In my dream, I had a hangnail.
In real life, I am terrible with hangnails. I semi-frequently pick and peel at the corners of my nails until I pull the skin away. When I was younger, I pushed this far enough that it resulted in at least one nasty infection. Nowadays, I do my best to stop before I draw blood—or at least before the bleeding gets serious.
But in this dream, it was a far worse compulsion. I couldn't get this hangnail out of my mind. I couldn't keep myself from picking at what, to my other fingers, felt like that one little bit of unsmooth skin, that one niggling piece that kept me from being at rest. And it hurt. God, did it hurt. It hurt to leave it alone, and it hurt to peel it away. I had no choice but to keep going.
It was clear to me, before long, that I didn't even have a hangnail: I had a wound where the hangnail used to be. I was trying to "pick away" the wound, as if it was possible to carve a wound out of me and leave behind unblemished skin. I knew it was unreasonable of me. But I couldn't stop. Because this pain, and this deep, agitated desire to pick my pain away, was fundamentally a part of me. It was me—or, as a Buddhist might describe it, I identified with my pain so deeply that I thought with as my pain, felt as my pain, understood the world as my pain. The rest of me was somewhere far away, forgotten. I couldn't remember how to remember who I was, or who else I'd ever been.
And there was something unseemly, something unnerving, about how much pain I was in. Everybody in my life saw what I was doing, and it made them vaguely queasy. I was pushing my friends and loved ones away, maybe just for the moment, but maybe forever. Certainly none of them wanted to help—and I knew that that was reasonable, because there was nothing they could do that would help. And maybe this incident was changing how they saw me forever. Maybe they would forever think less of me for this. Maybe this was the moment that I lost the people who meant the most to me, because of how embarrassing and disgusting it was that I couldn't keep myself from doing this.
I howled, I screamed, in pain and misery and anguish. I howled with how much it hurt, how much I was hurting myself. I howled, teeth clenched, with the awareness of what I was doing to others, the sense that I was hurting them, the ridiculous humiliating sense that I was doing something that I knew was wrong and bad and simply couldn't help myself, couldn't even remember how to plead for them to help me.
More than anything, I howled and screamed with the awareness that this was who I was now: that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, something fundamentally loathsome, something at the core of my being that I couldn't control or change and that guaranteed a lifetime of pain, a lifetime of hurting myself and others, a lifetime of scaring other people away and deserving it, deserving to be alone, because the best thing I could do for anybody else was to keep them from being my friend or loving me or spending even a moment with me. That was the deepest pain of all: the awareness, the certainty, that I deserved all the suffering I'd ever experience, that I was a blight on anyone who dared give me the time of day, that I warranted only fear and contempt and disgust.
And then Jesus came, and he sat with me.
He didn't heal me. He didn't make my wounds go away. He didn't even stop me from hurting myself more than I already had. He just sat with me, in my torment and anguish, my terror and my wretchedness. And he stayed there, and he shared my pain.
He stayed there as I screamed and cried and howled and sobbed. He stayed there as I hurled fear and rage around me like a storm I couldn't begin to control, aimed sometimes at myself and sometimes at him and sometimes at nothing at all. He stayed there, and he let me hurt: he gave me permission to suffer as I was suffering, he showed compassion for my pain, and he loved the person who my pain had turned me into. He loved me, not for who I was at my best, but for who I was at my very worst. He loved the version of me that compulsively, helplessly did the wrong thing, the scary thing, the awful thing. Everything that made me who I was, in that moment, sank into the endless well of his love and his patience. The infinite horror that I'd become met the infinite kindness that he offered me, and his kindness made my horrors finite. Until the tormented animal of me began to recede, and I started to catch my breath, and, bit by bit, my pain and fear and misery ebbed away, leaving something shuddering, shaking, drained, and ultimately at peace.
Then I woke, and knew I'd had a vision of something profound and very real.
______________________
There's a song I love by the Legendary Pink Dots, a band typically known for their macabre and nightmarish imagery and not for their devotion to Jesus Christ. It's called No Matter What You Do, and it's quite ghastly, and listening to it helped me understand why certain messages of Christian faith seem so grotesque and masochistic and unpleasant.
I don't think that Edward Ka-Spel, who writes all of the Legendary Pink Dots' music, thinks of himself as Christian. "No Matter What You Do" feels like a critique of a certain kind of Christian, or perhaps a challenge. It's a rendition of Christ at his most horrible, Jesus-as-goth-icon. And what's fascinating about it is how it goes about being so nasty: namely, it takes the central premise of Christianity as literally as humanly possible.
In real life, I am terrible with hangnails. I semi-frequently pick and peel at the corners of my nails until I pull the skin away. When I was younger, I pushed this far enough that it resulted in at least one nasty infection. Nowadays, I do my best to stop before I draw blood—or at least before the bleeding gets serious.
But in this dream, it was a far worse compulsion. I couldn't get this hangnail out of my mind. I couldn't keep myself from picking at what, to my other fingers, felt like that one little bit of unsmooth skin, that one niggling piece that kept me from being at rest. And it hurt. God, did it hurt. It hurt to leave it alone, and it hurt to peel it away. I had no choice but to keep going.
It was clear to me, before long, that I didn't even have a hangnail: I had a wound where the hangnail used to be. I was trying to "pick away" the wound, as if it was possible to carve a wound out of me and leave behind unblemished skin. I knew it was unreasonable of me. But I couldn't stop. Because this pain, and this deep, agitated desire to pick my pain away, was fundamentally a part of me. It was me—or, as a Buddhist might describe it, I identified with my pain so deeply that I thought with as my pain, felt as my pain, understood the world as my pain. The rest of me was somewhere far away, forgotten. I couldn't remember how to remember who I was, or who else I'd ever been.
And there was something unseemly, something unnerving, about how much pain I was in. Everybody in my life saw what I was doing, and it made them vaguely queasy. I was pushing my friends and loved ones away, maybe just for the moment, but maybe forever. Certainly none of them wanted to help—and I knew that that was reasonable, because there was nothing they could do that would help. And maybe this incident was changing how they saw me forever. Maybe they would forever think less of me for this. Maybe this was the moment that I lost the people who meant the most to me, because of how embarrassing and disgusting it was that I couldn't keep myself from doing this.
I howled, I screamed, in pain and misery and anguish. I howled with how much it hurt, how much I was hurting myself. I howled, teeth clenched, with the awareness of what I was doing to others, the sense that I was hurting them, the ridiculous humiliating sense that I was doing something that I knew was wrong and bad and simply couldn't help myself, couldn't even remember how to plead for them to help me.
More than anything, I howled and screamed with the awareness that this was who I was now: that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, something fundamentally loathsome, something at the core of my being that I couldn't control or change and that guaranteed a lifetime of pain, a lifetime of hurting myself and others, a lifetime of scaring other people away and deserving it, deserving to be alone, because the best thing I could do for anybody else was to keep them from being my friend or loving me or spending even a moment with me. That was the deepest pain of all: the awareness, the certainty, that I deserved all the suffering I'd ever experience, that I was a blight on anyone who dared give me the time of day, that I warranted only fear and contempt and disgust.
And then Jesus came, and he sat with me.
He didn't heal me. He didn't make my wounds go away. He didn't even stop me from hurting myself more than I already had. He just sat with me, in my torment and anguish, my terror and my wretchedness. And he stayed there, and he shared my pain.
He stayed there as I screamed and cried and howled and sobbed. He stayed there as I hurled fear and rage around me like a storm I couldn't begin to control, aimed sometimes at myself and sometimes at him and sometimes at nothing at all. He stayed there, and he let me hurt: he gave me permission to suffer as I was suffering, he showed compassion for my pain, and he loved the person who my pain had turned me into. He loved me, not for who I was at my best, but for who I was at my very worst. He loved the version of me that compulsively, helplessly did the wrong thing, the scary thing, the awful thing. Everything that made me who I was, in that moment, sank into the endless well of his love and his patience. The infinite horror that I'd become met the infinite kindness that he offered me, and his kindness made my horrors finite. Until the tormented animal of me began to recede, and I started to catch my breath, and, bit by bit, my pain and fear and misery ebbed away, leaving something shuddering, shaking, drained, and ultimately at peace.
Then I woke, and knew I'd had a vision of something profound and very real.
______________________
There's a song I love by the Legendary Pink Dots, a band typically known for their macabre and nightmarish imagery and not for their devotion to Jesus Christ. It's called No Matter What You Do, and it's quite ghastly, and listening to it helped me understand why certain messages of Christian faith seem so grotesque and masochistic and unpleasant.
I don't think that Edward Ka-Spel, who writes all of the Legendary Pink Dots' music, thinks of himself as Christian. "No Matter What You Do" feels like a critique of a certain kind of Christian, or perhaps a challenge. It's a rendition of Christ at his most horrible, Jesus-as-goth-icon. And what's fascinating about it is how it goes about being so nasty: namely, it takes the central premise of Christianity as literally as humanly possible.
Jesus loves the little children
Even when they torch the cat
Jesus loves the little cat
That flies then tortures this and that
Jesus loves, yea, that which stings
Yea, that which stinks
Yea, look! No fingers!
Jesus just loves everything
We do not deserve him
I've written before about Jack Miles' interpretation of The Book of Job—namely, that he sees it as Job holding God in judgment, and finding his actions unforgivable, and God realizing that for humankind to be created in his image means that humanity does, in fact, have the right to judge his actions. And I mentioned, there, that in the original order of the Tanakh, which differs somewhat from the Old Testament, Job's conversation with God is the last time that God ever directly interacts with human affairs. Unless, that is, you then proceed to the New Testament, in which God returns as Christ specifically to be tortured worse than Job ever was... and to love and forgive and save, not only the worthy, but the men who crucified and murdered him.
I don't love the whole "Christ died for our sins" framing. I've seen it used far too often as a way to guilt and shame and judge and reject both non-Christians and Christians alike. The way I'd personally frame it—as a non-believer, mind you—is that Christ loved us, not only despite our sins, but for our sins. That Christ's love extends all the way from the paragons of virtue that we could hypothetically be down to the murderers we might hypothetically become. That no matter what we do—even when what we do seems truly unforgivable—we are worthy of love, so long as we allow ourselves to genuinely ask for it. And it's the asking that is truly the catch here: that love may always be available to us, but it's still up to us to acknowledge that we need it, to reach out for it, to admit to the awful wretched feelings inside us that cause us to lash out and do evil deeds, and to admit that we can't help ourselves, that we are doomed to forever be ourselves, unless we let ourselves be lowly, and ask for the salvation—in a manner of speaking—that can only be ours once we admit that we need it.
Or, as a far more famous song puts it:
Amazing grace (how sweet the sound)
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears relieved;
how precious did that grace appear
the hour I first believed!
______________________
Around the time that I had this dream of mine, I'd been spending a lot of time reading works by Elizabeth Bruenig, who is a somewhat controversial figure among the progressive left. Bruenig, who calls herself a leftist and is outspoken about her Christian faith, had recently spoken with Sean Illing about her concept of forgiveness, specifically about seeing it as a far more radical act than it's often conceived:
The truth is that forgiveness pertains to a situation in which the person is guilty and culpable. That is when the question of forgiveness actually opens. It does not open up when you have a situation where somebody is not responsible for the offense. That’s not forgiveness. Forgiveness is when you decide to permanently forgo seeking restitution or vengeance — or however you want to think about it — for an offense that someone really did commit. [...]
People are very angry, especially when you have forms of systematized oppression that have operated for a very long time, and you finally have an opportunity to reckon with those. I think it’s very difficult for a lot of people to say, “Okay, so for the first time we have the opportunity to deliver accountability here and you’re asking us to just walk away and say never mind?” That’s not necessarily what forgiveness is, but it does mean asking an individual to decline to prosecute, to the fullest extent of their rights, the offense. And that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Forgiveness gets confused with so many things. It gets confused with mitigation or exoneration or with this idea that we have to pretend that what took place wasn’t all that bad, which is just wrong in my view. But more critically, forgiveness is a very difficult moral practice. And so when you get in a situation where you’re asking someone to forgive, the response often comes from a place of, “Look, I was victimized, I did nothing wrong, I was minding my business and someone hurt me and I’ll never get that back. Now you’re telling me I have to do this extra work? I have to add a layer of emotional labor and the person who caused this harm is off the hook?” And fuck, that’s not an unreasonable feeling to have there. I get it. [...]
It’s a decision that’s kind of like the 12 Steps program: You remake it every day, and you do it every day. Because sometimes it’ll come to you, the thing that happened. You’re standing at the sink or looking out the window at the bird feeder, and the fury comes back to you and you want to explode all over again. At that point, you have to remake the decision to forgive. A lot of forgiveness, at least as it’s manifested in my life, is me reaching out and being there, and being friendly and warm and open for the restoration of a relationship with a person who hurt me and saying, “I’m still here, I’m not going anywhere.”
But you know, and maybe this is another discussion for another time, it’s also hard to be forgiven. There are so many issues with respect to pride and ego and accepting fault, and there are feelings of condescension and suspicions of having something lorded over you. So part of forgiving is to stand humbly and say, “I’m not kidding. I’m serious. It’s forgiven.” [...]
I think there are things a person can do to another person that make the likelihood that they will ever be forgiven zero percent. But in my view, a person cannot actually eliminate the value of their own life, no matter what they do. It’ll always be the right thing to do to allow that person to live.
I struggle with what Bruenig says here, both in theory and in practice. I don't think it would be worth chewing on if it wasn't such a struggle. Bruenig describes a fundamental Christian concept—turning the other cheek—in a way that makes it clear that this is not an easy or a sanctimonious act: it's an active choice, and one that has to be made again and again, and it's hard, and it hurts. But it's an important one to try and practice, because only through forgiveness can you let go of that part of you that has been defined by the pain that others have caused you. Inherent to forgiveness is the awareness that, once someone has hurt you, you and you alone give that hurt a home: it exists in your heart and in your memories and in your ongoing, persistent suffering. The moment has passed; the act is over; you and you alone harbor that pain and nourish it, offer it shelter, and give it a place to live.
______________________
These are not concepts that are unique to Christianity. Bruenig's concept of pain and forgiveness fits perfectly with the Buddhist concept that suffering goes hand-in-hand with attachment: that to suffer, in a manner of speaking, is to dwell.
Christianity's innovation was the figure of Christ himself: a figure who endures limitless suffering, and not only forgives but loves. It posits love, not only as a radical and transformative act, but as a social act: it is our duty, not to love ourselves, but to love others, and to reach a place of self-acceptance radical enough that it lets us offer that love sincerely and deeply.
This is perhaps the trickiest aspect of Christianity, and I suspect the one that gets misinterpreted the most frequently. By my interpretation, it makes no sense to evangelize Christianity as detached from that radical act of love: after all, it's impossible for anyone to behave in a genuinely Christlike manner if they don't come from a place of feeling deeply and unshakably loved. To convert someone without giving them that sense of profound love would be absolutely meaningless; after offering that love, conversation hardly feels necessary.
Conversely, it feels like it would be impossible to be Christian unless that deep sense of love and self-acceptance was achieved: the miracle of Christ's love, it would seem, is in part that it frees you from any false notion of love that would otherwise keep you trapped in your own suffering. To call yourself Christian while remaining in a community that rejects and judges you is to have failed to find Christ; to belong to a community that judges and excludes is to fail Christ. Christ's love and compassion is an act: as with Bruenig's forgiveness, it must be intentionally and deliberately offered.
If no one can be Christian unless they have experienced that infinite mercy and salvation, it's not only their duty to offer that up to others: they must be honest with themselves about whether or not they've found it, and take action to find their way to it. It's not Christlike to bear suffering masochistically and without reprise, because you can't accept Christ without accepting your own limitations, your own mortality, your own inability to literally be Christ. Only by acknowledging your limitations, and your need for kindness and mercy and love, can you aspire to Christ—and it is up to you to acknowledge that you both need and deserve that love, and that you don't stand an ice cube's chance in hell without it. Anyone who demands your self-sacrifice and self-abnegation in the name of Christ isn't Christian: they're a torturer using Christ's name in vain.
It's this last bit that leads me to believe, perversely, that it might be easier to adhere to Christian virtues if you don't literally believe that Christ was real: if you understand Jesus as a hypothetical ideal, an asymptote of humanity, that can only be strived for if a part of you understands that you will never reach it. The profoundest Christians in the world, I suspect, not only realize this but have made peace with it: what is more Christian, after all, than making peace with your deepest limitations?
______________________
So I did not wake up from my dream a Christian. I woke a Jewish man and an atheist and an ardent lover of Taoism. There was no need to change my faith, because my faith remained unchanged: I believed in what I already believed in, and was delighted to find a new inlet to nourish that belief. But I felt like I'd had the kind of vision that brings many people, not wrongly, to Jesus and to Christianity itself, and from that day forward felt like I understood Christianity in a way I heretofore hadn't.
Because there was nothing to that vision of Christianity that I hadn't already experienced in humanity at large. I'd experienced that love from my parents: from my mother, who even in our most bickering moments made it starkly clear that she loved and supported me and wanted me to be happy, and from my father, whose patience and acceptance and gentleness is a fundamental part of who he is. I'd felt that love from my favorite teachers, who dealt with my being a miserable little shit and unfailingly found what was best in me, and who made it clear that whatever sternnesses and boundaries and punishments they handed my way wouldn't change how they saw me and how they believed in me. I found that love in the friends whose support of me and fondness for me baffled me then, and still baffles me to this day. And I found that love in the partners who, after some genuinely tense and unpleasant relationships, made me feel like their love for me was not only easy but a blessing, and like I added more to their lives than I could ever possibly cost them.
Yet even with all that, I struggled. I'd had those hangnail moments, and with more than merely hangnails. I'd had moments where I sobbed and screamed and was beside myself with rage and fear and misery, because l didn't know how to stop being myself, and because being myself seemed like a horrible affliction. I'd watched people who loved me change their minds, and grow fearful, and realize that they had to pull away from me, because they didn't know how to handle being close to me. I'd felt that anxious paranoid terror, that wretched debasing shame, at the sense that something about me was fundamentally and inherently wrong—incurably, unforgivably so.
Maybe we all feel that way sometimes. Or maybe I'm just lucky.
I'm always fascinated with the deeper faiths, the major religions, the ones that last for millennia. What lets a spiritual practice last for thousands and thousands of years? I find it hard to cynically put it all down to chance: sure, maybe it's arbitrary that one faith lasts and another doesn't, but anything that lasts for this long, and for so many generations, is sure to be worn down to its profound and purest form, at least among some people. Somebody, somewhere, surely finds the deepest form of their faith, and finds a way to spread it. And I feel like that kind of profoundity is simply too momentous, too meaningful, not to find purchase.
So there we go: I had a dream, and I found Jesus, maybe, and then I woke up and kept not being Christian. But it was beautiful, and it stayed with me, and I'm a happier and more peaceful person now than I was before I had that vision. It would be a shame if you had to believe in a religion to have a meaningful experience with it. Far better to believe in the possibility of religious revelation, and to understand that you don't have to sign a contract or change your affiliation or even start believing in anything at all when you have one. This, too, is a part of being human, and has been since time immemorial. There's nothing miraculous to it—if anything, it's statistically quite normal. Then again, perhaps that normalcy is what makes it such a miracle.
______________________
These are not concepts that are unique to Christianity. Bruenig's concept of pain and forgiveness fits perfectly with the Buddhist concept that suffering goes hand-in-hand with attachment: that to suffer, in a manner of speaking, is to dwell.
Christianity's innovation was the figure of Christ himself: a figure who endures limitless suffering, and not only forgives but loves. It posits love, not only as a radical and transformative act, but as a social act: it is our duty, not to love ourselves, but to love others, and to reach a place of self-acceptance radical enough that it lets us offer that love sincerely and deeply.
This is perhaps the trickiest aspect of Christianity, and I suspect the one that gets misinterpreted the most frequently. By my interpretation, it makes no sense to evangelize Christianity as detached from that radical act of love: after all, it's impossible for anyone to behave in a genuinely Christlike manner if they don't come from a place of feeling deeply and unshakably loved. To convert someone without giving them that sense of profound love would be absolutely meaningless; after offering that love, conversation hardly feels necessary.
Conversely, it feels like it would be impossible to be Christian unless that deep sense of love and self-acceptance was achieved: the miracle of Christ's love, it would seem, is in part that it frees you from any false notion of love that would otherwise keep you trapped in your own suffering. To call yourself Christian while remaining in a community that rejects and judges you is to have failed to find Christ; to belong to a community that judges and excludes is to fail Christ. Christ's love and compassion is an act: as with Bruenig's forgiveness, it must be intentionally and deliberately offered.
If no one can be Christian unless they have experienced that infinite mercy and salvation, it's not only their duty to offer that up to others: they must be honest with themselves about whether or not they've found it, and take action to find their way to it. It's not Christlike to bear suffering masochistically and without reprise, because you can't accept Christ without accepting your own limitations, your own mortality, your own inability to literally be Christ. Only by acknowledging your limitations, and your need for kindness and mercy and love, can you aspire to Christ—and it is up to you to acknowledge that you both need and deserve that love, and that you don't stand an ice cube's chance in hell without it. Anyone who demands your self-sacrifice and self-abnegation in the name of Christ isn't Christian: they're a torturer using Christ's name in vain.
It's this last bit that leads me to believe, perversely, that it might be easier to adhere to Christian virtues if you don't literally believe that Christ was real: if you understand Jesus as a hypothetical ideal, an asymptote of humanity, that can only be strived for if a part of you understands that you will never reach it. The profoundest Christians in the world, I suspect, not only realize this but have made peace with it: what is more Christian, after all, than making peace with your deepest limitations?
______________________
So I did not wake up from my dream a Christian. I woke a Jewish man and an atheist and an ardent lover of Taoism. There was no need to change my faith, because my faith remained unchanged: I believed in what I already believed in, and was delighted to find a new inlet to nourish that belief. But I felt like I'd had the kind of vision that brings many people, not wrongly, to Jesus and to Christianity itself, and from that day forward felt like I understood Christianity in a way I heretofore hadn't.
Because there was nothing to that vision of Christianity that I hadn't already experienced in humanity at large. I'd experienced that love from my parents: from my mother, who even in our most bickering moments made it starkly clear that she loved and supported me and wanted me to be happy, and from my father, whose patience and acceptance and gentleness is a fundamental part of who he is. I'd felt that love from my favorite teachers, who dealt with my being a miserable little shit and unfailingly found what was best in me, and who made it clear that whatever sternnesses and boundaries and punishments they handed my way wouldn't change how they saw me and how they believed in me. I found that love in the friends whose support of me and fondness for me baffled me then, and still baffles me to this day. And I found that love in the partners who, after some genuinely tense and unpleasant relationships, made me feel like their love for me was not only easy but a blessing, and like I added more to their lives than I could ever possibly cost them.
Yet even with all that, I struggled. I'd had those hangnail moments, and with more than merely hangnails. I'd had moments where I sobbed and screamed and was beside myself with rage and fear and misery, because l didn't know how to stop being myself, and because being myself seemed like a horrible affliction. I'd watched people who loved me change their minds, and grow fearful, and realize that they had to pull away from me, because they didn't know how to handle being close to me. I'd felt that anxious paranoid terror, that wretched debasing shame, at the sense that something about me was fundamentally and inherently wrong—incurably, unforgivably so.
Maybe we all feel that way sometimes. Or maybe I'm just lucky.
I'm always fascinated with the deeper faiths, the major religions, the ones that last for millennia. What lets a spiritual practice last for thousands and thousands of years? I find it hard to cynically put it all down to chance: sure, maybe it's arbitrary that one faith lasts and another doesn't, but anything that lasts for this long, and for so many generations, is sure to be worn down to its profound and purest form, at least among some people. Somebody, somewhere, surely finds the deepest form of their faith, and finds a way to spread it. And I feel like that kind of profoundity is simply too momentous, too meaningful, not to find purchase.
So there we go: I had a dream, and I found Jesus, maybe, and then I woke up and kept not being Christian. But it was beautiful, and it stayed with me, and I'm a happier and more peaceful person now than I was before I had that vision. It would be a shame if you had to believe in a religion to have a meaningful experience with it. Far better to believe in the possibility of religious revelation, and to understand that you don't have to sign a contract or change your affiliation or even start believing in anything at all when you have one. This, too, is a part of being human, and has been since time immemorial. There's nothing miraculous to it—if anything, it's statistically quite normal. Then again, perhaps that normalcy is what makes it such a miracle.