I Hate Jesus

I’m sixteen years old and sitting in the principal’s office for the third time in my high school career. I’m scanning the room, waiting for the tight lipped, Church-going Principal to blow through the doors and give me some look that may or may not bring me down to her level. I look at the pictures that line her solid oak desk; four, maybe five kids. It’s hard to tell, they’re all grown and married, standing under Jesus in giant Cathedrals. She smiles with them at picnics at baby’s birthday parties. I rub my hands together, a nervous habit. I look down at my shirt. It’s a home made Hanes white t-shirt with giant black letters on the front that read: I HATE JESUS.

            When she enters the room she looks straight ahead then sits swiftly next to me, not across. I wait for her to notice the shirt. She does, immediately, and gives me a sort of sympathetic look. A look that makes me think she wants to buy my Mom a gift basket with good wines and cheeses in it. The kind that is sad, mournful, like I’m a dog with a cancer. Quite to my dismay she disregards the shirt through our meeting and mentions it not once.

I had decided to wear the shirt as a means of protest after I had been discovered as the mastermind of my high school’s first underground newspaper.  The paper had been anonymously distributed and contained highly controversial critiques of our school. One column titled, Atheists Corner pointed out the annoyance of the blue shirts worn by half the school on Fellow Christian Athletes day proclaiming I LOVE JESUS, and mentioned how it would not, in any way, be lawful of the school to reprimand or even call attention to a shirt that announced I HATE JESUS.

Unfortunately for me, I was right. She didn’t say a word.

My idea of spirituality and religion I believe has since evolved past the time of wanting nothing more than to offend the enormous Mormon community in my tiny town. Perhaps in growing up I have discovered a new way in which to understand what the term “spirituality” means to me, and find it for myself.

            I was raised with an Atheist Father and an indifferent Mother. She was raised Christian and claimed to hold a connection with God. I recall nights in which my Mother would sit on the patio watching my Father take long drags off cigarettes and calmly debate with him the benefits of spirituality. She would tell him if he had spirituality his life could be more centered. When bad things happened, he would have something to grasp to, an understanding of the world. Yet he would consistently deny this, not necessarily disagreeing with the fact that maybe he’d, essentially, “have his shit together” if he “found God”, but simply could not bring himself to do it. He was always a realist, he knew there wasn’t a God, even if he wanted there to be one.

I thought little of religion and God until High School in which I was bombarded with it. I didn’t decide I was an Atheist until then, before I had been completely apathetic to God and religion. I’d always kind of side stepped it; considered it to be a backdrop for people I didn’t really care for. For some reason, I had never had religious friends growing up, never noticed the dozens of churches on our blocks. As I grew older and my cognitive skills developed I began to notice, to learn about it, and to loathe it.

I can only “loathe” something for so long before it wears on me. Soon after high school I let go of the dismay I had for those whom I considered “weak minded” trotting along every day to their “crutch” preying to a fictional myth which had somehow infused itself into my government and affected my rights as a woman and otherwise. I still hold a certain amount of dismay, I still feel myself clinching my teeth whenever I hear about “creationism” being taught alongside science in schools.

Unfortunately, I can’t hold onto anger the same way I did in high school, especially when there is no conservative, Christian principal to fuck with. Perhaps this is why upon entering my twenties I believe I found what it means to be spiritual, maybe not in a traditional sense but I believe the feelings I get from it are just as strong.

The first time I made the connection between art and spirituality was at a ska show in Las Vegas. I don’t suppose many can say they “found God” at a ska show in Las Vegas, but for me it wasn’t about finding any kind of God, it was about the feeling I got inside when one of my favorite bands entered the stage, free of a set list, unaffected by the audience, and began to play their instruments facing each other in a circle, creating this paroxysm of thrashing musical mayhem. And if I close my eyes I can feel the music in my stomach and bones and I am the most centered, at ease, and happy I can ever be. At this moment I knew. Art is my religion and good, real, visceral live music is my form of prayer. It is when I can reach that point when I feel beyond myself. This is the only time when I truly feel connected with something much more than me; something higher and bigger and more powerful.

After this I began to embrace my new form of spirituality. I would read a great book and I’d want to crawl in-between the tiny black letters and live there and when it pushed to make me cry I would feel it then, that wave of spirituality and creativity and artfulness all rolled up and injected straight into my veins. And when I see a piece of art so beautiful or fantastic it makes me want to cry or scream or laugh or fuck or run and run until I forget who I am. I feel it then. Completely centered. At ease. Happy.  

Art has a church, too. It’s in my home, at my dining room table, sitting with three or four smart, funny friends eating really good food and drinking tasty wine until we can’t remember when we fell asleep, talking about each other, others, the things around us, congregating and worshipping our life, this life, right here, and feeling it again. Completely centered. At ease. Happy.

As with any religion mine creates frustrations as well. When I feel the want to create art, especially with my w

riting, it’s there but allows me to feel questionable emotions. My writing possesses self doubt and frustration. I sit and stare at a screen, drink, smoke, tap keys and feel doubtful. When I create something I feel is worth it, I feel it again. Connected with something bigger than myself. Completely centered. At ease. Happy.

So it goes again though, I wonder if maybe it’s just my knack for rhetoric that allows me to justify why I’m a spiritual person. In essence I don’t possess the discipline and drive most religions require. Like my Father I will never have the ability to perhaps “have my shit together” the same way in which a disciplined, religious student would. Others can be completely engulfed in nature and the Lord and spirits and have that ability to “get high” from it. Seemingly, I still need vodka for that.       

I let go, sometimes. I think maybe there is something more than just art. Not literally, but maybe in another dimension of reality. I believe in energies that people hold and exude, I believe in karma and actualizing your wants through positive energies and intense personal relationships with others.  Is that really all I offer spiritually? Does it hold any connection with whatever God may be? I ask myself. I sincerely don’t know.

I remember sitting in the principal’s office at sixteen rubbing my hands together. Watching her talk to me as if I were in grade school and having that Cake song off Prolonging the Magic (by far their best album) in my head, “…sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell”. I disappear into the song a little; it makes me feel a little more at ease. I grow up, I go to shows, I write, I spew questionable rhetoric, I think about God some days and most days I don’t. I’m happy to be a goat, happy to grow up unaffected by religion, happy to have found what I was looking for in an artistic form. Yet no matter how old I get I still can’t bring myself to get rid of my I HATE JESUS t-shirt, no matter how childish it is.