On "First Impressions"

Well, I am a little out of practice.  I guess I'll just start writing and see what comes out. I don't really have any thoughts at the moment.

What was my first impression of Jesus?

I wish I could make it easy for you.  I wish that I could tell you that my first impression was something simple, like seeing the flannel board, or the fair skinned Messiah on the stained glass windows.  I wish I could explain to you that my first impression of Jesus was the blue haired woman at Tyrone First Baptist church, the woman who yelled at me for dancing when they had Jars of Clay on the speakers.  Maybe it was the candy I got for memorizing a verse.  Maybe it was the cheesy songs, the "Spring up the well" or playing underground church.

I just wish I could make it easy for you.

Because, it is not as if I met Jesus one day while I was walking down the road.  It's not like he just appeared to me while I was in route from my front door to the park that was down the street.  I did not get to feel the holes in his hands or the scars left by thorns pressed into his forehead.  If only.  I did not get that experience. Did you?

No.  My Jesus was a mystery.  He was the words on a page, he was the songs in the air.  He was all of that and more.  He was supposed to be the answer, long before I knew the questions to ask.  Descarte said that animals did not have souls, that they were just machines.  If a dog cried, it wasn't really crying, it was just malfunctioning.  I'm not too sure about that hypothesis.  When I was young I was able to recite back to you what you wanted to hear.  I was a dog that could do the tricks.  But why did I want to do the tricks?  Why does the dog please his master?  Either way, I grew up.  And I learned that I had questions. I learned that faith is a lot like the love that Leonard Cohen describes, that it is not a victory march, it is a cold and its a broken hallelujah.

And I suppose that I tell you this to just say that faith is not the easy image.  Jesus is not the pretty picture. I mean, we know that, we say that.  But we still try to make it easy for people.  We still try to say that the first impression of Jesus was this or it was that.

The fact is that it was a mystery for me then and it still is now.  My impression of Jesus then was tied up as much with church bells as it was with lying in the grass and looking up at the clouds. Can you see yourself in that image when you were a child?  Can you look up in your memory and see the vivid greens and the sharp blues?  Can you make out the shapes of the clouds as the floated along in that frame shot from so long ago?  I can.  I can see it and to think about it almost makes me weep.

I have given you nothing that you can use.  I'm out of practice.

There is a tendency for me to want to wrap it up for you nice and tight like a pretty package.  That I could tell you that the first impression was this or that.  But it was not.  My first impression of Jesus was the day on the grass with the clouds when I was about five years old.  It was the stained glass.  It was the memory verse.  It was learning that my father did not exist.  It was all of that and it was infinitely more.  My first impression of Jesus was life itself unfolding in front of a child's eyes.  It still is. And the only hope that I really cling to is that my impression of Jesus now is that life itself is pouring out him, pouring out of his words, out of his smile, out his touch. Out of everything that he was and everything that he is still.

Tatum

jasontatum.blogspot.com