Many Mansions

   Going on…

Many Mansions

 John 14.v.1-3

Including my own defeated and ruined fortress, but still with a view of sea and sky.

Preface

This book is inspired by a hasty response I made at a low point to my step-step-daughter when she was urging me to pray. I said, “All done for the night. Not in the mood for Jeeesus right now.”

Contrary to my whole view of Christianity. Which is that if you claim, want, to be Christian you are. I don’t have to agree with your interpretations of the gospels; if they give you balm I accept your faith at face value.

But I do feel a need to explain the Jeeesus citation. It struck a chord. One I can’t ever unstrike, given my life to date.

This book is about my own relation to Jesus, which is personal but no more intimate than that of God to man. 

Chapter 1

I wrote a huge book called “The Boomer Bible.” It sold nearly 100,000 copies over 30 years. I learned some things in the writing. Things only writers learn when they are trying to live through their characters. Trying to get into the voice of Jesus. Because I was writing an Antichrist, or was he(?), named Harry. I found it easy to give him a voice. It was the same voice in all four gospels. Literary scholars confirmed for me this was the truest proof of his existence, doubted in detail since the 19th century. His was a voice never heard before in scriptural writings. He was struggling against a language that could not convey what he was talking about. He told the truth outright. When that didn’t work, he used simple parables his acolytes still could not understand. He was impatient with his audience. At times querulous. “Have I not told you…?” Of course he had. He was a God trying to talk theoretical physics with fisherman who hadn’t mastered arithmetic beyond counting the day’s catch.

I heard the voice of Jesus and stole it for my character Harry, gradually realizing they might have been trying to say the same things in different millennia. Harry was always sermonizing on the Mount, scornful, perplexed, angry, and yet generous.

Thing is, I had always been aware of Jesus. I had three perfect-attendance pins from Sunday school. Three years of watching the massive black-walnut paneled wall between kiddyland and the nave of the church, knowing that Fod the Father was on the other side talking to the parents who were there while us small fry were coloring in pictures of the animals on Noah’s ark. I had heard rumors from our teacher, Miss Toothacre, that some kind of different deal was being discussed behind the wall.

My Dad wasn’t there for those discussions. He was home cutting the grass. He came to pick me up, smelling of sweet green clippings in his TR3 roadster and WWII khakis. I asked him about Abraham and Isaac. “Oh that,” he said. “What about it?” I asked.  “”Would you sacrifice me if God told you to?”

“No,” he said, shifting down to second for an acute corner. 

“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you love God?”

“Sure I do. But I love you more.”

When I started understanding why there had to be a Son of God, and how that might change everything.