... and that’s what it’s all about

The vicar had always been fond of saying that, if his congregations knew what he truly thought about some of the articles of his faith, they would quickly be calling for his impeachment and would seek to have him exiled somewhere to sell aluminum siding. The truth is, the man’s principal anxiety has been rooted largely in his skepticism over the matter of miracles, those scripturally recorded phenomena introduced prominently into a church narrative that tells of a young girl’s preternatural rescue from a mental disorder, or the restoration of a man’s hearing or the defeat of another’s leprosy, or of jugs of water that mysteriously turn into fine wine. He’s of the notion that those accounts of wizardry, tied by the New Testament to Jesus of Nazareth, have long been used to sell individuals a commitment to ideology, no unlike the way odd and sensational ingredients are used to make toothpaste. The venerable cleric, a man devoutly faithful to his creed for decades, has nevertheless long admitted to unease over the emphasis placed on extraordinary flukes and fantasies — including, for starters, the unlikely conditions of Jesus’ birth, and the equally fishy circumstances surrounding his bounce-back from an ignominious execution. “Virgin births and physical resurrections?” “Fake news!” he’d be inclined to say. The old guy’s angst isn’t that he minds mythology or paradox of any sort; he’s long been enchanted by fiction and lore both sacred and secular. What’s irksome, he’s long contended, is the ecclesia continuing determination to imply historic accuracy to the walking-on of water and the feeding of thousands of people with a kid’s lunch. In so doing, it depicts the church’s founding father as some kind of magician capable of saving not just a soul from perdition but the soul’s garage from fire, his job from extinction, or her knees from arthritis. What our man mourns are the unremitting misrepresentations given to depicting the Galilean for whom magic, not the urging of companionship, kindness, honesty, compassion, is what underpins the ancient fidelity and discipline. Much as he’s anxious for continuous dialogue, to him Jesus the prestidigitator rises unreal, weird, beyond the sort of mortal ken that propelled Dietrich Bonhoeffer once helpfully to describe the “Man for Others.” The pastor struggles with Jesus the wand-waver who’s increasingly separated from humanity, increasingly dismissed from a very human search for mentoring, direction, friendship, peace, goodwill, charity ... salvation. Salvation? What’s the word mean, anyway? Ball players, cowboy singers, and American presidents apparently claim, with extravagant piety, to have found it in Jesus, attaching it, somehow, to once having had some personal chestnuts astoundingly pulled out of the fire. Does the “Man for Others” do that sort of thing ... save skins? Maybe. Or maybe his stilllively spirit is more likely to point the head toward inclusion, acceptance, understanding, curiosity, sacrifice, exercises in human service. The parson says he’s comforted in the believe that salvation lies not in the singing on to some beatified Houdini but, instead, rests importantly in an examination and ongoing conversation with an extraordinary figure who once made it his principal mission in life and death to encourage folks to give a hoot about people other than themselves. Ah well, these days our saintly divine is calming down a bit, and becoming a bit more confident that the “Man for Others” mission will stop getting bent out of shape and that, with a lot of hope — and a bit of hard work — his reality, his honour, his benevolence, his patience, his celebrated understanding and tolerance will settle down, modify, the world of hocus-pocus. Now that might just be miraculous. ’Cause everything else looks pretty much like card tricks.