An Anne Rice Christmas

Anne Rice has written about vampires for ten novels now, so readers whose passion for doomed souls remains unrelieved may balk over her recent move to higher things, spiritually speaking. I doubt that their disappointment will last long. Ms. Rice’s latest book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, opens up a new phase in her wildly successful literary career, one into which her large following will be the better for entering.

Christ the Lord is about Jesus of Nazareth at age 7, and most especially about --- can you believe this? --- his inner struggles at that age with a growing awareness that he might be, in the most literal sense possible, God. If the book were merely about religious delusions, there would be no particular reason for praising the chutzpah of its author for writing it. Any literary hack could put together something credible on a theme like this. But on the theme of a really, truly, genuinely divine Christ in the mentation of a child?

Even in the first century, with eye-witnesses there for the asking, only Matthew and Luke took so much as a first pass, and much later at that, at executing a plot-line like this. Paul never gave it a  thought. And it took John only fourteen verses to set up that magnificent eight-word finesse of it altogether: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The second century produced more risk-taking explorations of the God-kid theme than the first century did, most notably in the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas. But all of those ventures quickly crashed and burned, as well they should have. Turning clay sparrows into live ones? Knocking off a disrespectful playmate? Better that Anne Rice had left those screwball vignettes alone and continued to make it all up as she went along.

But it would not be better had Anne Rice avoided the subject of a redemptive, incarnate God altogether. Fiction, of the quality she is more than capable of producing, is just the right venue for airing out a subject like this. It takes narrative imagination far more than it does logic to capture the idea of an identity between the universe’s creator and a man run out of town after his first sermon. God’s advent in Jesus of Nazareth is simply too big an event for either observed data or spun-out dogmas to contain.

Myth is the only way to go here, in Plato’s sense of the word: as stories that are made-up and true at the same time, rendering realities that can only be rendered when we begin thinking and feeling, aspiring and rejoicing “outside the box.” Great myths are not fantasy and falsehood masking as fact. They convey something truer than all three.

First century Christians mythologized their own growing understanding of Jesus by extending the connections they first perceived between Jesus’ resurrection and his divinity to other events in Jesus’ life, from his teachings and wonder-workings backward in time through his baptism to his infancy, birth, and finally to his very conception. The insight underlying all their efforts was that Jesus’ resurrection could attest to his unique status in God’s eyes only if Jesus possessed that very status from the very beginning. As the Gospel writers might have put it, Easter revealed what had been true, but not fully realized to be true, from the time of Jesus’ baptism (Mark), or of the angelic visits to Joseph (Matthew) and Mary (Luke), or from before anything had been created at all. (John)

What first century Christians did not do very well was draw their hearers and readers into the inner struggles of a man whose body and brain could only obscure the divine substance they came to believe had been mixed perfectly with its every cell and molecule, its every neuron and synapse. Jesus’ heroism proved easy enough for them to depict; they had at their disposal a whole literary genre to support their efforts to present him as a hero of all heroes, fearing but facing the kind of opponents that could and did destroy lesser men. But Jesus’ divinity was another kind of story altogether, one they could tell only by finally divesting its bearer of the very humanity that he was divinely chosen to bear. Thus, John eventually began telling of a Jesus who got through life with hardly any struggle at all. Others told of a Jesus who only seemed to suffer at human hands, and who really didn’t.

Happily for us, Anne Rice will have none of this. Happily for her story, her Jesus exhibits a budding identity disorder from a very early age. And happily for him, he had the best Therapist ever to help him with it.

Who’s In Charge At Your Church

Most Methodist leaders I know are still fuming at the denomination’s Judicial Council over its Decision 1032, a decision which gives pastors the sole discretion to determine a person’s fitness for membership in their congregations. It is, indeed, an astonishingly bad decision. But it is not quite as bad as the pastoral action that gave rise to it in the first place, denying membership to a gay man ostensibly because he would neither repent of his sexual orientation, nor deny its overt expression in a committed relationship.

Part of what makes 1032 potentially so destructive is the obstacle it presents to staying focused on its central issue, the meaning of church membership in the United Methodist tradition. It is all too easy to get distracted by yet more rounds of unhelpful venting about gays and the church. But unless the majority of the Council who voted for 1032 can be shown either to have slept through the hearing altogether or to have been motivated from the start by a malign intent, their otherwise off-base decision might best be regarded as pointing to more ambiguity in the Methodist Book of Discipline than many have believed. 

For example, I have worried that the Discipline may pay insufficient attention to sexual orientation in comparison with its powerful condemnations of excluding people on the basis of race, color, national origin, status, or economic condition. Taking up the issue of gays and lesbians in the context of affirming inclusiveness unambiguously would surely make for more edifying discussions at the next General Conference than those that Methodists have had to endure for quadrennia now. Surely the church can do better than rote recitation of “chastity in singleness,” a phrase crafted especially with non-straights in mind.

Does anybody really know what Methodists should mean by this Medieval-sounding phrase anyway? General Conferences continue to avoid taking responsibility for it by leaving unreconnoitered the critical term, “chastity.” Their inaction left me with little to go on a while back when an unmarried seminary student, worried about his practice of masturbation, asked me if I thought his behavior made him unchaste, and therefore unfit for the ordained ministry. It used to be that the church’s more conscientious youth wondered about even their opening gambits in parked cars on Saturday nights. Nowadays, from other teen-agers and even a former President, the view has emerged that not even oral sex should be counted against either virginity or fidelity. Can we get off the singling out of gays and lesbians and get on with clarifying what chastity means for all singles?

But back to Decision 1032. (Remember what I said about distraction?) Robin Lovin, Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University, got down to its real issue succinctly and well when he wrote recently: “… a member of the United Methodist Church joins the whole connection, so we have not followed some congregational traditions that give the local congregation a decisive role in determining a candidate’s readiness for membership.” (United Methodist Reporter, November 25, 2005.) What this means in specific is that a United Methodist pastor’s bishop and  “collegial guidance by the Annual Conference” have important roles to play in the discerning of anyone’s readiness for membership in the church. Both roles are undermined by Decision 1032.

One of the most powerful images that Christianity has ever offered for understanding and appreciating the identity and role of its leaders is the image of “pastor,” from poimen, shepherd. The pastor of a local congregation is like the shepherd of a flock. The qualifier is crucial. Like shepherds, pastors have both considerable responsibility for and considerable power over the members of their respective flocks. And like shepherds, pastors constantly confront the sobering reality that the responsibilities they bear often outrun the power they have to bear them effectively. However, with every analogy, this one also has its limitations.

Unlike shepherds, pastors do not suborn the fleecing of their flocks. (At least, most of them don’t.) And unlike shepherds, pastors do not fret over how to improve their flock’s gene pool. One in Christ Jesus, their members do not have to be one in race, color, nationality, gender, economic condition, social standing, mode of baptism, marital status, musical preference, commitment to tithing, doctrinal understanding, or sexual orientation as well. When pastors get confused about any of this, and the real owner of their flocks seems otherwise occupied, it is a good thing that there are other Christians higher up on the spiritual food chain to step in and help them out. And when The Book of Discipline becomes too confusing for the Judi-ciary whose job it is to interpret it, it is a good thing that there is a judi-catory available to clear things up.