How Can I Love God If I Don’t Like Jesus?

That question could be enough to send many of you fleeing, but it’s a serious inquiry of mine. In one way or another, I have been asking it all my life.

I am asking the question again after having met a few people who say that they had a much more up close and personal meeting with Jesus and/or God during their near-death experiences. They say he is awesome.

I can’t say that I have any big wedge issues with God. I haven’t had any major injuries. I haven’t lost anyone prematurely in any violent way. I wasn’t born in a ghetto. I’ve had a pretty smooth ride this life. So my issues with God and Jesus are more abstract.

My parents were unadventurous Presbyterians. I was just a little kid when God first pissed me off by separating me and my dear friend Priscilla into different Sunday School classes. Not only that, but He (through my mother) forced me to endure Sunday school wearing a bowtie. Gag me.

Church never improved. I always found it boring. So when I heard stuff like “Jesus loves you,” I just wasn’t very impressed. He loves me—so what? Why doesn’t he do something to thrill me? Other people who loved me gave me candy.

When I was 13 and circling in on puberty, I fell madly in love with Marilee. She was a Jehovah’s Witness (I didn’t have a clue what that meant) and introduced me to the concept of eternal life. Whoa! Cool idea! The notion of spending forever with Marilee motivated me to accept her invitation to Bible study. The thrilling mental picture I remember even 40 years later is bobsledding through eternity holding Marilee in my arms. Woo-hoo!

That was a much more interesting picture than anything Marilee’s mother said about the Bible. Egypt? Isreal? What does this have to do with anything? Then came this whole Armageddon thing. I was happy to hear about the new world, the promised paradise, but why did God feel it necessary to attack the whole world with fire and earthquakes and plagues and a bunch of mean and nasty stuff. Was God psycho?

As I was pondering Armageddon, President John Kennedy announced the naval blockade around Cuba. I recall telling Marilee on the school bus, “Looks like Armageddon has arrived.”

Alas, there was no thermonuclear holocaust, but then one set of grandparents, who were Baptists, apparently became alarmed that I was seeing a Jehovah’s Witness mother and daughter propaganda team. I don’t really know the backstory. My parents tried drawing a fine line between supporting my religious freedom and placating the relatives. My mom hinted even before I really knew what this meant that she thought that Marilee’s mother was using her lovely daughter to lure me into religious study. Commies had spies and now religions had spies.

Ultimately, I grew so bored with God and his dry as dust Bible that I quit on my own. Meanwhile, God found a much more formidable rival for my attention: sex. My first exposure to Playboy in a drug store produced such a bodily rush that the law of natural selection won out. Curiosity about the mysteries of sex was wildly more compelling than anything God’s earthly representatives were selling about lambs and flocks and dead prophets who couldn't speak understandable English.

It kept getting worse. When the Vietnam War blossomed in my face, threatening me with military service for a war I didn’t understand, I could not comprehend how and why religious leaders actually favored our military action. Was God nuts? How could Jesus say to love thy neighbor and then want us to go blow Commies up? Furthermore, a whole bunch of Christians called anti-war protestors various permutations of gutless, unpatriotic scumbags. What happened to “thou shalt not kill?”

In a previous blog entry (December 3) I mentioned that while Richard Nixon was being chased out of office, a radio psychic Betty Bethards captured my attention with woo-woo. Reincarnation thrilled me. Since many Christians decry reincarnation and other metaphysical studies as a form of devil worshipping, I drifted even farther from becoming what was being branded at the time as a Jesus freak. The savior in sandals seemed to be doing nothing to attract my attention but tell me, via his outspoken religious press corps, that the things that were capturing my heart or my intrigue were anti-God. Sex was anti-God. Nirvana was anti-God. Hippies were anti-God. Metaphysical thinking was anti-God.

I was never anti-God. I was more pro-something else. I put God and Jesus on the back shelf in the philosophical cupboard while I searched for the light elsewhere. I was pretty quick to catch onto the idea that there are many different branches of Christianity, but none of them spoke to me on an ooh-wow level. Many spiritual spokesgurus said that all paths lead to God eventually, and I liked hearing that.

The best stuff was my own creative essence—my own consciousness. I began to form my own picture of God. My visions of unconditional love were a lot different than those preached by conservatives. Listening to the bile pouring out of the mouths of televangelists turned my stomach. To me some of it is a no brainer. If Jesus loves everybody, for example, then he loves gay people, too. I am only human and I accept gay people. If I, a human, can conclude that loving, same sex couples should be allowed to create a family, then I think that an enlightened being who loves everybody could reach the same conclusion.

When I try to envision what Godlike or Christlike unconditional love is like, I get a far different picture than what I get from any church I have attended. So many of our cultural institutions are set up to discriminate, isolate, and prioritize in very unloving ways. “We’re right—you’re wrong” thinking does this. Often the name Jesus is used to brand these movements.

It’s only been recently that I have become aware of the possibility that the Jesus I have come to know and dislike is not the real Jesus Christ. I have come to this awakening primarily through reading about or hearing about near-death experiences that featured visitations with light beings, including whom the perceiver believes is Jesus. These visitations present light beings who are all about unconditional love much more in harmony with visions I resonate to. I say thank God for that.

The most recent of these experiences came last Saturday when I attended Seattle IANDS and heard Howard Storm talk. Howard was a tenured art professor at Northern Kentucky University and an avowed atheist. At age 38, he was admitted to a Paris hospital with a perforated duodenal ulcer that was killing him. His subsequent NDE led to a trip to a hellish place where he eventually, out of sheer desperation, called out for Jesus to rescue him. That’s when the ride got wild.

I am not through this arc yet. I am at the point where I realize that I dislike the behavior of many religious entities. It is their portrayal of a stuffy Jesus that I dislike. I am opening my mind to reconsider my position and see more clearly.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I am a flip-flopper.