infinite

Photo by Mario Verduzco on Unsplash

“I feel infinite,” he said. A Perfect Song had just finished playing on the radio, and he was riding with two new friends, the first friends he had made since his best—and only—friend in middle school committed suicide the year before. The new friends looked at him then, like he’d said something profound; like they were just realizing he wasn’t just another high school freshman, he was someone special. I finished the book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky the day after Christmas, and infinite is how I felt. So I pulled my husband out of his office so we could feel infinite together for a while. Feeling infinite is the perfect way to celebrate surviving another year, another Christmas.

Infinite is exactly the feeling Jesus seemed to spend his whole life chasing. It is scarcely possible to avoid his story this time of year, it’s in about every other song on the radio, and that’s if you don’t listen to the Christian stations. Confronted with children’s storybook versions of the story, my daughter wished for a time machine so she could find out “what really happened.” That is a good Christmas wish. Since the magic of the season doesn’t extend that far, I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ life and what it means to me now that I no longer have his flag tattooed on my forehead, metaphorically speaking. For one thing, I do not buy the traditional manger story. In a large village full of women, it seems wildly unlikely that Joseph wouldn’t have gone for help and that Mary wouldn’t have immediately been whisked away to someplace warm, clean, and full of experienced birth attendants. That’s just the sort of thing people do in situations like that. Joseph probably spent that Holy Night getting properly smashed in company with sympathetic village men, or pacing in front of the house where Mary was laboring, or alternating between the two. And I rather doubt those women would have let a bunch of smelly shepherds in, either, no matter how many heavenly beings they claimed to have seen. Birth, and everything that had to do with bleeding women, was strictly women’s business. But, it makes for a better story if Mary had to deliver the son she claimed was God’s all by herself in a filthy barn.

And that’s the big question, isn’t it? Who’s son was he, really? Of the people who mattered to her, only Joseph and her cousin Elizabeth believed her, and he had to be scared into it by a dream. Or, so he claimed. Maybe they just got carried away in a field one day and made the whole thing up to cover, a bold move for that day and age. Jesus would have been labeled “Bastard” as soon as they returned to Nazareth, small towns being what they are. No wonder he spent his boyhood studying so hard that at 12 he could match any temple scholar in Jerusalem. No wonder he so desperately needed to feel special that he came to whole-heartedly embrace the idea that he had been fathered by God—and then, perhaps because he craved connection with the greater community that had rejected him, went a step farther in declaring that all people are the very children of God, inherently divine and inherently blessed. And he meant ALL people: women, children, foreigners, foreign sympathizers, prostitutes, the unclean; everyone treated as outsiders in the Jewish spiritual hierarchy of the day Jesus escorted, as it were, directly into the Holy of Holies. Beautiful blasphemy. No wonder the people hung on his every word. No wonder the religious and political leaders feared him as much as they did. No wonder he outlived, in at least one sense, their successful murder-by-tribunal. No wonder his is still a common household name, strong enough to swear by.