Friday, September 4, 2015

Jesus pictures

The pictures given us at Sunday School depicted Jesus teaching people often children in rustic setting and with clouds in the sky streaked with heavenly light. It was a feature peculiar to this style of religious art. The impulse for streaks irresistible. We were all given poster size pictures each week along with tiny pocket size New Testament Bibles. Five kids, five posters and five pocket New Testament Bibles. Each week. All the American children in church received these things. Through years of this steady influx of unusable Jesus posters and pocket New Testament Bibles  I concluded they're flown in by the planeload.

Just for us. To keep us on the straight and narrow by all means necessary. I resented being heavily propagandized and brainwashed and resisted early.

Nothing could be done with these pictures. We have no good idea why they were given in such ridiculous overabundance. When I think of my dad's family car loaded with these rolled Jesus posters left behind by us careless children, folded Jesus posters, torn Jesus posters, repurposed fly swatter Jesus posters, tease the dog Jesus posters, milkshake bib Jesus posters, foot wipe Jesus posters, leaking baby diaper Jesus posters and New Testament Bibles falling into every crease, fold and pocket of the automobile, I shudder for the sanity of my parents back there and then.

GO CLEAN OUT THE CAR!

Those streaky clouds get me every time. I look up from doing regular things today and pow there's another Jesus picture right there in the window.


Then it rains lightly but steadily, heavenly refreshing you can say, then abruptly stops, and this, the quiet of satisfied refreshment and peace:


2 comments:

Methadras said...

You know, I'm going to say something that is going to go against known orthodoxy, but I'm pretty confident that Jesus may have been kind of an asshole when he needed to be and a gentle soul when he needed to be. he was a man of the situation with an overarching theme of his life that he know and understood until the day he was at the Garden of Gethsemane when his Father pretty much told him that he had to hang it up and come home. But the idea that Christ went through his life as an illustration of a calm, meditative, and zen like person are bullshit.

MamaM said...

Light is a powerful force, strong enough to vaporize, gentle enough to awaken seeds to growth.

When Jesus reportedly told others, I am the Light of the world, and You are the Light of the world, who knows what Big Picture was behind those words?

I love seeing keyholes in the clouds with sunlight streaming through, as they allow me to see visible light in another observable form. Which may have been what was in the back of the flesh and blood mind of the visible Jesus when he said to those following him that anyone seeing him was seeing the Father who sent him.