He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

by Trish Ryan

  “Amen” we echoed. I opened my eyes and blinked, then noticed everyone staring at me expectantly.

  “So how was it?” Paul asked. “Did anything resonate?” Liz handed me a sheet of paper with everything written down: Windmill. Billy Joel. Bright fish. Smashed crown. Cannon.

  “It was great . . .” I said. “It was . . . um . . . inspiring. I’m not sure what else to say. I think I’ll go back to my seat by the fireplace and wait for my cannon to go off.” As I hoped, the levity broke the serious tone in the room, and I was allowed to leave the prophecy chair and slide back into obscurity. I folded the piece of paper and slid it into my back pocket, unsure whether or not I’d look at it again later.

  It was after eleven when I left that night. (Apparently, this small group business was not for the faint of heart.) I didn’t understand most of what I saw, but the group met my standard for spiritual viability: people were friendly, there were several cute men, and no one demanded that I kneel down and give my life to Jesus. I wasn’t sure what to make of the whole prophecy thing, but as I thought about it later, what stuck with me—what resonated—was a sense of astonishment that a bunch of strangers would stay so late on a Wednesday night just to pray for me. That, I had to admit, was pretty amazing. I couldn’t wait to invite these nice people to my next spirituality lecture. I bet they’ll like it, I thought on my way home.

  WHAT SURPRISED ME most over the next few weeks as I immersed myself in life among the Cambridge Christians was the upswing in my social life. My e-mail in-box filled with invitations to movie nights, birthday dinners, and kayaking adventures in nearby states. As a member of this not-so-small group, I now had a staggering array of fun social options to choose from, none of which involved discussing God’s wrath or monitoring each other for biblical obedience. Following Jesus, in this group at least, was fun.

  I met a great girl named Amy who picked me up for church on Sundays so I wouldn’t have to take the train. She quickly became my new best friend, making me laugh with her comical perspective on life. She also sprinkled a healthy dose of Jesus into our conversations. “What is God talking to you about today?” she’d ask. Suddenly, this seemed like a valid question.

  One weekend, Pascha organized a group of us to volunteer for the Special Olympics. We helped coach a softball game, cheering on our players, giving them high-fives and hugs. My team lost badly (even by Special Olympic standards) and I prepared to console my players, dredging up stock “better luck next time” lines.

  “Twish!” one of my players called, running up to me, face glowing with excitement. “Guess what? Guess what? Guess what?”

  “What, Joey?” I asked, putting an arm around him to stop him from jumping so I could understand what he was saying.

  “We came in second!” he yelled, doing a victory dance right there next to the pitching mound. His entire body writhed in glee, his upper limbs flailing with joy as he reveled in the satisfaction of a job well done. “That means we won the silver medal!” It never occurred to him that second place, in a contest with two teams, is last; there were no losers in Joey’s Olympics.

  I told Pascha and the rest of the group about this afterward as we made our way back to the car. “You know,” Pascha said, “that’s why I love the Special Olympics. When I’m messed up and I’ve blown everything, I think Jesus sees me like a silver medal, not last place. Your dude Joey reminds me what that looks like.”

  That gave me something to think about.

  PEOPLE IN OUR small group talked about God all the time, but in interesting ways I’d never heard before. There was no judgment, no grandiose political proclamations, just lots of wonder and hope and awe. I thought more about Amy’s Sunday morning question: “What is God talking to you about this week?” No one had ever asked me that before. What was God talking to me about this week? For a spiritual junkie like me, this was nirvana. And in the midst of these people, I felt like I found the secret connection: the miraculous portal I’d searched for as a little girl, that special link to God. I was amazed by the way my supernatural efforts were multiplied—exponentially, even—when our group prayed together, or even when we just hung out, talking about Jesus and what he was doing in our lives. There seemed to be power in this group thing. I wondered if this was what Jesus meant when he said, “Where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.”

  I recalibrated my prayer style, lining up with what I heard around me on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Vineyarders didn’t pray like me, I noticed. They didn’t approach God with long, ellipsis-filled soliloquies of blessing and requests, terrified of leaving something or someone out. They didn’t affirm the universal good of our common life force, or higher power, or most enlightened manifestation of being; they didn’t chant self-selected affirmations. They talked to God like a friend, only with a bit more hope and reverence. They expected Him to respond when they prayed in Jesus’ name, whether it was a prayer for healing, help with a difficult roommate, or a parking spot in Harvard Square on Sunday afternoon. It was different from what I’d heard before. Easier, somehow.

  In those first few months, church and small group felt like Christmas every week, as these new friends handed me the gifts of God’s Holy Spirit one by one: Peace. Love. Joy. Patience. Kindness. Generosity. Gentleness. Faithfulness. Self-control. All these were mine, they said, because of Jesus; I could unwrap them, take them home. “It comes with the package,” Paul assured me. “This is how you know Jesus is working in your life.” I didn’t quite get what he meant, but it seemed like one heck of a deal.

  I didn’t know what Jesus was doing in my life—I still couldn’t pin down who or where he was. But I watched and listened, begging God to bring me the sense of roots and spiritual belonging I saw all around me. I liked how Dave and Grace and Paul and Pascha lived, how they built their lives together around each other and their friends and Jesus. I liked the idea that this kind of love might be possible for me.

  The only ant at my little picnic was that I didn’t understand what my new friends meant when they described how Jesus saved them. I got all vague and foggy when they talked about their personal relationship with him, and how he freed them from their sins. I didn’t ask them what they meant, though. I liked my new life, with the prayer and the singing and the Saturday night dinner parties. I was afraid that if my new friends learned that I wasn’t sure about Jesus—that I was winging it, trying to figure everything out on the fly—they might have to kick me out.

  I was living a bit of a spiritual double life, trying to keep a handle on all this information. My morning reading took hours now, as I sat on the couch with Kylie, drinking my coffee and seeking spiritual ballast to get me through the day: I was back reading the Course, certain it could help me take Jesus seriously, along with Jayme’s books, which I unearthed to explain what the complicated language of the Course said. After that, I’d reach for one of Joyce Meyer’s books on making the most of my life. Finally, I’d open the Bible to whatever prophet or Gospel story Joyce mentioned in that morning’s chapter to make sure she wasn’t exaggerating, that her claims weren’t too good to be true (because it seemed like they must be, all those promises about victory and joy and overcoming obstacles to get to the promised land). Satisfied that she wasn’t embellishing, I’d close the Bible and ask God to make something good of my day. Then I’d set to work revising my “Feminine Magnetic Power” lectures, weaving Bible quotes and Jesus-isms in among the other principles comprising my philosophy of love.

  I invited the group to my next event: “As a few of you know,” I announced one Wednesday night, “I give lectures and classes on spirituality. Mostly I talk about astrology and the biblical revisions Jesus made through a book called A Course in Miracles.” Pascha stared at me, eyes wide. “But lately,” I continued, “I’m finding some exciting stuff in the Bible, so I’m adding that to my teachings. Anyway, my next lecture is this Friday night at the Unicorn Metaphysical Bookstore, and I’d love it if you all came!” I
smiled at the group, excited by how my attendance numbers would skyrocket once word of my work got out. (It would be years before I understood that the metaphysical smorgasbord of confusion and half-truths I brought to the group was the spiritual equivalent of showing up with a raging case of the smallpox, offering to give everyone a hug.)

  Paul and Pascha offered me a ride home that night. “So, Trish,” Pascha asked as we got in the car, “what do you talk about in your lectures?”

  “I talk about metaphysical principles,” I gushed. “You know—how Jesus shows us how more is possible in life; how we all need to actualize our highest good so we can manifest fully in the world.”

  “You mentioned that you find the Bible helpful,” Paul asked. “What do you like about it?”

  “I like Jesus’ pep talks,” I responded, eager for the chance to let them in on what I knew. “All you ever hear Christians talk about is the Crucifixion,” I complained. “But if you read the Gospels, Jesus spent most of his time making promises about how abundant our lives should be.”

  Paul missed the point. “The Crucifixion bothers you?” he asked.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said, a little exasperated. “Honestly, the Resurrection is what matters, because that shows us that we too can overcome death—that it’s all just a lie and an illusion. But beyond that, the Crucifixion isn’t important.” I explained how, according to the Course, Jesus is our divine elder brother sent to teach us to overcome the illusion of evil. “I believe in Jesus, he’s our role model,” I clarified. “If we try hard enough, each of us can be Jesus. And when that happens, we’ll realize that things like misery, sickness, unhappiness, and disappointment are imaginary, that only the love is real.”

  I WAS SHOCKED, and a little hurt, that Paul and Pascha didn’t come to hear me speak that Friday night. After our great talk, I’d really thought they’d be there.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spiritual Monogamy

  Our small group read portions of the Gospels—the four books at the front of the New Testament chronicling Jesus’ thirty-three years of life—over the course of the next several weeks. At first, I was thrilled at the prospect of a guided tour into Jesusland, with real people to answer my questions and point out the important sights along the way. But my enthusiasm waned as we dug into Jesus’ words and I learned that my years of spiritual training conflicted with every second or third thing he said.

  I was amazed, and infuriated, to discover his claim, “If you want to have a relationship with God, the only way to do it is through me.” I’ve had a relationship with God for years, I fumed. What can Jesus add to that? To my utter consternation, Jesus also claimed to be the only path to abundant life and the only way to get to heaven. As maniacally devoted as I was to the idea of romantic monogamy, it hadn’t occurred to me that spiritual monogamy might be a good idea, as well. (“If Jesus dated,” a friend suggested later, “wouldn’t he have dated exclusively?”) Worst of all, though, was Jesus’ claim that he was the only one who could forgive us of our sins. Why would I need forgiveness? I wondered. No other path talked about forgiveness in these terms, like something we need to receive. Forgiveness was something you gave, like compassion; it was a sign of your spiritual evolution.

  This forgiveness thing was tied somehow, I realized, with the Christian obsession with Jesus’ death. I was still baffled by songs like “The Wonderful Cross” and “Victory at Calvary” that made it sound like this was the site of a great battle rather than the location of a gruesome murder. Somehow, the songs suggested, we were supposed to come to the Cross (metaphorically? physically? through some sort of prayer-induced astral projection?) and leave our sins there, after which Jesus would give us abundant life here on earth and eternal life with him in heaven. It sounded like a sorority ritual combined with some sort of metaphysical timeshare, the chance to buy a piece of a multiroom vacation house in the afterlife. I stared at my new friends wide-eyed as they described this like it was the most logical thing in the world.

  I scoured Christian bookstores and Web sites for some reasonable explanation of these claims. I found pamphlets featuring “irrefutable laws,” illustrated with stick-figure drawings indicating that in my current state I was going to hell. The stick-figure flames were daunting, but I couldn’t figure out why this was certain to befall me, or what on earth Jesus had to do with this predicament. Several sources quoted C. S. Lewis (of Chronicles of Narnia fame) who, they alleged, proved that in light of Jesus’ claims about himself, there are only three possible conclusions anyone can reach. They called them “The Three Ls”: Jesus must be either Lord, a liar, or a complete lunatic. This was served up as an evangelical fait accompli, as if there was no possible way one could contemplate this truth and not capitulate immediately and beg for membership in the Christian Coalition. But to me, it made no sense at all. I read and reread these claims, but couldn’t figure out how they applied to my life. It reminded me of the way people tried to figure me out over the years—my single state, my failure to make relationships work. From my track record, there were only three possible conclusions anyone could reach: I must be a loser, a lesbian, or a complete lunatic. But it’s not as if deciding on one of these helped you understand me better, or even made it true.

  Honestly, when I thought about Jesus, I didn’t care about the details of what happened on the Cross, or even what fabulous afterlife party he might be inviting me to. What I wanted to know was could he help me? Was he the spiritual leader who could explain why, despite all this effort, I kept making the same mistakes over and over again? If I got some forgiveness along with the package, well—so be it.

  BUOYED BY THIS new perspective, I decided to read the Bible in its entirety. I was tired of other people’s conflicting opinions; I wanted to know the truth, who was right—the people who insisted that the Bible was a flawed document designed to repress us, or the people I met at the Vineyard who told me it was God’s personal message of hope and possibility.

  Intimidated by Genesis, I started with the book of Acts, in the middle of the New Testament. After that I read letters by Paul, Timothy, James, Peter, and John, struggled through Revelation, then circled back to Genesis and, “In the beginning . . .” I waded through tales of miraculous healing, vicious persecution, family turmoil, Jewish dietary laws, generations of plight and plenty, kings and villains I couldn’t keep track of, prayerful Psalms, wise Proverbs, a racy book about sex, dizzying prophets, and the four Gospels of Jesus. Every few hundred pages, I found a story I knew—Noah and the ark, Jonah and the whale, Joshua and the walls of Jericho. It was like running into an old friend in a new city, a bit of comfort in the midst of unfamiliar surroundings.

  My crash course in the Word of God took five months. By the end, I still mixed up Moses (who lead the Jews out of captivity in Egypt to the promise land of Canaan) with Abraham (who fathered all those Jews in the first place) in my mental time line. I didn’t emerge from my reading binge as anything close to a theological expert, yet, mysteriously, I felt like I knew a whole lot more about God. The Bible was different than other spiritual books I’d read: the more I studied it, the more I “got” the whole God thing—who He was, what He wanted from me. “For God knows the plans He has for you,” it said. “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.”

  The Bible, I discovered, was a hotbed of pithy advice on romance: “Do not awaken love before its time,” “Do not throw your pearls in front of swine,” “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Why didn’t anyone tell me this was in here? I thought. I read story after story of God bringing great husbands to single women—Isaac and Rebekah, Boaz and Ruth. Who wants a man from Mars, I thought scathingly, recalling one of the books I’d labored over trying to decipher why I couldn’t make my relationships work, when you can have a man from heaven? The Bible was like a father’s letter to his daughter, encouraging her to trust that he has her best interests at the forefront of h
is mind. In a way, it was almost like the preface to a fairy tale. I was stunned by how much I liked it—how the words spoke to me, how hopeful they made me feel even as they said, essentially, “You’ve been doing this all wrong; it’s time to recalibrate!” As I read the stories and poems and passages, I considered the outrageous possibility that maybe God was more interested in my life than I’d thought; that perhaps all He wanted from me was to sit still, trust Him, and let Him sort things out.

  As excited as I was about this new understanding, the Bible posed a whole host of theological problems, forcing me to confront irreconcilable differences between what I always thought of as “the truth” and what the Bible said.

  By far, the toughest thing I found was the idea that we human beings aren’t inherently good. According to the Bible, we have a human propensity to sin (miss the mark, screw up, be selfish and demanding and miserly and mean, hurt the people we love, disobey God) and that is our inherent nature from birth. No amount of effort or good intention will save us from our own personalized cycle of missteps and mistakes, it said; the only way to overcome it is through faith in Jesus Christ. This idea was as foreign to me as if it were written in the original Greek. Sure, I’d heard of Adam and Eve and the incident with the snake and the fruit tree. But I’d been told for so long, by so many sources, that our inherent nature is good (and that any evidence to the contrary is simply our personal failure to manifest as God designed us) that all the Christian rhetoric about “sinners in need of a savior” blew right over my head. The Course taught that sin was an illusion, “a moment when we forget that we are children of God.” That sounded so much nicer than all this inherent sinfulness stuff, so much more like how it should be, if the world was perfect. Unfortunately, however, reality didn’t bear witness to this if you ignore it, it will go away approach. For me at least, the baggage from my mistakes didn’t go away. It accumulated, stacking up around me until I practically needed a stack of affirmations and a staff of bellboys to get me up out of bed in the morning. The Bible told me that without Jesus, I might as well just lie there. There is, it said, no hope of being good on my own, and no point in trying, really—there is no continuum between good and bad to wiggle along, no scale of justice to influence with my choices, no point in doing nice things to tip the balance toward the “good person” side. Rather, it implied, the scale is permanently tipped, and we are all piled in a heap on the side away from God, wallowing in a mess of fear, shame, and regret that keeps us from the lives we want to live. None of our efforts, however well intended, can get us up out of that pile. According to the Bible, God sent Jesus to sit on the other side of this teeter-totter, to lift us out of the pit. And for those of us who want to, we can defy this spiritual gravity and slide up into his arms and get off this scale once and for all, trusting that no matter what we do, if we slide back to Jesus, he’ll lift us out of this cycle. This is, the Bible said, the mystery of God’s grace.