true.”
“Well, it’s true for them.”
He took a bite of his bread and seemed to ponder how to respond. “Before Copernicus, most people believed the earth was flat. That was false, but it worked for them. Why?”
“I suppose it didn’t matter much back then. Until Columbus, they never traveled far enough for it to be a problem. Well, except for the Vikings.”
“And what if humanity had tried to go to the moon while still believing the earth was flat?”
“So you’re saying…”
“What people believed worked for them, to a point, even though it wasn’t true. But at some critical juncture it ceased to work anymore.”
“And…”
“You tell me. You’re the one with the master’s degree.”
“In business, not philosophy.”
“You had to think a little.” He reached for his spoon.
I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten off the offensive and was now playing near my own goal line, but I decided I might as well go along. Besides, I admit I was starting to find the conversation a tad intriguing. “What you’re saying is that even if a belief system seems to work for someone, if it’s false, eventually it will break down.”
He leaned forward. “And you don’t want what you’re ultimately trusting to be wrong.” He paused a moment, then leapfrogged forward. “Now, you’re the scientist.”
“Used to be.”
“And you took that comparative religion class at Northern Illinois. What do you think? How does Hinduism line up with what you know about the universe?”
“How did you—,” I started to respond. But what’s the point? He seems to have this whole scene, including me, thoroughly researched. I just hope there’s a limit to what he’s found out. I returned to the question. “As I recall, Hinduism teaches that the universe is simply an extension of this universal force called…”
“Brahman.”
“Yeah, Brahman, the ultimate essence.”
“So God is the universe, and the universe is God.”
“Right. There is no separate creator.”
He slid back in his chair. “And how long has the universe existed?”
“Well, some Hindus would say always. Brahman is eternal, so the universe is eternal.”
“How does that match what your astronomers have discovered in the last century?”
I pondered that one for a moment. “Not too well,” I admitted. Although I had loved cosmology in college (I would have majored in astronomy if I could have made any money at it), I hadn’t thought down this path before. “All the evidence points to the fact that the universe had an actual beginning in time, maybe fifteen billion years ago.”
“What if that number is wrong?”
“The universe still can’t be eternal. The second law of thermodynamics. In a closed system, everything eventually winds down. In an infinitely old universe, we wouldn’t see new stars or galaxies forming. It all would have wound down, with no productive energy remaining. A couple of people, like Hoyle, tried to hold on to the steady-state theory, in which the universe would be eternal, but no one accepts it anymore.”
“Jesus” leaned forward and entwined his fingers on the table. “So if Hinduism is true, how did the universe get here?”
“I don’t know.”
He smiled. “I don’t know, either.”
We took a couple of bites before he spoke again. “Hinduism’s depiction of reality has other problems.”
“Like what?”
“Morality, for one. Humans are highly moral beings. All societies, even primitive ones, have complex—and similar—moral codes.”
“Agreed.”
“Now, let me ask you this: what is the ultimate source of morality in Hinduism? Does Brahman establish right and wrong?”
I picked a piece of bread off my plate and thought about that one a second. “No, Brahman is amoral. With the universal force, nothing is ultimately right or wrong. It simply is.”
“So what is the basis of morality if the source of all things is nonmoral? What makes anything inherently right or wrong?”
“We do, I suppose.”
“But you are an extension of Brahman, which is amoral.”
I didn’t have a reply to that one. He continued. “Hinduism has a similar issue with personality. One of the things people appreciate most about themselves is their individuality. It’s part of what it means to be human. Do you remember what Hinduism teaches about that?”
“Yeah. Personality is an illusion. You have to renounce it to enter into oneness with the universe.”
“So what you most value about yourself is illusory. One day you’ll be reabsorbed into Brahman and lose your individuality.”
I had to admit, that never had sounded all that appealing.
“If personality is an illusion,” he asked, “why are people all so individual? How did an impersonal universal force bring forth such unique personalities?”
“But you could make these arguments about all Eastern religions.”
“Yes. That’s the problem with them. The world is not as they describe. They provide a way of understanding life, but it’s a false understanding.” He leaned back, wiping his mouth. “What do you remember about Buddhism?”
Buddhism was always a little easier to get a handle on than Hinduism. It was hard to forget the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. I couldn’t name them all, but I did remember the main idea.
“Buddhism is kind of like Hinduism in its basic worldview,” I said. “
Ultimate reality is this…abstract void called nirvana. You enter nirvana by traveling an Eightfold Path and stamping out all attachment or desire in yourself. Once you’ve eliminated that, all your suffering ends.”
He picked up his wineglass and held it in front of him, looking at the wine and then peering at me through the glass with a strangely distorted face. He moved the glass to the side of his vision. “Someone made this glass well. They were attached to a sense of fine craftsmanship.”
“Probably.”
“How much have humans accomplished without someone having passion?”
“Not much,” I conceded.
“You’ve taken plenty of biology. How many sensory nerve cells do we have in our skin, capable of providing pleasure?”
“Millions.”
“So somehow an impersonal universe has taken the form of personal beings with strong desires and the ability to feel great pleasure, and yet the goal of life is to negate all desire.” He put the glass down.
“I suppose it doesn’t make much sense,” I said, making his point for him.
“Do you think that perhaps suffering was so great in India that Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, tried to come up with some explanation for it and developed an entire belief system based on alleviating suffering?”
My answer, or lack thereof, was preempted by the waiter appearing on my right. “Are you finished with your mushrooms, sir?”
I momentarily considered the two that remained. “Sure.”
He removed our dishes, a well-timed interruption. Too much more talk about Eastern religions and my ignorance would start showing. One thing was certain. I wasn’t going to play this guy in Trivial Pursuit, Religion Edition. At the risk of getting in over my head, I wanted to see what he would say about something closer to Christianity.
“What about Islam?” I asked. “Maybe pantheistic religions don’t hold up. But Muslims claim to worship the God of the Bible. Who says that their version is wrong and Jesus was right?”
He reached for his water, then answered. “That depends on whether God actually spoke to Muhammad, doesn’t it? That’s a lot of weight to give one guy’s writings, especially one who, after supposedly hearing from an angel, wasn’t sure whether he had heard from God, had persistent bouts of suicidal thoughts, built a following based partly on military conquest, countenanced the murder of his enemies, and married a nine-year-old, among other things.”
Dinner with a Perfect Stranger Page 2