prelude: werewolf jesus

I don’t have any grandfathers. Only Mem and Grammy, my grandmothers. I have blurry memories of my mom’s father, Grampy. He and Mem had been divorced for quite some time before I came along, so we didn’t see him too often. I remember he drank strawberry milkshakes and had an oxygen tank. I remember my little ten-year-old self being picked up early from a sleepover because Grampy had died, and then all of the sudden we had a new washing machine. On the other side of the family is my paternal grandfather, Ernest William Clark, - “Eunie”, as Grammy refers to him, her Japanese mouth trying so hard to form the “r”. I don’t know much about him. He passed away when my dad was my age, just finishing his second year in the Marine Corps. I know that he was a tall skinny man who played the piano when no one was around. I know that he was a pharmacist before pharmacology was a profession of wealth. I know he met Grammy in Japan during the war and brought her to America when she was pregnant with my dad’s older brother. I could parrot back the facts to you all day but I still don’t really know who he was because I never hung out with him. I know him through my dad’s stories and through my book report facts- I know about him. I couldn’t tell you how he would react if I said the word “bastard” (it’s not really a swear…some people are ok with it) or if he would cry during PS I Love You. I really wish I had gotten to know him in that way, so I could understand how my dad loves and misses him, even when he doesn’t say so.

I guess what I’m trying to explain is that I don’t know Jesus. I grew up Christian, with the person of Jesus tossed around in all of my conversations, like the ubiquitous imaginary friend. Like my Grandpa, I have been told about him my whole life. I was the frequent champion of Bible Quest in my house, so I can rattle off a list of facts about him. But I don’t know Him.  I know versions of Him and the longer I live, the less I trust that these versions resemble Him at all.

For my senior volunteer hours in high school, I worked at a thrift store run by a local church. It wasn’t a passion for elderly-scented hats or sequined sweaters that made me choose the Blessing Barn. It was just that my two best friends worked there and our supervisor was blind (literally), so we just did whatever we wanted. Our work days usually consisted of making fun of the clothes, playing with the creepy hand-shaped doll that no one ever bought, singing along to (blind) Christine’s gospel music and again, making fun of the clothes. Overseeing all of our mischief was Werewolf Jesus. I named him that, much to the giggling shock of my good Christian friends. It was a portrait of Jesus that hung on the wall, in which he looks as though he is painfully animorphing into some sort of shaggy beast. He had a unibrow, yellow eyes, heavy sideburns and a slightly voracious look. Without the divine glow about him, you’d think he was from a Geico commercial. We made a lot of jokes about Werewolf Jesus, always glancing sideways, not sure how close we were flirting with blasphemy. At the time it was funny because everyone at our little New England Christian academy knew that Jesus was blonde, with blue eyes and impeccable dental work. Plus, it was absolutely absurd to think that He would ever sport a unibrow. We had all watched the musical cartoons in Sunday school where Jesus, played by an animated, moustached Anne Hathaway, blinked his big, blue, Bratz doll eyes and healed people with his pale hands. Meanwhile, his fat, swarthy disciples, played by ex-Taliban members, looked on in tanned amazement.

I wish someone had told me back then that Werewolf Jesus was in fact, more on the accurate side of Biblical history than this cartoon Jesus - the White Anglo Saxon Protestant Jesus. For goodness sake, He was from the Middle East and slept in fields- He probably went days without washing his armpits. He was dirty. He was shaggy. He was hungry. He may or may not have had a unibrow. In modern times He would be “randomly searched” every time He tried to fly somewhere. Why was I taught by so many earnest Sunday school teachers that He was the kind of man who would fly first class and sip a mimosa? If I was going to fill my head with endless facts about Him, I should have at least made sure they were accurate.

If anyone ever trusted me with a Sunday school class, I would ask for middle schoolers or high schoolers. I would send them home to read the book of Luke or John with this assignment in mind: describe Jesus to me. Pretend you’re not a Christian; pretend you’re a dirty little pickpocket observing Him in a crowd, or an old man sitting on the porch, watching him preach. Imagine you ran into him at the market and did that awkward dance, trying to get out of each others’ way, or gave him a flat tire by stepping on his sandal. How would he react? How would he treat people, talk to them? Would he haggle for a lower price? Would he wash his hands after he peed – like really wash them, not just rinse and shake?

Then we would sit around and talk about it, based on what they had read about Him and His character. I would lean in and drink up everything these little detectives had to tell me about Him, all the things I missed because I can’t see the forest through the trivia. I wish I had had an assignment like that before I came to college. I wish that instead of things being fed to me in this condensed soup version of religion, that I had been allowed to wonder, to search out answers for myself. I wish I had been guided more than instructed.

I have all of these Sunday school notions drilled into my head and at times it feels like it has been a detriment to my relationship with God. Like all the Sunday school and Christian books and Christian school and Christian college has created a lot of white noise with Jesus buried somewhere in the center. I just read an account of some girl who noticed her Christian friend really, truly loved people. One drunken night she started crying and got on her knees and told God she wanted to genuinely love and help people, like her friend, but she couldn’t because she was selfish and needed something bigger. I wish I could boil my faith down to something that simple. I think maybe sometimes its better to develop a worldview and then realize how Jesus is the significance that is missing, who fits in so perfectly and fills all the gaps, than to start with WASP Jesus and this complicated stigmatized view of how to live like Him that is so big and noisy that it fills your vision.

It makes me want to shut down the arena in my head and kick everyone out- just erase everything and start over. Find out who He really is.