Volume 1, Issue 3, June 1994

EACH MUST FIND JESUS FOR THEMSELF

Based on the new knowledge of the historic Jesus, Daniel Easterman, has written his latest fictional novel, entitled, "The Judas Testament". Just published by HarperCollins, the novel contains the following statement by an old priest:

"When I was a young man, I believed in God - a conventional enough belief, even banal, but sufficient at a certain age to sustain a life of self-denial, which was what I really wanted. I do not know why. Young men are such strange creatures, even to their older selves.

But with time such a life grows harder. It is not so much that the flesh is weak, but more that the spirit is complex, and the mind is prone to wander. So it is that we come to other beliefs, other visions. An absent godhead is not enough. Hume's pendulum swings very heavily. I believed in so many things then: in my country, in peace, in purification through war, in justice, in punishment, in something I called mankind. Some of these I even believed in at the same time, if you can credit that.

Because I was a Christian, I knew that one day I would have to believe in Jesus. Not taste or sample him, not sip him in the mass, not give mental assent to the abstractions of Paul, not crucify myself alongside him in some juvenile denial of my human needs. No, I had to devour him, I wanted to swallow him whole. I knew there was more, but it was hard to find what it was. I believed in whatever came to hand. The saints, the sacraments, the Virgin, life everlasting: anything to put off the day. Anything but come close to that beating heart....

I got there in the end; I don't know how, I could never guide you there, I have no map for such a journey. Perhaps no one has, perhaps everyone has to find his way there alone. But he was there, as I had known he would be, he was waiting for me. All alone. That was the awful thing to me in my arrival, how alone he was. Nothing can fill the wilderness he lives in. Not the church, not prayers prayed, not hymns sung - nothing. Each one has to appear before him just as I did, the alone meeting the alone."

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.