While in New Bern this weekend I went looking for Jesus, and after three hours of searching Christian stores, I gave up. My heart didn’t see anything it liked.
Let me explain. What I’m looking for is a statue of Jesus that I can put on my mantle with Buddha and Shiva. My house is an external reflection of my inner mental house, where I live and worship, and my mind likes to see physical representations of its mental images surrounding it. Adults and children who like stuffed animals know what i mean.
I live in three rooms , or houses, which are built in three expanding circles. The first inner circle just has an I am, a center of consciousness, and this is where my act of worship originates. Here is the Word, or OM, which seems to be an infinite space without walls, light or darkness, and thought cannot come in there. I really can’t describe what is in this room, because thought has never been there. it only can only stand with its ear to the door and get reports from insight and faith of what’s in there.
The next room, which is a circle around this center room, is where little self, thought and images live. Here there are images that hopelessly try to give a form to what’s in the center room, because without some form thought couldn’t even know there was a center room where it couldn’t go.
And the third room is the physical world, which is the whole universe that thought thinks (mistakenly) is out there, external to itself. Here is where I want to put the statue of Christ.
As I look at why this is proving difficult, the problem is not just in New Bern. When it comes to Christian statues, we are poor. Catholicism still has a lot of statues, but Protestants sit in an empty room.
It is easy to find good statues of Buddhas and Indian gods and goddesses. Their variety seems to have no end, from the cheap to the very expensive and beautiful. And all the statues tell stories or explain a whole philosophy through the symbols hanging around the god’s arms and head. All the senses can get involved with these religions.
The Protestant Reformation in its zeal to clean up what it saw as false gods or idols, declared war on religious statues, and now we are left with a cross and a nice looking young man with a beard and robes. The outer room where the statues reflected the mental room is gone. And we are only left with the mental room of thought. The Word has become our words and they have become what we worship.
However, unless there is a secret inner room where thought can’t go, then thought builds its own church full of false idols. We need another reformation to clean up this room.
But in the meantime I will continue my search for a statue of Jesus Christ that makes my heart reach out and take it off the shelf.
Posted under General Observations
This post was written by ed on March 27, 2006
Ed,
Let your heart reach out and take the statue off the shelf at eBay. Search for Jesus statue and you will find 549 different choices.
May Christ be with you!
Would Jesus use the internet? Yeah, He probably would. In fact, He might be on there right now. How would we know? Well, I found out. Here is his URL.
http://www.jesus.com/
I want you to use the internet. You are not Jesus. Buy a Jesus! Let Jesus use UPS. Don’t mix the salt and pepper.
Sam, thanks
Your comments on my Jesus search were quick and to the point. “Get real,” you said to me, and I knew you were saying something important when I read them, especially the second one. This one went to the bone. I felt this flush of embarrassment flood over me, like someone caught on stage with their pants open, or something exposed that they didn’t know they were exposing. That is what so good about that hot flush that burns the brain like a high fever. We even turn red. It is a kind of hell, isn’t it. A flash of hell.
So what was I embarrassed about. Well, as you pointed out, I was getting too caught up in my words. That’s the tar baby I keep getting stuck too. Whatever the tools we use, there is also the danger that we believe the tools are the most important thing. So I was getting a little too cute with the Jesus thing.
You also helped me this weekend find something else. It was you that led the parade onto the stage of the jazz band. It was you who led us out of our seats and into the music. It was you who embodied the true meaning of jazz as a celebration of life.
If Jesus had been there I’m sure he would have been on the stage with you, clapping, raising the umbrella up and down, feet going with the beat.
Well, maybe He was there. Maybe that’s what or who Jesus really is. When we jump into life, into the dance, without reservation or embarrassment, we jump into that consciousness that to me is Jesus. When we become the music, we also become the bread and the wine. Then everybody gets a taste. Thanks for the taste. Ed (Sam is the husband of my sister-in-law who hosted us in New Bern)