BACK IN TIME AND OVER IN PLACE TO LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT THE HERE AND NOW

 

9/21/21

For Father’s Day, our kids gave me a subscription to service called Storyworth.  Storyworth sends me a prompt each week and I write something…a story, an essay, or, in my case, a novel, or at least a novelette, of sorts…based on that prompt.  At the end of the subscription period, Storyworth compiles my writings into a vanity book for our family.  It’s been a wonderful gift for at least two reasons.   First, it keeps me writing, often about things I don’t normally don’t spend enough time considering.  Second, it shows how much my kids know and love their dad.

This week’s prompt was

If you could travel back in time to any country and any era, knowing you'd be completely safe and could come back, where and when would you go?

The answer to this question took me somewhere I didn’t think I would be going, and I thought the readers of this blog would like it.   Further, it gave me a reason to post something here, which I haven’t done in a long time.

Thanks for reading:

 

9/21/21

There are a couple of important stipulations in this story prompt.   The first is that I could come back.   The operative term is “could;” depending on the outcome, maybe I wouldn’t want to come back.   The second is that I would be safe, but, again, depending on the outcome, perhaps my safety, in the physical sense, wouldn’t be that important.

 

Given those two stipulations, I would, without a doubt, travel back to the Holy Land during the time of Jesus, probably to Capernaum, where Jesus did much of His teaching and performed many of His miracles, and, inevitably, to Jerusalem, where Jesus made His ultimate sacrifice for us.  I realize that a lot of Christians, and perhaps especially a lot of Catholics, might write that just because they feel, for some reason, that they should write that, just as they would say, if asked what their favorite book is, that their favorite book is the Bible.   However, as a Catholic and a committed Christian, I don’t feel compelled to state a desire to go to the Holy Land.   I would like to go there because I want to learn something about my faith, and perhaps not the obvious.

 

I am a Catholic and, to a certain extent, a Christian because I was brought up as a Catholic and a Christian.  In mid-20^th century America, being Christian was, for most of us, being an American.   And in the neighborhood in which I grew up and with the Polish and Irish ethnicities of my ancestors, being Catholic was part of being alive.   To be Catholic was to be part of the establishment, to be a “normal” member of society.  Asking someone why s/he was Catholic was like asking the proverbial fish why it was swimming in water.

 

Those who read the New Testament in any but the most perfunctory manner realize that the Gospels are series of challenges by Jesus to the religious authorities of His day.   Jesus does something contrary to a strict, and almost always contradictory, interpretation of the Law, the Pharisees go crazy and charge Him with the most absurd of “trespasses,” such as having the gall to cure people of life-long afflictions on the Sabbath, (e.g., Luke 6, 6-11, Luke13, 10-17), He puts them in their place, someone winds up being cured of some malady and, sometimes, following Christ, and we learn a lesson about the true essence of a life devoted to following God.   The story repeats over and over again until it culminates in Jesus’ being crucified when the religious authorities collude with the Romans to get rid of this guy who is challenging religious, and, by extension, the civil authority.   Jesus, of course, has the proverbial last laugh and we are saved because He, first, died for His opposition to the way the people in charge of the religion of the day demanded things should have been and, then, rose from the dead, never to return.

 

This should be pretty damn scary for those of us who are Catholic or some other Christian denomination because we were brought up that way, that’s what everybody around us was, and/or because some form of Christianity was the accepted, the established, religion of our place and day.   These stories of things that happened 2,000 years ago are not without relevance for today.   Jesus was a rebel who stood in opposition to the religious authority of His day, and those in charge of today’s established religions should not be comfortable in their assurance that Jesus was attacking only the Pharisees and would surely not be coming after them because the churches they run are ostensibly established in His name.

 

So, as a practicing Catholic and a serious Christian, what would I do if some character who was not ordained, had little education, and didn’t come from the right parts of town, so to speak, started criticizing the religion that I have followed my whole life?   What if He called certain priests, bishops, pastors, and even myself “hypocrites,” a term he reserved for those deserving of his most scathing criticism?   Would I follow this itinerant preacher with a beyond unconventional lifestyle, even if I had seen some pretty miraculous things that he did, or would I comfortably stay “in the fold,” like the parents of the man born blind who would not even acknowledge that it was Jesus who cured their son’s blindness for fear that they would be expelled from the synagogue.  (John 9,18-23)?   I would like to go back to the time and place of the historical Jesus to see if I would pass this “test.”

 

It’s easy to say from the perspective of having been comfortably ensconced in a religion that, on its face, doesn’t demand very much, that I would certainly follow Jesus.   I can only speak for myself, but I am not the least bit sure that I would give up all the Jesus demanded His followers give up; the easy way would be to stay in the “real” religion of the day and call this itinerant preacher and his peculiar band of followers a bunch of kooks.   Being human, I might, and probably would, choose the easy way.  

 

That is why the stipulation of being able to return is so important to my choice of the time and place to which I would like to be at least temporarily transported.   I’m quite sure that I would not follow the guy who was asking so much when I could continue coasting along in my own religion, confident that I was doing the right thing because that’s what I had always been told.    And even if I did decide that this guy was worth following, what would I do when the going got really tough?   I’d surely be with St. Peter denying left and right that I even knew the guy…if I even had enough guts to put myself in a position in which people would be asking.

 

If I did, however, somehow pass the “test,” if I did defy the wishes of most of those around me and embrace Jesus back then, I wouldn’t want to come back to today.  I, like Jesus’ other followers, would have a lot of work to do so that people today would be able to easily be followers of Christ, a gift given to me by the original Christians that I, and multitudes of others, take far too lightly.   And that work that I would have to do would in all likelihood involve a sacrifice to my personal safety, to put it mildly; to be stoned to death, crucified upside down, or thrown to hungry lions is something only somebody who was really committed to something that most people didn’t like or wish to understand would endure.

 

But I know myself quite well, so I would, in all likelihood, want to come back to 21^st century America, and not only, or even principally, because life is immeasurably better here than it was in 1^st century Palestine.  To follow Jesus back then would be beyond my strength, beyond my very self.   I’d want to come back to a place and time in which it remains easy to be at least a nominal follower of Christ; better a nominal follower than a denier.  But the trip would not be without its benefits; I would have seen what it took to be genuine follower if Christ.   That would make me a better Christian today and, after all, isn’t that, for Christians, the point of existing?