the face of jesus (written july 26, 2020) — fiction

an atheist wonders: could i become a christian again? (i love you penelope)

The Face of Jesus

I sat in the rocking chair on the patio. I listened to the birds chirping. I saw them flutter around the bird feeders. I watched squirrels and chipmunks run around in the grass. I looked up at the shining blue sky and puffy white clouds. Sitting in the shade under a 150-year-old White Oak, the 90-degree air felt comfortable on my skin. I seemed to love it all more than I ever had before.

I went back down into the dark of the basement. It was all gone now. the green leaves, the squirrels, the birds, the sky, the heat. It was cold. I was anxious. Carpet instead of patio brick was beneath my feet. Walls without windows surrounded me. The chair on which I sat was leather instead of wood.

And then I thought of him – Jesus. I’d been an atheist for 13 years, but still sometimes I felt like Jesus was watching me even now. I felt like he was waiting for me to come back into the fold. I felt like he remembered how close we’d been when I was a kid. Sometimes I wondered if Jesus, given his omniscience, knew this whole time that my atheism would only be a phase. Other times, I wondered if Jesus knew the opposite: that I had never truly been saved, that I was doomed to Hell from the beginning anyway. Sometimes, I imagined I might die and realize Christianity was true after all. I’d come face to face with Jesus sitting there on a throne, and he’d look at me sadly as we both remembered the days decades ago when the two of us were so close, when I prayed to him every night, when he helped me accomplish so much.

I opened my laptop. I went to Google Images and I searched: “Jesus.”

There he was. Every time I saw his image, whatever the denomination of Christianity in which each of them originated, it reminded me of his presence. It reminded me that he could be out there watching me, that all my actions would ultimately be judged against his unfathomable holiness.

I just kept looking at those images for a long time. I opened up each file and zoomed in on his face. I scrolled down through the results, traveling through dozens of pages, looking at Jesus after Jesus. And I could sense God judging me from on high. I could feel Jesus knocking on my heart trying to get me to let him in again. I heard all those warnings again from my childhood – that I was damned, that I deserved to be damned, and that Jesus loved me so much he had died for my sins in my place. I wondered then if I’d ever truly stop fearing God.

I was too high to type a text message. So I sent my friend a voice message. I told her how spooky it was for me to see images of Jesus, even 13 years after I’d stopped believing. “He’s still watching me, he always has been,” I said. “I just feel so weird looking at pictures of Jesus. It’s like, I used to think he was watching me all the time. I thought he saw my every move and knew my every thought. It was terrifying. And now, even though I don’t believe, even still when I see his picture, I can’t help but shudder, I can’t help but feel afraid.”

I waited a bit for her reply. And then it came in the form of another audio message. “I feel weird about Jesus, too,” she said. She told me it was like he was condemning her. It was something that made her feel guilty. It was a symbol of holiness forced upon us by centuries of propaganda.

“I will never escape it,” I said in a reply. “What terrifies me most is that over a decade later, I see these pictures of him, and I still feel a legitimate, like… fear of God.”

She texted back: “LOL, you’ll never escape it dude.”

I sent a text message to another friend, to see how general this feeling might be.

“Do you ever feel afraid when you see a picture of Jesus?” I asked. It was a bit hard to type, but I’d never sent an audio message to this friend, or received one, so I did my best.

“What?” he texted back. “No.”

I sent the same question to another friend by copying and pasting it. “Do you ever feel afraid when you see a picture of Jesus?”

I waited a long time for the response. Finally, it came: “LOL. No.”

I spent the rest of the day sitting in the rocking chair outside on the patio. For hours, I looked at the leaves and listened to the chirping birds and watched the well-fed squirrels scamper about the yard. I thought about those pictures of Jesus until it was dark outside. I remembered how he was always with me when I was a child. And then I went back to the basement to watch Netflix.

The next day, I had a few more gummies shortly after waking up.

Soon, I was on my computer looking at Jesus memes while sitting outside on the patio. I realized there was one Jesus who didn’t scare me. Raptor Jesus. I looked at several pages on Google Images of Raptor Jesus. Often, he was riding a harnessed raptor while hoisting a machine gun up into the air. I remembered I once had a framed picture of Raptor Jesus in my bathroom. I’d look into his eyes every time I peed. He didn’t scare me. His weapons and raptors didn’t give him new powers; they cheapened the ones he already had.

I sent an audio message to my friend: “Do you think Raptor Jesus was just created to make people feel less guilty when they look at a picture of Jesus? Like, do you think it serves to sort of undermine Jesus?”

I rocked for a bit on the patio while I awaited her response. I watched the squirrels scamper about near the bushes and the flowers. I listened to the birds chirping in the branches above me. I saw a stray cat on the prowl near the firewood.

And then came her response. “Definitely dude,” she said. “That’s what makes Raptor Jesus so offensive to some people.”

“So,” I recorded back, “you think there’s some kind of real power in just the standard picture of Jesus they want you to see?”

I waited for a moment. I watched the birds fluttering around the bird feeder.

My phone buzzed. It was a text. “Absolutely,” she wrote.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the patio.

I remembered believing as a teenager that Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christianity flirted with idolatry for their treatment of images of Christ and the saints. I saw them in their churches seeming to worship their icons, seeming to pray to a material object itself.

But then I realized sitting on this patio that it was the personal Christ, the born-again version of Jesus, the evangelical gospel which was the real idolatry. The idea one has a personal friendship with Jesus such that he intervenes on your behalf regarding tests, relationships, sporting events, exercise, and sometimes even sex, at least within marriage.

But maybe that Jesus was not the idol. After all, he was the Jesus with whom I grew up. My belief in a personal relationship was the cause of my current fear. It was the reason why I was afraid every time I saw his picture. Because it was the picture of an old friend who had once watched so closely after me… and who still did… and with whom I had spoken personally in prayer every day of my life for years. Therein was the root of a true fear of God, the kind that could haunt someone decades after they became an apostate.

My friend was in town. When my high had receded, I drove exactly eight minute from my subdivision to his. It was dark out now. I parked outside his house. I took the key out from the ignition and the headlights flicked off. I stepped out into his lawn and I locked the car behind me by remote control. Then I walked up the driveway to his open garage.

There he was, sitting in a chair smoking cigarettes like always.

He offered me one. I accepted. I paced back and forth smoking while he stayed in his chair.

He offered to roll us a spliff. I agreed.

We shared the spliff and then we began to walk. We walked on a trail that snaked through the woods between the subdivisions. There was a gentle summer breeze against our skin.

“Do you think I could ever become a Christian again?” I suddenly asked. Several minutes of silence had passed. We were still just walking straight and beside each other, passing back and forth another spliff, listening to the noises and feeling the presence of the night.

He didn’t answer for a moment. I listened to our steady footsteps upon the gravel below. I was afraid that it could happen. I was afraid my fear of God meant that I wasn’t truly free of my youthful fundamentalism, that in the end it would recoup its power and re-saturate my mind.

“Yes,” he said. “I definitely think it could happen.”

I knew he had never been a Christian. So I asked him: “What about you? Could it happen to you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I mean, I can’t predict things about myself that far into the future. And things can change in the brain that we can’t really control.”

I wondered if, in truth, it was the pervasive propaganda of all those pictures of Jesus. And yet I wondered also if it was something else. I was feeling with growing certainty that it was the actual, real power of Jesus, of the living God, and He would never relent in His passion for saving humanity from Hell. That passion would always pursue us. It would eternally nag at our hearts, pleading with us to step away from our sins and accept the grace of God. For that reason, all of its serious physical representations do indeed exert a type of power upon us. But it is all part of His design that our consciousness will always be haunted to some degree by His pleadings for us to accept Him into our lives. And here I was ignoring His pleading.

I became terrified that it really was going to happen. I was going to be a Christian again. I was going to lose all my atheist and agnostic friends. And so I started babbling about unrelated topics, giggling at small details and distracting myself, putting an end to those thoughts, ignoring the faith that was bubbling back up inside me. And so I just kept ranting. He kept giving me short, one-word responses. It went on like that for half a mile.

He stopped me. We stopped moving; we faced one another. He waited for me to quit giggling.

“Do you ever just feel like you should stay completely silent and listen to the beauty around you?” he asked.

I sighed. “Sometimes,” I said. “But, I mean, I’m just having a conversation.”

“Sometimes I think you miss out on things doing that,” he said softly. I knew he really cared.

I tried to be silent for a while.

We kept walking and I strained to perceive the world around me.

We loved to walk at night on the trails through the trees in the night while we were high. We often walked along this one, a trail that once was a railroad connecting several suburban towns in the area. Thanks to the path of the trail, we were farther from houses than we normally were. It was even darker, even blacker in the air than normal around here. I loved listening to the frogs and the crickets. I loved hearing the wind rustle the leaves. I heard the movements through the bushes in the distance of the raccoons, foxes, opossums, cats, and coyotes who roamed about in the night. I peered into the dark to catch a glimpse of their shapes and faces and ears, if only to see the faint outline of it all in the depths of the trees.

“Isn’t it amazing,” he suddenly said, “to just think about how we are just slowly propelling ourselves across the surface of this beautiful celestial body?”

It was, I thought with happiness. It was beautiful to think about our friendship and our movement together across the ground of this brightly glowing planet, surrounded by all that empty darkness.

“You ever see pictures of the Earth at night, with all those lights all over the place?” he asked me. “Isn’t it amazing how we can just harness the energy of this planet and make it fucking glow like that?”

We kept walking for another mile. We smoked a few more spliffs. We got off the trail at a main road and stopped by a gas station. We bought snacks and drinks. We walked back on the trail toward his house stuffing our faces with Gardetto’s. I savored every individual bite.

We got back to his garage. He sat in his chair smoking a cigarette. I paced back and forth in front of him smoking one as well. He was so still; I was so fidgety. He looked at me with his head tilted a bit and that slight, sympathetic smile that always told me he cared about me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m so afraid I’m going to be a Christian again someday,” I said.

“But you’re not one right now,” he said. “It won’t do anything to worry about it.”

“But I’m so afraid,” I said. “What if I can never escape it? What if I go back to being a fundamentalist Christian? Afraid of sex, afraid of drugs, guilty all the time, hateful of – ”

“You won’t,” he said. “You would believe in a different kind of Christianity.”

“But how do you know that?” I asked.

“Because I know you’ll never believe those things again,” he said. “That’s just not who you are. You’ll believe in a different kind of God, if at all.”

I kept pacing. He kept sitting still. Neither of us were smoking.

“Do you ever think about seeing a therapist?” he asked me.

“Sometimes, but not really,” I said. “Why?”

He shrugged. He was leaning back in his chair. He had that slight smile that made me know he loved me. “I think you’d really benefit from it,” he said softly.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

“Anyway,” he said, “I gotta go to bed. Are you good to drive or do you want to sleep on the couch?

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said.

And then I was alone in his living room, falling asleep under some blankets on the couch. I thought about the party we were throwing here tomorrow night. I imagined how this room would just fill up with all my friends. I was safe right now.