Imaginary Jesus

by Matt Mikalatos

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Laurel and Hardy Meet Mohammad

  When I pulled into my driveway, Elders Hardy and Laurel were crouched over my sidewalk, white shirts pressed and nameplates on. My dad was working in our front yard. We have a lot of roses, and he’s better at caring for them than we are. The elders were hunkered down next to my kids, chalking the sidewalk. Zoey had drawn a reasonable picture of a horse and a shaky representation of her name. Allie had drawn a house with smoke coming out of it and a crooked version of her name. Elder Laurel had drawn a cat and Elder Hardy had drawn an amorphous blob. They, too, had signed their dubious masterpieces: “Elder Hardy” and “Elder Laurel.”

  Zoey came running to the truck and said to me as I got out, “Dad! See those two guys? They both have the same first name!” I grinned. I liked these guys so much and was glad to spend another afternoon with them.

  I sent the kids inside and the three of us decided to walk to Burgerville, just a few blocks away, for fresh strawberry milk shakes. After we got our drinks and sat down, Elder Hardy asked me if I had read the section of the Book of Mormon that they had suggested. I had, in fact, read it. It was a strange passage in which the “lost tribe of Israel” (ancient Jews in Latin America) meets the resurrected Christ. They are pleased to meet him and gather in orderly lines to take turns putting their hands into his side.

  “I read it,” I said. “And I have a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So you have this lost tribe of Israel—Semitic people—and what language was the Book of Mormon translated from again?”

  “Hebrew and Egyptian.”

  “And yet somehow Jesus introduces himself as Jesus Christ.” They stared at me blankly. I waited for them to put together my question. They just kept staring, so I said, “Christ is a Greek word. We would expect that a Hebrew text would say Messiah. Maybe it would be translated ‘anointed one.’ But for a Greek word to show up in the middle of a Hebrew text—that’s just weird. And then it talks about baptism, which is another Greek word. Both baptism and Christ are transliterated from Greek, meaning that they are basically taken over into English without changing them. They’re not translated. How do you explain that?”

  Elder Laurel said, “That’s a good question.”

  Elder Hardy said, “I don’t know the answer to that. But God knows the answer. And if you pray and ask God to show you the truth of the Book of Mormon, I can guarantee he will do that.”

  I took a sip of my milk shake, giving Elder Hardy a few seconds to collect himself. Then I started again. “The person I’m interested in is Jesus. Who is this Jesus who shows up and talks in Greek to a bunch of Jews stranded in America? He’s a god, but he was created by God. He sends a vision of himself to Joseph Smith and then . . .” I paused. Something had just occurred to me, a surprising connection that stopped me in my tracks.

  Elder Hardy said, “It requires faith, Matt, we’re not denying that. Jesus showed himself to Joseph Smith and gave him the golden tablets to be translated. After that, the golden tablets were taken up into heaven. We have no physical evidence of any of this. You have to trust it’s true.”

  “You know what’s weird?” I asked. “Joseph Smith and Mohammad have almost identical stories.”

  “I’m not really familiar with Islam,” Elder Hardy said.

  “Allah sent his angel to Mohammad while he was in a cave,” I explained.

  “Joseph Smith was in a grove of trees,” Laurel said.

  “Right. And an angel appeared with a vision of a purified religion to both of them. Then Mohammad dictated the scriptures and someone wrote them down.” I said, getting excited. “Mohammad was actually illiterate.”

  Hardy dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Joseph Smith took the gold tablets and covered his head and read from them as people wrote down what he said.”

  “He dictated, just like Mohammad.”

  Hardy pursed his lips and grimaced. “It’s not that similar.”

  “Both the Koran and the Book of Mormon were taken up to heaven,” I said. “Both men had multiple wives. There are many similarities. Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked. “All the similarities between the origins of Mormonism and Islam?”

  He didn’t seem concerned. “We would say Mohammad was a prophet too.”

  My jaw dropped. I had no idea that the Mormons believed this. And maybe that’s not official Mormon doctrine—maybe this was a strange heresy of the elder before me and not any reflection on his religion overall. Regardless, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just expressed my wonder by showing my tonsils.

  “There’s a pattern,” Elder Hardy said. “After Christ, about every six hundred years, God sends a prophet. Mohammad was one of those. Joseph Smith also came at the end of one of these six-hundred-year periods.”

  “Amazing,” I said. “What do you mean when you say he was a prophet?”

  “That he was a sort of spiritual genius, given insight by the Holy Ghost about spiritual things.”

  I thought maybe this was the equivalent of Hardy’s “God made the grammar mistakes” argument, but when I looked to Elder Laurel, he was nodding.

  This stick of dynamite completely derailed my train of thought. “I think this makes God seem schizophrenic,” I said at last. “Every six hundred years God gives humanity an entirely different system for interacting with him? The theology of Mormonism and Islam are vastly different. If both Joseph Smith and Mohammad are prophets, then God disagrees with himself pretty often.”

  Elder Laurel considered me thoughtfully, but Elder Hardy fell back on his Answer to Everything. “You need to pray and ask the Holy Ghost whether the Book of Mormon is true.”

  “You told me that last time,” I reminded him.

  “Did you do it?” Hardy asked eagerly.

  “No.”

  He sat back, disappointed. “You really should.”

  “Have you ever had a moment where Jesus spoke to you so clearly that you could hear the words?” I asked. “Have you ever known he was talking to you like talking to someone on the telephone? And you asked him questions and he talked back to you and told you things you had no way of knowing?”

  “No. We’re not high enough for God to speak to us that way,” Elder Hardy said. “He speaks that way to prophets and spiritual geniuses. Not to ordinary people.”

  “I disagree. I think he speaks to us every day and we drown out his voice by saying, ‘That can’t possibly be Jesus’ or ‘Jesus only speaks to spiritual geniuses’ or ‘I can’t believe that. My parents would be so disappointed if I followed the sound of this voice.’ I think we can ask him questions—important questions—and he’ll answer us.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Elder Hardy said, but Elder Laurel watched me with a curious look in his eyes.

  “I believe it,” I said. “I believe he’s here right now.”

  Elder Laurel surveyed the room carefully, but Elder Hardy told me that we should meet again in the future. He took out his calendar, and we tried to come up with a time, but I wasn’t all that interested anymore. As I walked home I decided to take the next day to walk around Portland and look for Jesus in the midst of the everyday. And it worked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Back in (the Red and) Black

  In a mystery novel, detectives are always returning to the scene of the crime. It’s the best way to catch a crook. Not to imply that Jesus is a crook or anything, but I thought, hey, I figured out I had an imaginary Jesus at the Red and Black Café, maybe the real Jesus would be waiting for me there. And as I walked down the streets of east Portland, headed for the café, I caught sight of a dusty brown donkey with a white star on her nose. I ran across traffic. The drivers were too used to it to swerve, but they did lazily glare at me. Someone halfheartedly flipped me the bird, but I saw that he had California plates. He hadn’t gone completely native yet.

  “Daisy!” I said. “Where have you been?”

  “I do have other cases
I’m working on,” she said. “In fact, in a few minutes I need to get over to the convention center.” But for now she walked with me toward the Red and Black. When we got there, she trotted up to the window and pointed with her nose at a trim man wearing a checkered shirt, a brown jacket, and a New York Yankees ball cap at a back table, eating what appeared to be a taco salad.

  “Is it hard pointing with your nose?” I asked.

  She sighed. “You know who I’m pointing at, right?”

  “I’m not sure. If you had fingers it would be much easier. Especially this finger,” I said. I pointed at it with my right hand. “It’s called a pointer finger.”

  “That’s George Barna,” she said. “He’s probably the most influential living researcher on Christianity and the church.”

  “Who’s the most influential dead researcher? Is it a zombie?”

  She didn’t laugh. In fact, she ignored me, a good sign that we were becoming close friends. “Some people say he’s the most quoted person in the Christian church,” she said.

  “Huh. Never heard of him.”

  Daisy shook her mane in frustration. “Just go in there and talk to him.”

  So I walked in the door and hoped no one recognized me from my earlier altercation with Pete and Imaginary Jesus. Then again, people at the Red and Black were all about revolution, and you can’t have sudden, momentous change without breaking a few chairs and knocking some heads into windowpanes. As I got closer to the man with the Yankees cap, I started to wonder if he wasn’t imaginary himself. I’d been duped before. And just because a talking donkey tells you something doesn’t mean it’s true.

  So I walked up to him and pinched him in the arm as hard as I could.

  “Ow!” Barna dropped his fork and glared at me. His look of annoyance immediately softened into pity. “You must be Matt Mikalatos,” he said. “Daisy told me you might do something ridiculous.”

  “Hey!” I said. “You can see Daisy too?”

  “It’s pretty hard not to notice a talking donkey.” He waved me over to the chair across from him and I took a seat. He took a bite of his taco salad. “This is the best salad I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “The food here is great.”

  I was shocked. “The chili is awful.”

  “You didn’t do your research,” Barna said. “Just over 63 percent of the Red and Black patrons agree that the chili here is mediocre . . . including the cook. But the rest of the food is exceptional.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “I like it here,” he said. “The idea of revolution and revolutionaries is one that’s important to me.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Daisy seems to think there’s some big reason we should meet.”

  “She said the same thing to me. She tells me that you’ve been wrestling with an imaginary Jesus.”

  “It’s hard work. And he keeps appearing in other forms. I don’t even know if I’ll recognize the real Jesus when he shows up. And I feel alone. No one else seems to be dealing with an imaginary Jesus.”

  He laughed. “Alone? My research shows that 67 percent of adults in the U.S. would say that they have an active relationship with Jesus that influences their life. But only 38 percent would say they’re certain that God speaks to them in a personal, relevant way. There’s a whole group of people out there who think that God is silent, even though they have relationship with him. What do you think of that?”

  I looked down at the table. “He seems silent to me right now. I’m looking for him, trying hard to find him, and there’s just this unbearable, empty nothing. Sometimes I wonder if he can even see that I’m hurting, and that I need to hear from him about all this.”

  George listened to me quietly. I shared a bit more about the miscarriage, and he told me that he had done research into what people thought about God’s response to our pain, too. Turns out that most people think God feels our pain with us. But I fell into the category of the 6 percent who just don’t know anymore whether he experiences our loss and grief. And I was starting to lean, honestly, toward the 21 percent who say God is aware of our pain but doesn’t have any real emotional response to it . . . not really feeling it like I was, like we are.

  “Listen,” George said. “The core belief of Christianity has to do with this spectacular moment when Jesus overcomes death by the power of his resurrection, and he shows that he is God when he rises from the dead. If God doesn’t care about our suffering, why would he be in the process of repairing the world? Jesus said that he came into the world so we could have life, abundant life. He’s not a God of the dead, but of the living. You’re at a vulnerable place right now, Matt, where you’re most susceptible to imaginary Jesuses. You’re window-shopping. You need to stop and look at these Jesuses carefully. Test them. Question them. The real Jesus isn’t afraid of your questions. The truth is our friend. That’s why I do my research, so we can look at what’s really happening in the church and society instead of what we wish was happening. Jesus called himself the truth, as I’m sure you know. The way, the truth, and the life.”

  And somehow I knew that this was what I had come here to hear. Jesus wasn’t afraid of my questions, and he’s not afraid of the truth. “I think it would be helpful to look at all this research you’ve done,” I said.

  “I have a report online,” George said. “I’ll send you a link.”

  Daisy was standing at the window, beckoning me with her snout. Boy, hands would sure be useful for her. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, I’ll take a look. But I have one more question.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can I try that taco salad?”

  And I did. It tasted like heaven would taste if it were in Mexico. And if heaven had somehow run out of meat. I stepped out of my new favorite restaurant and Daisy gave me a long look from her dark eyes. “Let’s go,” she said. “Pete is meeting me by the convention center to deal with a couple of imaginary Jesuses, and we thought you should tag along.”

  George stood outside the restaurant and watched us go. “Matt,” he called, just as I was barely in earshot. “You’ll know him when you meet him. You won’t have any question that he’s the real Jesus.” And he was right. About that and the taco salad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Parable of Zombie Boy and Werewolf Boy

  Daisy and I walked for a long, long time. I had left my car somewhere in east Portland and I knew I’d have to walk back for it, but I didn’t want to ditch Daisy now that I had found her again.

  “How was your time with George?” she asked. “Was it helpful?”

  “Not as helpful as him giving us a ride,” I said. “My feet hurt.” But we had finally come to MLK Jr. Boulevard and I could see the twin glass towers of the convention center. “So there are some imaginary Jesuses over there?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s a New Age festival in town. There’s a huge mess of imaginary Jesuses hanging around across the street there. Pete and I are meeting to try to point out a few of them to the people at the festival.” She stopped at the corner and flicked her ears. She tried to hit the crosswalk button with her nose, but it didn’t work. “Do you mind?” she asked. I hit the button and we waited for the little white man to tell us we could cross.

  “Do you ever wish there was a little white donkey on the crosswalk signs?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I don’t expect you humans to think about other species.”

  We walked toward the convention center’s entrance. “Speaking of imaginary Jesuses,” I said, “you should meet these Mormon guys I’ve been hanging out with. They have some crazy ideas about who Jesus is.”

  “Not much different than yours,” said a handsome Middle Eastern man on the corner near the MAX stop. He was probably in his midtwenties and he had just handed a sack lunch to a homeless man. He wore tattered jeans and army boots, a collared shirt with a T-shirt over it, and a thick blue jacket on top of that. His hair was black, curly, and chin length, pushed back behind
his ears and held in place by a hemp hat. His sideburns threatened to close the shaved space leading to his goatee, but they had been restrained sometime in the last several days. “How is your imaginary Jesus any different than theirs?” he asked.

  Despite the fact that I hadn’t been talking to him, I said, “Mine was closer to the real thing.”

  The man laughed. “That’s true. Can I tell you a story?”

  Daisy didn’t say anything, so I answered, “Sure.”

  He smiled. The homeless man next to him said good-bye and they shook hands warmly. “A man went to buy a new car. The dealer showed him a car made out of stone. It had stone wheels that didn’t turn and stone seats that didn’t have any give. It had a stone steering wheel. The doors didn’t open. The man told him, ‘No, I want a real car.’ So the dealer showed him another car. This one was made out of wood. It was sanded to perfection and painted with metallic paints. The steering wheel turned and the doors opened. Some of the parts under the hood moved. But the engine couldn’t start.” The man spread his hands wide to me, and then motioned toward the street. I could see the cars whizzing by, headed deeper into Portland. “That wasn’t a real car either.”

  I scratched my head. Daisy had wandered a little ways away and was watching me carefully, her ears flicking. “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “It’s a parable.”

  “I thought parables were supposed to be about stuff that people knew about, like everyday life. And yours was about cars. I don’t know anything about cars . . . or what that story had to do with anything at all.”

  “Ha-ha! I can dig that. Here’s another story. Are you ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Once there were two guys in high school who couldn’t get a date to save their lives.”

  “I understand better already.”