Sexless and the City

I grew up perpetually in love.   I started a little early, age four, with a girl named Theresa.

I clearly remember staring out my window at the stars wide awake, thinking about her.  How could I get her attention?  She was older and did cool kids things. I was still into throwing spit and mud cakes at the dogs behind the preschool.  I imagined myself doing all sorts of smooth daddy things to get her attention, but I chickened out and never made my move.  Eventually she stopped coming to school and I moved on to my next love... Karen.

Karen had red curly hair and uhhhh a face.  That's about all i remember, other than being lovesick for her.  She was my next door neighbor (and my best friends sister) so I thought i had a pretty good shot.  I remember sitting in my bed at night trying to sleep when the song "Just a Gigolo" came on the radio.  I swear to God I pictured myself in a red tracksuit running in slow motion into her arms in a golden field.  This is maybe the dumbest thing I've ever imagined, but it kept me up at night.  She moved away in second grade.

I didn't change much in the love department until after I moved to California.  I initially came with my girlfriend from Missouri.  Job hunting by day, by night i'd draw her in charcoal... as she lay asleep or posing, on the lumpy beds in cracked out motels.  It wasn't just for the keepsake, I wanted to soak up each curve and line.  Drawing let me spend more time doing exactly that.  It also was something you could hold in your hand that captured how head over heels I was.

After we split I learned dating in California had a waaaaaay different set of rules.  And they are rules.  Rule number one is don't show too much interest.  Keep the phone calls to a minimum, take your time to ask her on a solo date, don't push for exclusivity.  Stay cool.  Rule two is keep things engaged and entertaining.  If she has friends with her, keep them all smiling.  Pick the right place to go, keep the champagne flowing, keep everyone talking.  Rule number three is take control of the situation.  Don't show indecisiveness or let yourself get pushed around.

Should you follow these rules and keep your teeth white, you have a fighting chance.  A chance to at least head towards the next level.  Hold your emotions in check, don't move to fast and you could find yourself:

(in order of severity)
 
   - Always very close to going out, but never going out
   - Supporting her emotionally as she tries to get back with her ex
   - Having long conversations that end ambiguously
   - Having sex
   - Being "friends"
   - Having sex several times
   - Something like a girlfriend

Most of these areas were new to me.  I guess they still are.  I admit, I am a little dripping wet with my emotions, I am still that idiot kid and sometimes my music shows it.  Dating is fun here but I think it killed that romantic in me.  I still look for love, but in a sort of tongue in cheek way.  Anyway, those chances are few and far between.  Most of my friends are married now, but the ones that aren't... we'll they seem to be in a never ending chase.  Sitting around like some kind of Aziz skit, trying to figure out if their tinder match is going to ghost them based on the last few texts.  I'm usually in the same situation, and I have to wonder:

Is love just different sized fish chasing each other around the pond?   Do we only love those who are squarely out of our league, or the chase itself?
Have I lived in California so long I've become too cool to love wholeheartedly?
Am I just stuck on peoples appearances like everyone else is?

Do we have so many options and distractions, are we so bent on the next best thing, that we've forgotten how to make genuine connections?  

In the six months before we met, I had to go through:

Sheila
Allie
Chel
Chrissy
Estefania
Stephanie
Juliet
Jeanette
Natalie
Kaylee
Lauren
Lexie
Lynne
Rebecca
Patty
Jessica
Cheyenne
Lily

Just to find one Lianna.

I didn't sleep with these women, but I threw my hat in the ring.  I started to build a connection but it didn't stick.  I wonder now.. how long will the next list be?

Find out on the next exciting episode of "Sexless in the City"



Oh and Lily's number is 619-889-1764.  Give her a call, she'd love to hear from you.

What I  learned  about Christianity by studying its early writings:


I thought I should share some of my thoughts around Christianity to:

Help make sense of a position I hold (which Christians and Heretics alike seem to scratch their head at)

See if it resonates with anyone out there who find themselves in similar theological waters.

I started with the position that the "Old Testament" wasn't true to the word of God.  It didn't seem likely that God created me, created such a complex physical universe full of observable laws and piled high with evidence for the date of the world and the evolution of man but then hastily told a few prophets that oh by the way all the scientific evidence is wrong.  I created the world a few thousand years ago, chose a small group of people to share my protection and then murdered everyone in their way.  I then decided to have this written down after untold generations of oral transmission and put it in a book that overall depicts me as an angry, baby killing, moody and easily offended but somehow perfect and infinite God.  Oh and while we're at it we all come from two people in a garden who's exploits into fruit based debauchery have created an unfix-able rift between us.  They must have done a good job of having the angels type this out on their Surface Pros (like i'm doing now) to make sure the story stayed intact from the dawn of history through the penning of the first scriptures. 

So my position was Old Testament fantasy mixed with some inspired insights, But I held the New Testament in pretty high esteem.  I read it and heard a genuine voice to Jesus, an iconoclast who seemed intent on overthrowing the traditions of his time that were empty, who boldly overturned the money changers' tables, saw beauty in the sinner, and cut through hypocrisy like a hot knife through um.. sin butter. 

About this time I started going to church and really trying to make the right moves.  Okay, here is my spiritual guidepost, the words of Jesus but there are a few questions:

A:  Was the New Testament word for word the untainted word of God and accurate with regards to Jesus?

B:  Was Jesus God?  Was he the "Son of God" or was he a human?  If he was God we have to assume A is true, and as Christians we regularly accept A is true and the bible is a clear guidepost for our moral and spiritual journey.

C:  Did we capture the whole story in the New Testament?  Are there genuine words of Jesus outside the canon that were left out for political reasons?  If so A loses probability and answering B becomes difficult.

D:  If Jesus was a man, what kind?  Anti-Roman?  Apocalyptic Preacher?  Enlightened teacher?  or the miracle worker of the bible sent to free us from religious nit picking and the law of the dreaded Pharisees?

C is the one that really started the journey for me.  I was fascinated that not only were there extra canonical writings but that there were a ton of them.  I thought it probable that the final version of the New Testament might have left out genuine teachings of Jesus and I wanted to see if there were good ones left on the table.   If there were, it gives me a whole new way of following Jesus.  It seemed like a pretty important question to answer.  If I go to church every week and pour over the bible, can I be sure it's  not corrupted by man and that we are safe in following its message to the letter?  Only my eternal soul is at stake..  so.. no big deal.

The first stop on my journey was www.earlychristianwritings.com.  I got obsessed pretty quickly, looking for truth and found that there were some fascinating alternative gospels and writings.  I focused on the earliest writings, hopefully closer to the source and that struck me as having genuine wisdom.  I made a list of candidates that seemed to have some possible connection to real words of Christ:

    1 - The Dialog of the Savior
    2 - The Gospel of Thomas
    3 -  The Gospel of Mary
    4 - The Didache
    5 - The Sophia of Jesus Christ
    6 - The Gospel of Phillip
    7 - The 2nd apocalypse of James

Three things struck me almost immediately into reading all this. 

1 - Tracking down Jesus was difficult.  Some of the oldest and maybe best sources were fragmentary or totally lost (i.e.. The gospel of the Ebionites)

2 - There was a lot of different interpretations of the Jesus story.  There was a Gospel of Mary painting her as the lead disciple, unknown mysterious Mary.  There is the Gospel of Thomas which was a rare intact early writing with potentially numerous real quotes of Jesus.  But the Jesus in there is completely different than the Gospel hero.

3 - In the Gospels I've come to realize we know almost nothing about the characters, their history and how they actually played a part in this story.  I was on the hunt for more clues about that so I could understand if the church history was accurate.

Let's look as some examples.  We are told there were 12 disciples, 12 being a ubiquitous number in the Hebrew Bible.  They get names in the gospels but we know nothing about any of them with the exception of perhaps Peter , John, James and a bit about Thomas.  When they come in and out of the story it's very unclear who is who and what they really represent.  Peter is called Peter, Simon Peter, and Cephas.  It makes it difficult to know exactly who we're talking about.   Further, looking hard at the letters of Paul it turns out Paul happens to spend most of his time railing against him!  One of 12 in history to be documented spending time in the mortal presence of Jesus and Paul is completely opposed to him.  My favorite quote is Paul saying it would be better if Peter's crew had their testicles removed.  Ok so it turns out the early church was founded on division.  And the guy featured most in the whole New Testament, our friend Paul hates Peter and James and spends a fair amount of the pages in our canon arguing about whether Gentile converts should be circumcised or not. 

Here the doubt begins to flower.  Why would the canon feature so heavily arguments between its very founders?  Why did Paul, a man who knew Jesus not in the flesh but only through "revelations and visions" not bow down before these lucky few who Jesus himself reportedly selected to create the church?  Why is there almost nothing left from these founders?  If they spent their lives following Jesus why wasn't there a divine order to get that valuable knowledge transferred?  To me the letters of Paul were starting to look altogether very human.  If we accept it as pure and untouched word of God then it works like this:  I shall send my son to Earth and choose twelve disciples to carry my word.  they shall write nothing down because frankly they got it wrong so 50 years later I will come to someone else in a vision and he will get it right.  Fortunately his letters will win the day and almost nothing will be in the bible from the 12.  Well except i'll sneak in one short letter from James... his BROTHER. 

I started to focus on James.  We have more historical information on James by far than Jesus.  He is called "the brother of the lord" by Paul and in the Gospels he is shown as Jesus flesh and blood brother... sort of.  I say sort of because from the gate there is a disciple James who with his brother John are called "The sons of thunder"  Another unexplained title for two folks with familiar names.  Is this the same James?  It's unclear as always, but it seems like James is alternatively touted as Jesus' brother then hidden as not his brother "son of Zebedee" and then pulled back and forth by the factions.  On the plus side, there is a fair amount written about James.  Well I thought, maybe there's a clue here.  If we know more about James than Jesus, we can probably infer something about what Jesus truly intended.  He was after all his brother and did lead the early church.  Right Paul?  Well Paul hates James as well.  Turns out James was not happy with uncircumcised Jews taking part in their new form of messianic Judaism.  Paul sure didn't give a lot of respect to the man Jesus reportedly asked to lead his church and who is his actual brother. 

On further reading (see Robert Eisenman "James the brother of Jesus"), James was a zealot, a hard core Jew who was revered by other serious Jews for his religious piety and purity.  He lived a simple life by design, and most likely was an Essene.  Essenes were extremely strict in their purity rites, didn't drink and often were vegetarians.  They were also fervently anti-Roman.  They didn't want these pagans anywhere near their temple and all sorts of fights broke out when they tried to show up there.  The Essenes were ready to die to fight the Romans and abhorred the Pharisees who took a very pro Roman position.  To them this was the ultimate sellout.  Eventually this anti roman zealot position of James got him killed. 

Was this a clue?  Was Jesus in fact anti-roman, a strict zealot and was that what he intended for the early church?  I mean we know Jesus was killed by crucifixion so it would make sense that he was also anti-Roman, stirring up the ire of the establishment preaching like his brother that the Romans needed to go.  I mean the messiah  was supposed to lead his people from the rule of the despots... right? 

I still find it hard to tell.  Great books have been written on this and i'm sure they could sway me one way or another.  Its an important question to ask.  If Jesus brother was an Essene and the early church seemed to be comprised of these same folks, were the rants of Paul misplaced?  Here we have a mountain of evidence for a poor, vegetarian strict Jew who would not eat the blood of animals and then the Jesus of Paul who is almost the opposite, a new covenant who releases us from Torah law and does it by us drinking his... blood...  Okay now we're in diametric opposition.  Would the real Jesus please stand up?  And are they even definitively brothers?  Paul calls James "the brother of the Lord" but all through his writings calls Jesus "Jesus Christ"  Why then would he not say  "the brother of Jesus Christ" after reading and re-reading I started to feel that the reason Paul feels safe completely opposing the view of James is because "brother of the Lord" is another term meant to denote James holiness, not his physical relationship to Jesus.  This also helps explain why its so nebulous in the Gospels.  The gospels go to great pains to downplay the importance of Jesus family.  They intentionally obfuscate the role of his family and alternately show them as thinking Jesus is crazy or that Jesus doesn't really think that much of them.  If there was no true bloodline to Jesus this starts to make sense.  What we are in fact looking it is best understood as two sides trying to claim dominance in the same sort of arguments Paul had.  Messianic Jews have it right, and by goodness look here this James guy who is a devout Essene, is his brother therefore we're right.   Wait no the Pauline gentile Christianity is correct because the family of Jesus is unimportant, and Paul's word are the majority of the Canon.  This also helps us make sense of the tons of extra canonical writing.  A lot of it comes from opposing camps trying to show that their line to Jesus offers them supremacy in the battle of ideas that was the early church.

The New Testament started to look different.  Here we have highlighted a very Pauline Jesus.  What I thought of as iconoclastic seemed to be actually anti Jewish, Anti-Essene and the Jesus in there is one who isn't that opposed to Roman rule and can be stomached by the ruling elite.  So in the war of views (and it was a war jews were slaughtered for their anit establishment ways including our friend James) the pro gentile, pro establishment Pauline way won the day and it would seem the Canon.  The anti-establishment Jesus was mostly gone, except for a few incongruent and likely accurate quotes and of course Matthews sword which he chopped off a roman ear with (why was he carrying that?)

Okay so at this point back to my original questions I've given up on A.  It's clear to me the New Testament is the work of warring factions of messianic Jews who are jockeying for position and the dominant position won out and left behind a mountain of "heretical" works for us to parse through looking for clues on who Jesus really was.  So if not the word of God was it at least accurate? 

Now we're back to names.  The gospels are written from Mark, Luke, Matthew and John.  Well except that it almost undeniably wasn't written by them.  What we know of the characters in no way lines up with what we can determine of the authors.  Assuming our evidence is accurate we can early date the gospels to 50-100 years after jesus died.  So he then had his word orally transmitted, written down by people under fake names and given to us as something we must believe at all costs?  I guess I can go with that but it looks like there's some confusion as to what really happened.  None of them agree on the birth narrative.  Mark, the oldest gospel doesn't have a resurrection story originally.  The women find an empty tomb, are afraid and leave telling no one anything!  This starts to sound like a completely different tale with a different meaning.  If the oldest Gospel originally had nothing about the resurrection isn't that a pretty big deal?  I hear in church "without the resurrection this means nothing"  Oh boy, now that very thing is starting to look dubious.

When you look at the gospel Jesus he is a miracle working fool.  That is a major focus of the gospel but there are a few issues here:

  1 - Contemporary historians of Jesus are silent about any miracles
  2 - The miracles, especially in Matthew are almost complete word for word extractions from Old Testament events
  3 - The miracles imply Jesus is the son of God or God himself but I've already thrown out that option.

What we do know historically about Jesus is that he was crucified.  (A punishment for those that opposed Rome, not other Jews).  We have no idea when he lived, what he did etc. unless we take the Gospels as inerrant.  Since I no longer can, i'm forced to evaluate what we can know with some degree of certainty.  Looking at the letters of Paul, the only one who bothered to write this stuff down (albeit in a poorly collected fashion and with most of his letters inarguably not being written by him but others in his name) we can see that he knows:

Jesus was crucified
Jesus was an atonement sacrifice for us
Jesus appeared after death to the disciples and James and last to Paul

There's nothing in here about miracles.  I find it hard to believe Paul wouldn't write a fair amount about his ministry, the effects he had running around his small town raising dead people or any of that.  In fact Paul doesn't know anything about any of that (despite spending extended time with Peter)

So I really am starting to feel like this Jewish peasant who may or may not have been an Essene, who was filled with wisdom...  didn't run around reviving dead people.  Josephus wrote extensively about really crappy wanna be prophets and you're telling me he didn't notice hundreds of people following around Jesus while he healed lepers, raised the dead and gave huge sermons?  Or if he did, the Lord of the universe didn't bother having contemporaries write about it in a fashion that is consistent and easy to trace historically?  That he gave us all the gift of reason but asks us just this once to completely disregard it and believe in all these miracle stories, written down long after Jesus died but with no backing by Paul or James or any of the others?  I drew the opposite conclusion, that God wants us to know its allegory.  Paul himself calls Old Testament scripture allegorical.  So how are intelligent reasoning people supposed to believe all these miracle stories aren't also allegorical without a shred of evidence and a mountain of evidence that the bible is the work of men not God/ 

I've concluded we're not.  we are supposed to awake to the fact that taking the Bible literally is a mistake.  underneath it all the revealer, the teacher is there with some wisdom but seeking it in a book will only get us so far.   The truth is inside us all, I have to agree with the Gnostics here.  Fighting and warring over foreskin isn't the will of God.  Paul on closer inspection seems to be a bit of a Gnostic himself.  he constantly speaks of Jesus inside us, and seems totally comfortable asserting not knowing jesus in the flesh is completely irrelevant.  If we really look hard at Pauls words we see that Jesus the man is unimportant.  Its Christ in you.  And frankly maybe it always was.  Maybe the war of ideas in the early church, the jockeying for supremacy was just man's way of trying to add validity to their ideas.  Maybe James, John and Peter all saw "Christ within them" and spoke to us about awakening the Son within ourselves.  Maybe this historicizing was the effort of Greek intellectuals looking to historicize wisdom quotes from their branch of Messianic Judaism and wrap up nicely a list of quotes from some mysterious teacher (a la the Gospel of Thomas which I put as earlier than Mark).  Or perhaps the revealer is inside.

Either way its the first step in many on my long journey to somewhere.  If there's truth out there i'll find it.  I'm sad I can't rely on the bible to be untouchable truth, but glad to know I can seek that truth for myself.  At this point i'm guessing this is all on purpose, that truth can't just be written down in a book.  God can't be compartmentalized and given to just a small fraction of one cult at the exclusion of the rest of the world.  there are many prophets many clues but they're all just pointers, not answers.  they don't give you a destination only enough tools to start a journey.  And along the way we should all feel welcome to take that journey as we please, call God whatever name we want and not be afraid to do the hard spiritual work of discovering God for ourselves and experiencing God rather than reading his textbook.

If we choose to follow Jesus that's great.  but we shouldn't place much stock in who he was or what was written about him.  After all Paul didn't.  he just knew what Jesus had revealed to him, and that truth was enough to set his heart on fire and change the world.  Its scary not having a guidebook, but it's comforting to know that no one can claim one line to the truth.  The truth is inside us if its to be found..