The Jesus of Cleveland would probably have moved away a long time ago

I'm interested in Jesus, despite my decade-point-five-plus years of Catholic schooling. It's a loose interest--one of those interests you have that you find yourself meaning to do something with, when you have the chance to get around to it; like learning how to do origami, or organizing the boxes of baseball cards from when you were a kid. The sort of thing that runs around in the back of your head, maybe occasionally gets dabbled with out in the real world, never amounting to much but never going away, either.

And while there's plenty to be interested in when it comes to Jesus, I'm mostly drawn to the idea of Jesus as source and subject of story. Religion, Christianity--it's had its ups and downs. The downs are usually loud (Holy Wars? The current American political climate? Fucking creationism, for His sake?) and the ups are usually quiet (those who get it; those who do nice things for other people). Right now, seems like there's a lot of down to all of it--I guess its up, if you're standing on the other side of a line from where I'm looking. I won't lie; I don't get it all, I haven't studied enough or paid enough attention to be someone who can really speak about all of it with great authority. But I think that it's safe for me to say that, whether its just a current through the stream, or a core to the whole ball of wax, story has a certain important place in the entire Jesus & religion thing.

Yeah, big keen insight, I know; story being important to a religion founded on a book of stories. Woo, you say, please; let me donate to your lovely little Websitelogcast to keep the hits coming. And yet, I think it's something still worth keeping in mind. I mean, creationism? Metaphorical stories taken as literal truth? What the hell, right? I don't know, either.

But to get to a point: it's not so much the stories within the Jesus religion that are most interesting to me. Not the accepted, repeated stories, at least. What I find interesting is story that cuts through the myths, that takes the traditions and builds on them or cuts them up. Jesus: Remixed, if you will. Because I think at heart--without even saying what my own religious beliefs actually are, because I don't know what they are--the Jesus story, in all its forms and variations, is a hell of a good story. Here's this poor guy, he's told he's the son of God, and then he dies, because people are bad people. You know? Cut through the Our Fathers and the rote repetitions of creeds, and you've got enough materials to found a dozen novels on. Er, give or take.

Repetition is a sort of enemy true faith. Which is where I think stories that somehow challenge the canon, that distort it and alter it and reshape it like so much putty, these stories are somehow important to faith, by allowing one to be surprised again by what was so amazing in the first place. If you're a fan of those "a:b::c:d" things (What is the word for that? I'm completely blanking out. First correct answer gets my undying love and devotion. Or maybe a chocolate bar.) (They're called analogies and the winner of the chocolate bar is Chris!) you could think of it like, "challenging stories" are to "religion" as "metaphor and simile" are to "the real world". Completion of this "a:b::c:d" thing (analogy!) is left as an exercise to the reader.

So, all that lovely backdrop in mind: if you'd like to see what I mean, go out and pick up Tod Goldberg's book Simplify and read the opening story, "The Jesus of Cathedral City". Now, admittedly, I've got no idea what was going through his mind when he wrote the story. Everything that's come before this paragraph in this post, that's all just me, and my mental baggage, the stuff I brought with me into the story, when I read it, just now. I mean, maybe Tod had these thoughts about challenging fundamental natures of etc etc etc, or maybe he was just thinking, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if, etc etc etc," or maybe the power and the glory and the spirit of God actually moved into Tod's writing hand and wrote the story for him and to this day Tod still isn't even aware that this story exists and that it's been attributed to him in a book with his name on it. I don't know. But it doesn't really matter anymore, because now the story's out there for people to read, and people like me, who have their own thoughts and ideas about the way the world works, they're going to read the story and get certain things out of it, things they might be putting there themselves in the first place. (Just like all art. Yeah, I know. Can I give you so much free keen insight and sleep comfortably at night? Yes I can.) What I know is that I enjoyed the story very much, considering what I knew going into it; and I know that--well, am pretty sure that--even without any pseudo-deep thinking about religion and the nature of story and their overlapping and all that, that this would still be a pretty damn good short story. So really, either way, you read the story, you win. Unless you're the type of person who doesn't like story at all, then you just suck.

Or in short: While I'm not usually a short story person, "The Jesus of Cathedral City" just slapped me in the face and stole my pocket change. And made me like it.