I walked over to Gullifty's on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill last night for dinner, a few drinks, and the unique condition of being totally alone with my thoughts (and my book--more on that in a moment) yet surrounded by conversations and boisterous activity simultaneously. The weekend left me feeling quite isolated and uncertain of myself--uncertain of my value to myself or indeed to others. I had to get out. When I arrived, I was disappointed to find that, first of all, there was no room for me at the bar, and secondly that everyone seated at the bar was there to watch the Steelers game--a bit more in the way of boisterous activity (and spontaneous screaming) than I had counted on. I could've fled to the coffee shop but that would have been bad form; the bartender, who I know, had already seen me come in. Besides, I was starving for real food. I sat alone at a cocktail high-top and opened my new book, 'The Gospel According to the Son' by Norman Mailer--a hypothetical account of the life of Jesus as related by Jesus Himself, employing a more straightforward, unambiguous language than we associate with much of the New Testament. (For the record, the only other Mailer piece I'd ever read was an extensive interview with Madonna--the pop star, not the Blessed Mother, just to clarify.)
Many of us suppose, perhaps, that Jesus must always have been aware of His importance, His magnificent appointment on Earth--His transcendent fluid existence bridging life and death, Heaven and Hell, God and humankind. In Mailer, here is a Jesus who seems detached from and somewhat nonchalantly ambivalent about--at times humbly unimpressed with--His divine purpose, a spectator of his own life. (Henceforth, then, I will leave him un-capitalized.) This lack of condescension and self-righteousness is quietly revolutionary in its approach to a most sacred, unchallengeable account of the very theological continent upon which all of Christianity was constructed. Of course, as a reader I would like to encounter Jesus as a modest and humorous young carpenter's apprentice, walking beside him on the dusty desert roads of human experience with all its sufferings and filth rather than the incomprehensible glowing perfection of some abstractly magic Heaven offering promises I will not accept.
Jesus the youthful bearded carpenter--what pride Mailer's Jesus took in his craft! Here is God grounded to the earth, to the trees, fruit of the soil. Here's a welcome intersection of scriptural Christianity and my admitted pantheist leanings--Jesus the tree-hugging hippie inside every bleeding heart willing to invite him in a bit. Thank the cosmos that Jesus had been a skilled woodworker friendly with fishermen, at home on an open sea where nets are cast for the promise of abundance, rather than some ambitious and sly apothecary or sneaky merchant of Oriental curiosities in the Nazarene markets. Then, at the age of thirty, as nearly I am now, the transformation in the River Jordan: immersion in brown water by John the Baptist, cousin of Christ (and another fairly grungy man presaging the hippie aesthetic). The man loved the desert and the sea, worked with his hands, hung with scoundrels and flesh-selling low ladies, embraced his own humanity--what's not to like here?!
Fifty pages into the book, I'm overcome by a warm and certain sense of peace along with a touch of scholarly purpose, already preparing the notes for this post. One of the low-functioning adults who works at Giant Eagle across the street squeezes in beside two men at the bar in Steelers garb and is instantly at home with them--accepted, valued, not spoken down to. It's rare to see individuals living with obvious mental impairments warmly embraced in the company of those we consider "normal," and the humanity of the occasion lifts my heart. By the end of dinner and my second drink, I realize that I'm watching the football game behind the bar and--gasp--actually paying attention to it! What the hell is wrong with me?
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