THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (Part I)

RECENTLY I traveled to St. Louis to spend a few days with my old high school friend John Jones. John and I knew each other back in 1992 when we both attended a high school in the upper middle class suburb of Fair Oaks, California. Circa 1993 John moved to the St. Louis area and I departed for upstate New York a few years later. We hadn’t kept in contact since John moved away all those years ago, and our coming together again after half a lifetime of forgotten separation is nothing short of a miracle.

***

JOHN was staring out of the window at his parent’s house which was located three hundred feet away. “When Jesus comes to reclaim his apostate church, He won’t reclaim me,” he said ominously. At 32, John is athletic with blonde hair and a bronze and slightly sun-burned complexion. His eyes are like two burnished blue spheres that seem to probe the depths of your soul and look right through you at the same time. When I met John at a Starbucks the day before, I was amazed by how little his appearance had changed since high school. Besides being a few years older and having a slightly receding hair line, he looked more or less like the 15 year old version of himself. Except now he claimed to know the truth.

“When the people asked him about heaven Jesus told them to, ‘look around them’ because heaven was much like Earth. When I look around me all I see is violence, suffering and poverty. Children are abused and neglected, injuries and illnesses afflict the righteous, and people are getting squeezed into ever tighter corners by fear and lack of resources.”

Across the street from our dark little godless meeting a much happier scene was unfolding. John’s mother was chasing two of her grandchildren around as John’s brother Kaleb and his wife Megan stared on in rapt amusement. There was sunshine, smiles, hand clapping and laughs compared to John’s dimly lit bedroom chilled by the home’s central air conditioning system. John had moved out of his parent’s house a year ago and been invited to live in a spare bedroom at his friend and next door neighbor Brian’s house. His physical proximity to his family, however, did not translate into a spiritual proximity. John had done the unthinkable two years ago and had renounced God and Jesus one night during a packed family dinner.

John humorously describes the occasion as his “coming out party.”

“I came out,” he says unabashedly. ”I told them what was what. I don’t believe in God anymore and that was it.”

“So they kicked you out for it?” I said.

“No. I made the decision to leave later on. I didn’t want to be a part of their programmed way of life anymore. I wanted to watch the TV shows that I wanted to watch and listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. You just couldn’t make those kinds of decisions when everybody is trying to sit you down and have a serious man-to-man conversation about the Bible and eternity all of the time.”

John is like a lot of thirty-somethings who were raised in fundamentalist church communities. Before John’s departure from the rest of the Jones clan, his life revolved around the fundamentalist church in his St. Louis suburb. He attended Christian rock concerts, weekly young adult functions and even participated in sports leagues which were organized by various area churches. He never had to travel farther than the five miles it was from his house to his church’s multipurpose room or soccer field. “I’ve never dated a girl who wasn’t a member of my church,” he said. He listed the names of his former sweethearts as if listing streets in a new sub development: “Kimberly, Allison, Megan.” All one had to do was put the word “Way” or “Circle” behind each name.

In comparison to the split level house John was currently residing in, the Joneses two story home was a constant work in progress. John said it was unusual to not see scaffolding erected along the walls, and the constant traffic of electricians, contractors, architects and plumbers he assured me was dizzying.

Besides Mr. and Mrs. Jones, John’s older and younger brothers both lived at home with their wives and children. The oldest son Mike is 33 and has a 24 year old wife named Katie. They have two children, Noah who is 5 and Eve who is 3, as well as an 11 year old child from a marriage that ended when Mike’s first wife was hit and killed by a drunk driver. The upstairs of the Jones house had been converted into a small apartment for Mike, Katie and their kids.

John’s younger 27 year old brother Kaleb lives in the large basement with his 31 year old wife Megan and their five children. Three of the children, 8 year old Noah, 6 year old Moses and 5 year old Sarah are biological, while two of the children, Elijah and Shadrack, were adopted from Ethiopia.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones occupy the first floor of the house. The living room has been converted into a master bedroom and a wall next to the family room was knocked out to build an extremely large formal dining room addition.

When I looked out the window at Mrs. Jones who was now twirling one of the grandkids around by the arms and muttering goo-goo gah-gah talk to the infant, I thought she looked like a happy and sane enough woman. Mr. Jones soon joined her and added loud and boisterous laughs to all the carefree family commotion.

This can’t be such a bad thing, I thought. Why would John want to run away from all of this?

***

TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE of my meeting up with John after so many years, one needs to travel back in time to the early nineties. I was raised in a family that can best be described as religiously indifferent. We were Presbyterians but only attended church on the obligatory holidays and a few other days out the year. I never read the Bible, I couldn’t have told you who Moses was, and if you had asked me who was the Son of Man I probably would have said they were a heavy metal band that toured with Judas Priest.

Despite my theologically deprived childhood, however, I had a number of friends who were ardent evangelical Christians. My best friend who lived up the street from me was an evangelical who attended a newfangled church that incorporated ancient fire and brimstone Christianity with modern rock music and Republican Party values. It was through him that I came to meet other fundamentalists – like John.

If one had pressed me in those days to explain the unexplainable, I may have gone so far as to admit to the possibility of supernatural or spiritual phenomena existing. But ultimately I was an atheist: I saw absolutely zero evidence of God’s existence either in nature or in my head. I believed that everything had either a rational or scientific explanation, and my fear of non-existence after death was attenuated by the fact that 80 years on earth was enough time to enjoy life’s sweetness and leave some footprints to be remembered by. One would likely think it impossible, for someone of my temporal persuasions, to get by with a group of fervent Christians. Despite the limitations to our friendships – even though I played with my best friend nearly every day, I was barred admittance to his house by his stoic and suspicious mother – our social synergy was mostly buoyed and maintained by other common interests, and an agreement to disagree on theological issues also helped keep the peace (this latter pact was arrived at after several unsuccessful arguments marked by mutual stubbornness and attempted persuasion reached an impasse every single time).

The distilled sum of our various commonalities was the crazy glue that held us together, and when we were flying down hills on our skateboards or practically asphyxiating from laughing none of us cared that I was a non-believer and vice versa. But this still didn’t prevent me from becoming a fifth wheel on more than a few occasions. No matter how innocent I was, there were times when I felt no better than Dr. Faustus in the company of my Christian friends. If I said, “Let’s swim under that bridge,” I may as well have been the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting them with forbidden fruit. If I suggested we ride our bikes along the river, I was afraid they might reply the way Jesus did when he rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.”

My Christian friends could get so high on God at times that it would have been futile not to go along with them. Like a straight man to a group of comics, I only would have been adding fuel to their spiritual fire. So I kept quiet at these times out of a desire not to rock the boat. The Titanic was a lavish and majestic ship before it ran into that dreaded iceberg.

Despite all of the good times we had, I also couldn’t shake the creeping suspicion that they were secretly planning to convert me. They probably realized my anarchic independence posed the biggest threat to their purity, and in order to maintain our friendship through puberty and beyond, they would have no choice but to convert me. This is why – after 7 years of having a mostly secular friendship – my Christian friends started introducing me to the religious side of their lives. I attended more Christian parties, youth groups, rock concerts and church services during my early teen years than I did during all of my previous childhood years with my family.

I was standing at the threshold of a new life. But of all the new possibilities that were forming and materializing quickly evaporated and came unraveled. In the rapidly changing world of adolescence, my Christian friends and I were soon scattered to the four winds. With all the things vying for the young mind, psychedelic drugs soon made more sense to me as a religion than Christianity ever did or could. My best friend was growing more and more serious about his guitar skills and his band than anything else. And John just sort of dropped off the radar before up and moving with his family to the St. Louis area. Other people in this Christian milieu also faded away too.

But just as drugs proved a short-lived avocation for me, my former Christian friends soon tired of their godless hobbies and each eventually found his or her way back to God. And after a brief religious epiphany in the late nineties when I was sure I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior forever, my belief and interest in discipleship slowly faded from skepticism and now – in the spectrum of religion and spirituality mindedness – is hovering somewhere between atheistic clarity and agnostic curiousness.

During my teens and twenties, after experimenting with drugs, dabbling in religion and battling addictions to nicotine, food and sex, I had finally come full circle. I was once again an ascetic practitioner of the Great and Responsible Here and Now. By my late twenties I had matured into the boy-man I always dreamed of becoming – an adult version of my 12 year old self. The only vestiges of my coming of age spiritual journeys is an awareness of and respect for the unknowable and unexplainable, and an acquired humbleness from the realization that I am mortal and insignificant in the larger picture of the universe. This is why I have traded in my naïve teenage atheism for a mantle of intellectual agnosticism.

***

JOHN UNDERSTANDS IRONY. It is all he ever seems to talk about. When he is talking about baseball it is as if he is really talking about irony. If he talks about what he is studying in college he is really indirectly expounding on irony.

“Everything I do feels like an affront to God,” John says. “And yet it’s entirely liberating, like being a millionaire.”

We are strolling through the quads and breezeways of his former church, a modern structure that looks half like a high school and half like an office park. A large pyramid-shaped building with a cross-topped copula and stained glass roof in the center of the complex is the only indication that this is a place of Christian worship. Even though it is Saturday (the day of preparation for the Sabbath), the place is practically deserted. Only a custodian and some kids on skateboards unsuccessfully attempting to hop a stairway are the only other signs of civilization besides us.

“In the mid nineties I dropped out of community college after two semesters,” John says. “What is a Christian going to do with an education?”

The actual reason John stopped attending college, however, had to do with the conflicts between a liberal arts education and the doctrines of the Bible. When religious dogma clashes with science, history and social studies, the religiously revved mind often repels any teachings that conflict with its scriptures. “The overlap between the Bible and all other fields of study is very small,” John says, “and most fundamentalists aren’t willing to yield to anything.”

“I can’t think of a single Christian I know of who aced Geology,” he adds. “In high school we all sat together and had to cheat off of each other because we just couldn’t swallow the scientists’ theory that the world was however many billions of years old.”

John says it is the same for other subjects such as political science, philosophy and even literature. He dropped his American Government 101 class after his teacher refused to admit that America was founded on Christian beliefs and principles and that the framers of the Constitution were actually devout Christian men with the same views as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. John thought he was righteously following God by rejecting what he perceived to be the lies disseminated by higher education. He was trying to obey the 9^th Commandment: Thou Shall Not Lie.

“I thought if I just sat back and pretended to learn what they were teaching me, I would be no better than a liar.”

After two years of scooping ice cream and dating a girl at his church, John got married at the age of 22. With no room at the Jones house and an inadequate income between the two of them, John and his new wife had to move in with her parents.

“It was cramped,” he said. “Screaming infants (children of his in-laws), crowded kitchen, ten people at the dinner table not to mention all the pets – it was insane.” John likened the experience to living on Noah’s Ark. “I was claustrophobic and sick to my stomach the whole time.”

Unlike the other potent and fertile members of both of their families, John and his new wife were unable to conceive. It turned out that, because of a congenital birth defect, his wife’s egg supply was deficient and she had already gone through her whole supply by the time she was 19.  John would later ironically identify this as his Deus ex machina moment, the divine intervention that saved him.

“Things started to go downhill in our relationship after the realization that we could never be parents,” he said. “But I think as things nosedived toward divorce, I was secretly grinning in the back of my mind the whole time. I knew that eventually I would be free.”

After 6 years of a rocky marriage, John finally moved back into his family home in 2004. But it was not the familiar home life he remembered as a teenager. His older and younger brothers were now both married with biological and adopted children of their own. Several additions had changed the architecture of the house and more were constantly being planned and added. While there may have been more room than there was at his former wife’s house, the lack of privacy was the same.

“When I first moved in I was sharing a room with my niece and nephew,” he said. “All these kids were like spies, looking over my shoulder every time I went on the computer or watching me every time I so much as took a dump.”

John felt as if he had switched boats from one Ark to another, and he was not happy. He found it hard to pray and find God in the midst of so much chaos. “A lot of jaded people think of religion as a private experience,” he said, “But in the households I had been living in it was a group experience – like a cult.”

John dreamed of the cloistered dormitories of the monks, he fantasized about wandering the countryside like an ascetic and not being turned away whenever he knocked on any door. He spent a lot of time listening to music on his iPod, reading books and magazines and watching movies on his laptop. These isolated experiences became his escape from the noisy world he was a part of. He had a job at Blockbuster for a while, and later he worked at Penguins and Borders. Oftentimes after work he would go to one of the college libraries in the area and read until closing time, which was as late as 2 am on some occasions.

John’s family members began to take notice that he was becoming increasingly more distant and exclusive. Concerned that his faith was slipping, people in John’s household began to sit him down and talk one-on-one to him about his relationship with Jesus Christ. They started praying for him, they gave him Bible passages to read, and his siblings even went so far as to corner him in an intervention style family meeting.

This show of family concern, John assures me, is when his real troubles began.