I was a teenage fundamentalist - part six

 Unchained, unbowed, boundless

I

 grew up in a very conservative part of the world (Queensland, Australia, under the flawed premiership of the late Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen). I was part of a welcoming, loving but conservative family and denomination. “Christianity” was the name of the game in much of public life (even though the Government, Police and Judiciary were ultimately exposed as systemically corrupt).

My class endured the singing nun’s cover version of The Lord’s Prayer played over the PA system in much of my primary school years (in a state school); it was interchanged with Mancini’s ‘Baby Elephant Walk’, depending on the whim of the school secretary.

My sometime-desire to be an inconspicuous Christian in high school was often rendered ineffectual by my appearance in the Corps Band as we played at local fetes or marched in the local Anzac Day parade (a day Aussies and New Zealanders remember their military personnel who had been injured or killed in wars).

In short, I had a fairly public witness and was a ‘known’ Christian; as I am today. I’d add that I was a junior soldier and a young senior soldier who often did not know how to respond helpfully to people who were different from me.

Zayed* was a Muslim that I knew in primary school. We would sometimes play in the same mob of kids at lunchtime, wrestling and kicking footballs around happily. We had something in common, too; both of us were often in trouble with our Mums for forgetting to put our shoes back on after footy (I must have gone through about nine pairs of shoes some years). 

But Zayed was never a close mate. A couple of times he looked at me sadly - I recall this vividly - and said, ‘You don’t really like me, because I am a Muslim’ (he knew I was a Christian; I’d been called upon to pray in the classroom a few times at Easter and on Anzac Day).

As I didn’t have a clue what a Muslim was back then - I vaguely knew we both believed in God - his rejection always struck me as confusing. It was certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that we never really established a lasting friendship.

Deepak* was a Hindu who was one of my best mates in the first few years of high school. He didn’t talk much about religion, nor did I to be honest. I was fascinated by the religious symbol on his door the one time my herd of friends walked past his home, and I met his Mum once and was even more fascinated by the red dot on her head. (At the time I suspected it symbolised her caste and status. Actually, the marking symbolised a third eye/chakra and also indicates that a female Hindu is married. The ‘dots’ are also utilised by Jains and Buddhists).

Apart from sports and some parallel romantic interests - at one stage we both had a crush on the same girl - I never got to understand Deepak and I lost contact with him after grade 10.

Helen* was a gorgeous, voluptuous girl I used to sit alongside and play the piano (badly) with at lunch times in my senior year.

A lovely person, she was also vaguely interested in me - but told me in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t go out with me because she was a Jehovah’s Witness (her decision could have also been influenced by the fact that I couldn’t actually play the piano, thus suggesting a lack of sincerity and dedication to our duets on my part). 

My connection with these three people, and with numerous other folks, was often directed by their and my beliefs about Jesus. I believed he was the Son of God. They didn’t. It got me thinking.

I subscribed, and I still subscribe, to the belief that ‘the Lord Jesus Christ has by His suffering and death made an atonement for the whole world so that whosoever will may be saved’.

While I couldn’t articulate what ‘atonement’ meant back then, and I’d still do a patchy job today, my heart was and is warmed by (I say this at the risk of scaring readers or being misinterpreted) the universal love of God and the desire to reconcile ‘whosoever’ through the sacrificial love and actions of Jesus.

In  my late teens I grew to be near-obsessed with Tim Rice’s libretto from Jesus Christ Superstar. I was a big fan of Jesus Christ’s; I loved him and, in the words of a then-popular Christian ditty, ‘I knew Jesus before he was a superstar’.

I knew from Christ’s parable of the sower that he didn’t expect everyone who heard about him to have faith in him. I knew, also, that he was very suss when it came to religious leaders and the ‘respectable types’ who have scorned the efforts of scores of Christian visionaries such as Bill Booth. People who believed in Jesus, who loved him and wanted to publicise him to any- and everybody they met.

But why didn’t the whole world see what I saw? How come they didn’t ‘get’ Jesus? What does it say about the destiny of Zayed, Deepak or Helen? And what does it say about my presumptions in the first place, or any assumption I felt towards them and their beliefs?

As Rice asked, so they also asked (well, all those who weren’t blandly ignoring him completely), ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Who are you, what have you sacrificed?’

What I’ve come to know as Christology comes into play at this point: who was Christ, what was his mission, why did he end up being tortured by the Imperial storm troopers of his day? What did any of it mean?

Rice plays in my head again …

DID YOU MEAN TO DIE LIKE THAT?

WAS IT A MISTAKE?

OR DID YOU KNOW YOUR MESSY DEATH

WOULD BE A RECORD BREAKER

As I previously discussed concerning The Salvation Army’s fourth doctrine, the way you perceive Jesus Christ tends towards a dismissal (liar or lunatic) or an acceptance (Lord). Christ’s first followers were convinced to the point of death that God was within Jesus. That Jesus, the self-titled Son of man, was the Son of God.

Jesus got tired, thirsty and hungry. He cursed and wept. He partied and lost his temper; he loved and he despaired. He healed, taught, walked, worked, argued, sweated, ate and drank booze.

It is Christ’s humanity that gives Christians hope, as it means that God identified with and embraces his creation to the point where he redeems it through a mystical process that, while theorised, hypothesised and analysed ad nauseum, ultimately must be taken on faith.

Scriptures teach, as God symbolically promised back in Genesis (3:15), that Christ died for us, his brothers and sisters, and ‘was made like us in order to be our priest’, mediating and linking us back to God the Father (Hebrews chapter two, 1 timothy, chapter two).

Jesus knew what it means to be human and frail (Hebrews chapter four), to be limited and finite (Hebrews, chapter five). The same man will be revealed, John the revelator predicts, to be the potent albeit confusing embodiment of salvation; the Lamb become the Lion (Revelation, chapters five and six).

Without being able to comprehend what it took to redeem us, the hows and whys that will always defeat us, I embrace and honour Christ’s sacrifice. Like Peter, I see a pattern in how we should live (1 Peter 2) and I look to fit the groove, as is only possible through some welcome and much needed- divine intervention.

* Not the person’s real name. 

Writer: Barry Gittins is a Melbourne-based writer, lifelong Salvationist, husband (to Trudy) and father(to Emily and Benjamin) who seeks God in everyday encounters. A frustrated poet and playwright, he has worked for the Salvos’ Australia Southern Territory in various roles since 1991: as a journalist (for Warcry, The Young Soldier/Kidzone, The Musician),technical writer and CD-ROM author in corps program (mission development), senior review editor (Warcry) and editor (On Fire). He currently works as a social program and policy consultant (writer/researcher) for the social program department.

No comments yet.

Leave a comment