Baby Jesus and Rene Girard

How I finally got right with the Lord

Chalk it up to a morning spent digging into Rene Girard’s notion of scapegoating, and how Jesus’ crucifixion was the ne plus ultra of sacrificial lambs. According to Girard, with His exquisite sacrifice, He blessed us/shamed us into never being that shitty to each other again (two thousand years of history since has yielded mixed results).

Backed with an afternoon of research into Complexity Theory for my next book and the relationship between the amoral Novelty Engine of evolution and the occasional breakthroughs and bright spots of Complexity that pop out from time to time.

Followed by a slightly overwrought update from a Johns Hopkins scandal, where a Harvard Divinity School student accused Roland Griffiths of priming tripping priests into thinking they’d been blessed with the Holy Spirit, (and not just some excellent mushies).

Concluded with a follow-on link to an article from Christianity Today “I Was a Disenchanted Deadhead Who Found Christ on a Greyhound Bus” Since I’d written about Joseph Campbell’s treatment of the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic Christic concerts, I was intrigued to hear a dude’s story that had gone the other way. Not finding Jesus in Jerry Garcia’s guitar riffs while tripping face, but instead, finding Him the old fashioned way, in a Gideon’s Bible. On a bus.

Needless to say, I was strangely primed for what happened next.

The Deadhead’s story began with a sad tale of broken homes and a “god-shaped hole” in his heart, that he’d hoped joining the psychedelic circus of Dead tour might fill. After a string of sad turns and nagging depression that the best setlists and blotter could not mend, he decided to pack it in. He was too broke to do anything but score a Greyhound ticket home. Then his sister gave him a bible to read on the week long cross country sufferfest to come.

After noodling on his guitar for a few days, he reluctantly opened the Good Book.

Surprisingly, he had a lightning bolt epiphany.

The gospel was beautiful to me. That Jesus had done for me what I could never do for myself—perfectly obey God’s law yet die to satisfy the wages of my sin—was the most liberating news I had ever heard. I was startled when I realized I was crying, overcome by the thought that such a well-practiced sinner could be washed clean, made whole, and given purpose in life.

I had climbed aboard that bus a long-haired, stinking Deadhead (bathing was not a high priority back then). I got off a week later with longer hair, smelling even worse, but saved. I had been washed in the blood of the Lamb and saved by the grace of God.

And here’s where, equally surprisingly, I had a mild goose-bumped epiphany of my own.

As I scanned that paragraph, I experienced an almost audible clicking of ideas into place. “Everyone of those words rang true, they glowed like burning coals,” as Dylan once warbled, “pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul…”

Because while I’d always been down with the Mystic Christic side of things (here’s a Gnostic Stations of the Cross I wrote about a few Easter’s back) the Bible School elements had always stuck in my craw.

Two bits in particular never landed for me (and possibly for you, either?).

1. Christ died for our sins. Always seemed like a groveling, bowing and scraping kinda move. And why (FFS!) did the base condition of existence have to be already tainted with Original Sin? Who said? Priests looking to keep us downtrodden and doubting our own basic goodness, that’s who! Seemed like a shitty baseline for any philosophy of Life, and also seemed to erode our own agency and faith in ourselves.

   Plus, after over a decade in Catholic schools, I saw where that kinda guilt trip got you–lying, cheating, stealing, boozing and fornicating at will, with the weekly absolution of confession giving you infinite second chances to do it all again.

   Wasn’t buying it.

2. I’ve now accepted Christ into my heart! Mawkish bullshit if you ever asked me. All of those holy rollers coming up to the front of the church and waving their arms around and getting dunked in bathtubs, praising Jeezus, and claiming that their lives were forever changed…only to be right back to all their old habits with a fresh veneer of smugness. The worst of performative American charismatic Christianity.

   Wasn’t buying that either.

But here’s what shifted for me when reading that Deadhead’s conversion story, and it lays smack dab at the intersection between Girardian Scapegoating and Complexity Theory. With only a few tweaks in languaging, the whole “Christ Died for Our Sins, and Now I’m Born Again” made sense to me in a way it never had before.

Before we drop into this, just wanted to assure any secular readers we’re not going off the deep end here, so you can happily follow along at full clip as we get to the interesting bits.

From my last book, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind

There really wasn’t a singular and definitive historical Jesus. Our understandings of him and what he represented were irreducibly mediated through human interest and historical context.

Was he the divine Son of God, sent to earth to free us of our Original Sin? Was he a mortal man who became enlightened? Or a regular dude who didn’t? Was he a fictional construct—a convenient grab bag of Middle Eastern solar gods and mystery cults? Or was he a cipher, an allegory cloaking a mystic’s initiatory instructions? Was he really ever here at all?

So much blood and ink have been spilled trying to litigate these questions—typically with far more certainty and less curiosity than is helpful. But what if we’ve all been fundamentally missing the point in our striving for certainty, pro or con?

Because what is beyond doubt is that the idea of Jesus, the “Jesus Meme,” which includes all versions—god, man, and myth—has shaped the last two thousand years of human history more than almost any other human who has ever lived. That in itself, in all of its ambiguity, is worth a real reckoning.

So if you’re a lapsed believer looking for a way back to the Fold, a “None” who’s been skeptical like me, or a member of the faithful looking to hone your pitch to the unconverted, read on and let’s see if we can get from Superstitious Claptrap to Brilliant Reality Map in four moves.

MOVE #1: Life really is nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes said, and red in tooth and claw as Tennyson put it.

Evolution is a giant Novelty Engine relentlessly churning between cycles of creation and destruction. From the origins of life in hotsprings, to the Black Plague and subsequent European Renaissance, to the booms and busts of capitalist markets, “Death writes the code for Life.” It’s utterly terrifying to contemplate. And it’s easy to slip into numbed nihilism if you consider it too long.

Our current political and environmental crises are only making this feeling worse.

Evolution is utterly amoral. It doesn’t care a whit or give a shit for the best laid plans of mice and men. And that can feel so deeply uncaring, so ruthless as to border on evil. It’s a problem theologians have been struggling to solve since Augustine and Aquinas.

We’re not getting any further on #therapytok.

But what if we rejiggered our concept of Original Sin, to the slightly more open-to-interpretation alternate, “Original Condition?” If we can accept that our Original Condition means living within the heartless raw deal that is Evolutionary, we can fully embrace how shitty that sometimes is.

By accepting our Original Condition as the inescapable baseline of life, we’ve got a way to deal with the pain of it. It doesn’t mean we’re intrinsically bad, or fallen as the term Original Sin implies. It just means that our Original Condition is unrelentingly brutal and tragic. And there’s no getting out of that, no matter how hard we try.

So that’s Move #1: Our Original Condition means caring for the fleeting and mortal things we care about, in the face of an indifferent evolutionary impulse.

The Horror! The horror!

MOVE #2: But out of that wood chipper of creation and destruction, sometimes, Complexity emerges. It’s how we’ve gotten from single celled cyanobacteria to Redwood groves. From smoke signals to smartphones. From horses to Teslas. And out of that fragile and emergent Complexity, (which is in no way guaranteed), we can sometimes spot things we value and cherish–the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

It’s those precious things that transmute and redeem the Agony of life into the Ecstasy of it. Call it love, call it Grace, call it Purpose, call it Progress. But whatever it is, it’s that impulse that rails against the Second Law of Thermodynamics which insists everything ends up in the ditch eventually. Replacing it instead with sonnets and sculptures and countless other things of impossible and delicate value.

So that’s the Complexity Theory portion unpacked. Now let’s transition to the Girardian Scapegoat/Baby Jesus bit

If I’m sayin’ grace it’s gonna be to tiny Baby Jesus (Talledega Nights classic clip)

Move #3: What if Girard, (who was Peter Thiel’s favorite prof at Stanford back in the day, and a darling of many Silicon Valley types) was right, that the Nazarene’s sacrifice was somehow archetypally momentous and created a legit split in time–B.C/A.D–before and after his noble act?

What if that dirty Deadhead was right too?

“That Jesus had done for me what I could never do for myself—perfectly obey God’s law yet die to satisfy the wages of my sin”

This is the part that gave me goosebumps–”perfectly obey God’s law, yet die to satisfy the wages of my sin.” Now that we have our Complexity Theory decoder rings, we can reread that as “perfectly honor [the Good, True and Beautiful], yet die to free us from the burden of our [Original Condition].”

You could argue that Jesus took a stand for Complexity (the GTB) in the face of heartless Novelty (Original Condition). And he did so by willingly sacrificing himself in the most perfect and comprehensive way possible, proving that if he could do it and not flinch, then what excuse did the rest of us have?

After all, Jesus got absolutely wrecked. Betrayed by his best friend. Let down and disowned by all his other friends. Praised by his people (Palm Sunday) only to be damned by his people five days later (“Bring us Barrabas!”), physically beaten and mocked, and ultimately abandoned by his AllFather (“My god my god, why have you forsaken me!”).

It would be comically bad if it weren’t so tragically sad.

#i’mnotdeadyet!

But still, the dude hung in there, amidst the slings and arrows of the most outrageous of fortunes. Offering his life to teach the lesson, “I get it, I get it. Life really is a bitch and then we die. And I’m gonna go all in on this so you really can’t miss the point (h/t Girard). But in the end, forgive ‘em all cuz they don’t even know what they’re doing!”

And then, at the very end, as he offered up his spirit, he cries out “It is accomplished!”

So we’ve gotta ask ourselves, what is it that he thinks he accomplished?

Move #4: If we toggle between Girard and our Deadhead preacher man, that “Christ died for our sins and now he lives in my heart” is another way of saying “Life’s nasty brutish and short, but I’m gonna keep my eyes on the Prize no matter what, because some brave-ass mother fucker (technically, not true. No one, apparently fucked his mother, not even that #cuckjoe) already laid down this meme in spades , and I’m inspired enough now to stay the course.

No. Matter. What.

And “accepting Christ into our hearts” is really just us committing to taking a stand for the Good, True and Beautiful and promising not to bail when things get hairy. Cuz if he didn’t then we shouldn’t.

That’s what Christmas is really all about, Charlie Brown.

So as we celebrate the Druid Solstice tonight by burning a Yule log and snogging under some mistletoe, we can do all the usual #inspo things and remind ourselves “it’s always darkest before the dawn” or “tonight marks the return of the light in our lives.”

And those are hopefully, helpfully true.

But let’s also ponder for a moment the advent of the Nativity. That unto us, a child is born who might one day change the world.

Like Roger Bannister busting out the four minute mile, once someone’s done the impossible, it suddenly becomes that much more possible.

So when it gets hard on the road ahead, as it likely will, and we feel like giving up in despair, or collapsing under the weight of all the injustice in the world, we will remember:

Our original condition is to be tossed around by the forces of amoral Creation and Destruction.

Our optional decision, is to take a stand for Complexity–the precious, the rare, and the meaningful.

And our constant volition is to keep the Light in our hearts–gaining the courage and the hope to keep on keepin’ on.

In dying so well, He makes us want to live a little better.

Fiat Lux, et Felix Nativitas!