Jesus, etc

Newsweek magazine, April 2012

I came across an interesting magazine article while in the States last week, written by the British-born blogger Andrew Sullivan. It made Newsweek’s front cover. Its headline urged me to "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus".

Sullivan is a Catholic. But he’s my kind of Catholic - the kind who rejects “supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms”. Sullivan prefers to keep things simple; to focus on “what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be”.

“Jesus’ doctrines,” he writes, “were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching.”

Like Sullivan, I’m also a Catholic. Not a lapsed one either; these days I bring my kids to church most Sundays. But I don’t follow all the rules, I don’t buy all the complicated theology, and I’m frequently embarrassed by the crusty and sometimes criminal antics of the church’s hierarchy.

I go to church because I believe we all have a thirst for God that is as natural as our desire for sex. We can deny it, just as those starchy Victorians denied their sexual urges. But it’s there: we are spiritual creatures. And it seems to me that the religion of my mother, my grandparents and my great-grandparents is as good a place as any in this flawed world to try to satisfy it.

So thank you Andrew Sullivan. Christian leaders of all stripes can continue to judge and denounce and obsess about others’ sex lives. Your little article spoke to me more clearly than all of them. Forget the church, follow Jesus. That’s it. Now, nobody tell that old chap in Rome but I feel like a man who has emerged from a confessional. 

You can read more from Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast