1
When I
first saw Jesus, he was standing like a statue on the fifty-yard line of the
high school football field, one arm pointed at the goalpost and the other
cocked back—fingers curled around an imaginary pigskin, locked at the ready for
a pantomimed hail-Mary in the final seconds of a make believe bowl game. It was
a glorious moment to behold… at least, that is, until an invisible opponent
rushed his offensive line. Jesus had to fake right, spin left, and duck around
a pretend tight end to make a harrowing dash for the touchdown. He hit a few
straight-arm blocks, pulled some fancy footwork, and half a second later he was
jogging across the goal line, spiking the ball, and moonwalking clear from one
side of the end zone to the other.
2
But
before I get too far into this story, I need to stop and explain a couple
things to you. First, you need to know that this little run-in with the savior
was happening on a cold and dewy Saturday morning, at about nine am. It was the
first of September— about fifteen weeks after my fourteenth birthday, roughly
three months since my last day of junior high, and exactly two hours after my
big brother’s body was found, lifeless and broken, at the bottom of a sixty-foot
ravine behind St. Soren’s. I don’t want to dwell on this detail too much at the
moment (we’ll get into it all later, trust me), but I just thought you ought to
know. For perspective.
3
“No,” he
chuckled, pulling a business card from his pocket. “You’ve got me mixed up. I’m
not that Jesus. I’m Jesus Jackson.”
He handed
me the card. I looked it over. It read:
Jesus Jackson: Spiritual Contractor 100% faith guaranteed!
Call for a FREE ESTIMATE!
4
All of
the numbness in the world could never have prepared me for what I found when we
pulled into the parking lot at St. Soren’s. The normally imposing front steps
of the school— a fifteen by thirty-foot mass of solid concrete— had been
transformed into a multimedia, rainbow-colored shrine to Ryan: purple chalk
hearts encircled the letters, “RIP RJS” written in bright baby blue;
construction paper tears flowed out of papier-mâché crosses and real flowers
sat next to plastic flowers that sat next to homemade pink tissue flowers that
stood beside poster-sized pictures of my brother on the baseball field, or the
basketball court , or the football field or the golf course. Ryan’s likeness
was created a thousand times over in oil on canvas and acrylics on plywood and
crayon on poster-board, and on and on and on, and all around all of this were
hundreds upon hundreds of three-by-five note cards, taped to the steps and
tacked to the posters and stuck in the cracks and the crevices in the granite—
and on each of these cards were little letters and messages and poems for Ryan
about missing him and mourning him and praying for him and about not being able
to believe that he was dead. I stepped out of my father’s car and wandered,
zombie-like, right into the middle of everything. I began reading some of the
notes and messages and poems for Ryan about missing him and mourning him and
praying for him and about not being able to believe that he was dead.
5
“Because
it’s all bullshit. It’s fake. They don’t know where Ryan is. They just choose a
fairy tale and run with it. If they say he’s watching over us in heaven with
God and the angels, than they might as well say he’s huffing glue at Burger
King with Mickey Mouse and the Easter Bunny! He’s just dead. Dead dead dead,
and no one knows what the fuck that means except that his body is sitting in
some freezer somewhere, waiting for some death doctor to cut apart his insides
and replace his blood with chemicals, while some morons he never even liked
recite bad poetry over a bunch of cheap-ass, ten-cent candles.”
6
“It just doesn’t
make sense. And it’s a little absurd, when you think about it—the whole concept
of some white-bearded guy up in the clouds, making every little decision about
every little thing in every little person’s life. Listening to your thoughts,
giving a crap about whether you tell a little lie, or curse, or copy someone’s
homework.” I gestured down at the stacks of paper, and Cassie giggled,
charmingly. “It’s all so damned convenient, you know? Life is too complex, too
random, and too fucking sad for it all to wind up in some kind of marsh- mallow
wonderland in the sky, where everything that ever happened, happened for a
reason. I don’t know, it just feels like some cheesy ending to a crappy movie.”
7
Now I
have to stop here for a second to talk a bit about inspiration. As an atheist,
I don’t believe in divine inspiration, exactly.... Or at least, I don’t believe
that there’s any divine god or mystical whatthefuck out there to do the
inspiring. But inspiration itself? That mysterious, unexplainable, baffling
burst of insight that somehow manages to tie everything together in a neat
little knot? Well, that I believe in. That, I know is true, because it’s
exactly what happened to me as I was sitting in those stands, watching the
football team practice. And the whole rest of this story—its entire sad and
unfortunate ending—would have been impossible without it.
8
“I want
to know where he is now!” I screamed. “Right now! At this moment! Dead! What
the hell happened to him after he died, not before. What happens to everybody,
what’s going to happen to me? And I don’t want any of your stupid
‘constructions’ or my school’s stupid god or my father’s lame-ass pamphlets, I
want the truth! A truth I can live for, and die for. An irrefutable truth about
what the hell it means that Ryan is dead and that someday I’m going to die too!
I want proof, not faith. I want to know!”
Jesus
reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled wad of money. “Here’s your
twelve dollars,” he said. “I can’t help you.”
9
And I had
to laugh, because he was right, just as he had been right all along: In the
end, you can’t be so concerned with reality. Sure, there has to be a real truth
out there, somewhere. But if Jesus Jackson taught me anything, it’s that you
can never really know the truth. Not about life, not about God, not about
what’s in another person’s heart, or even your own. All you can ever really
know is what it feels like. What it feels like to laugh and cry and hate and
hurt and hope and fear and love; what it feels like to live.
10
And as I
stepped out of that church, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to make that
choice at all. That you don’t need to choose between accepting someone else’s
faith and going without faith altogether. That you can choose to have faith in
anything you want, in anything you feel. You can have faith in science, or your
favorite comic book, faith in the stars or faith in the Earth, faith your job
or your family or your best friend or your dog. You can have faith in the sweet
face of a pretty red-haired girl who just wants to be close to you because she
thinks that you just might want to be close to her too....
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Finn
Easton sees the world through miles instead of minutes. It’s how he
makes sense of the world, and how he tries to convince himself that he’s
a real boy and not just a character in his father’s bestselling
cult-classic book. Finn has two things going for him: his best friend,
the possibly-insane-but-definitely-excellent Cade Hernandez, and Julia
Bishop, the first girl he’s ever loved.
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