Jesus of Fire

Giving up on Evangelical churches isn’t the same as giving up on God, or even Jesus as a divine figure.

In fact, it was my belief that God was a particular way that lead me to leave the Evangelical church in the first place.

I still prayed, although a little differently than I used to. And I still believed Jesus was, in some way, divine.

I got it in my head that the historical Jesus mattered less than the figure of Jesus. Even if Jesus was a fictional character, at that point, he still helped me understand God better. I saw it as a skin God could walk into.

Ok, here’s my cheesy Sci-Fi analogy. In the crappy crappy series Babylon 5, the Vorlon Race of aliens are always in an “encounter suit” because no other race of aliens could handle or understand what they really looked like. But with the suit, they could interact with people.

This was how I viewed Jesus. A character people could relate to. A starting point for understanding God.

My idea of Jesus had morphed quite a lot over the years. But at some point along the way, I wrote a poem. At the time of the poem, Jesus was especially representative of what I thought was divine inspiration to write:

Jesus

Night
And a hand
Fingers burning like candles
A body barely separate from darkness

Reaching
Touching Me
Lighting my fingers
And a choir of moans and sighs and shrieks

Closing
Now a fiery fist
Pushing between my ribs
Flames rolling against the roof of my mouth

(1997)