A few months ago, after coming out of a COVID-19 induced fog, I decided that I needed something new in my life. At the advice of a friend, I picked up a copy of Marcus Borgās Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. I was curious but I didnāt know what I had signed up to read. My husband had mentioned how much he loved Borg, but I was more of a fiction reader for the first few years of our marriage. Non-fiction felt heavy to me, especially non-fiction theology and religion texts. But I was entranced by Borg from the first chapter.
Borg is very much the strain of Episcopalian theology and ideas that resonates with me: modern mysticism. I hadnāt learned to label that theology until recently. But now my journey feels clearer. I cannot label myself as a mystic, but I hope some day that people will consider me as such. Diana Butler Bass was called one in derision once. I hope to be called one as a compliment some day.
I was married in the Episcopal Church in 2016. We were the first same-sex couple married in our parish, even though our priest told us that someone had sent a threatening letter to the church saying that they would burn down the church if same-sex couples were ever married in that building. But after six years at Brigham Young University, punctuated by two years as an LDS missionary in Thailand, I just couldnāt bear to consider myself religious anymore. I considered myself spiritual on some level, but I couldnāt get behind the label of religious. The years of agony in the LDS Church all felt like a preparation for something in my life, but I wanted a fresh start. I wanted to marry the man who I had learned to love with all of my soul. I wanted to lead a good life and be the best openly gay man I could be. Borg offered healing in reimagining Jesus in ways that I thought were āhereticalā or āwickedā for many years in my life.
I felt weary in my body after two years of COVID. I had given up a lot during COVID. I didnāt go to the gym. We didnāt travel. We stayed home, scared to venture into the world because we didnāt want to get COVID. Everywhere we went it was a series of decisions: do we mask or are we okay? Do we go to this family function or will we give someone COVID? How do we feel about hanging out with friends? What should we do to protect our elderly parents? The decision fatigue became real, even after the rollout of vaccines and better treatments for COVID.
One Sunday, I turned to my husband and asked,
āDo you miss Church? I donāt know that I do.ā
He honestly agreed with me on some level. We were both exhausted by the state of the world. It was deeply depressing out there: highly partisan, violent, and deadly. People were dying of COVID every day, and some of our neighbors, family members, and even some friends didnāt seem to care. I saw people live their normal lives and scream about masking or online school or the latest outrage du jour. We were all anxious, tired, and angry.
It was hard for me to get up some days because I was depressed about the state of the world. I would go to bed and wonder, āWhat will tomorrow bring? Civil war? Calamity?ā Mormonism left a scab of pessimism on my soul that, on occasion, has been re-exposed by world events or even events within my former religion. Borg saw that scab and asked why I kept picking at it rather than letting it heal. He begged me to embrace Jesus of Nazareth as He was, is, and can be.
Growing up as a Latter-day Saint, I was taught from a young age that the world would get much worse before it got better. We were in the final days of preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. From Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to Gordon B. Hinckley and Russell M. Nelson, the prophets told people to watch out, take their vitamins, and get ready for important revelations leading up to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ: the two-hour block. I found it hard to believe that there was much of God in my former religion, even though I can trace moments that I felt God in deep ways while I was a Latter-day Saint. And many Latter-day Saints do feel God on a regular basis.
Enter Diana Butler Bass and Freeing Jesus. After a particularly difficult last month with the release of Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu, I felt a deep thirst in my soul. I was begging for some affirmation of my lived experience, albeit from a slightly different perspective. For many years, I thought I was alone in my experience of craving the Jesus that some of the world was embracing.
In my moments of quiet contemplation on my mission or in my years at BYU, I yearned for the poor Jew who was born under Roman occupation who got washed up with John the Baptist and eventually was crucified because he threatened Roman authority. I wanted a Jesus who was fully human but fully divine. Latter-day Saints have a hard time embracing the human side of Jesus. They believe that Jesus established a church. Latter-day Saints teach that Jesus opened up a new ādispensationā that would lead up to the end of days with us all returning to Jackson County, Missouri to see the end of days. Chad Daybell even wrote about it in his Left Behind for Mormons. Evangelicals and Mormons donāt seem to want the real Jesus. They want a fictional Jesus: a MAGA rally complete with a cross clothed in an American flag or a corporate business meeting in Thailand, devoid of local customs, beliefs, and traditions that donāt align with āgospel culture.ā
But I was always intensely curious about the human side of Jesus. What was the context in which Jesus was born? What narrative was he countering in his cultural context? How did people experience Jesus after His death and resurrection? I wanted to know this Jesus so badly. Instead, I was stuck in the 1840s with the worst impulses of American Protestant thought. I really wanted to be more like Jacob Rolandus , a preacherās son in 17th-century Holland who ran away from home to become a Jesuit and eventually a missionary. Jacob Rolandus was brave. He stood for what he believed in, and he lost a lot of friends and family because of his choices. His fatherās heart was probably broken. His son wouldnāt become a reformed preacher. But Jacob did what he thought was right. I could relate. I lost a lot of respect for people who didnāt see how I was Trying to Be Like Jesus.
Freeing Jesus is more than just a book about the lived experience of the incomparable Diana Butler Bass: it is the experience of many of us who grew up in religions that touch Christian fundamentalism. She clearly has experienced some of the most painful and difficult trauma: abuse, a broken marriage, the stresses of being a working mother in our society that fails to value the labor of women. But in the midst of all of this turmoil, she found Someone beautiful: Jesus Christ. And the Jesus that she found on her journey was often contradictory to the faith that she embraced after being raised Methodist in Maryland for the first few years of her life.
Many of us were stuck between craving the Jesus who we knew was possible and the box that the Church (The Latter-day Saint Church or many expressions of Christianity who live by literalism) puts Jesus in. In the LDS Church, Jesusās box is a box of white corporate greed with The Son of God who healed the sick but would now tell them to just get a job or pull themselves up by the bootstraps. I couldnāt abide that Jesus. And neither could Diana Butler Bass, even though her Jesus may have been a little different at points in her journey.
In times of intense emotional distress, she found a friend, just like I did as I wished that I wasnāt gay in the concrete jungle of Bangkok, Thailand. I cried to my unsympathetic zone leader about how bad I was for not having investigators. He told me to have more faith. I had plenty of trust in God, but I didnāt have trust in myself. She found a teacher, like I did when I was on a flight reading Marcus Borg and realizing that my former conception of Jesus was rooted in American exceptionalism, capitalism, and greed. She found a savior who didnāt save her from her own sins but the sins of others, just like I did when I turned away from a bad Latter-day Saint man who was berating me at 13 in the church foyer and yelled, āWhere are you going? Iām not done with you yet!ā
She found a Lord of ākinshipā rather than kingdom, like I did as I looked into the faces of the people of Thailand and saw the face of God and wondered why I was bothering these Buddhists rather than sharing a good meal with them and learning more about their culture, their religion, and their lives. In Jesus, Diana Butler Bass found a way to live her life, like I found when I married the man who I love with all my heart in 2016. I get to choose my family, my friends, and my relationship with the world. My destiny is not determined by my patriarchal blessing or the latest words from General Conference every April and October. Itās determined by my relationship with God and my beloved community.
And finally, Freeing Jesus describes Jesus as a presence. In my life, in times of the most awful, unimaginable trauma, I have always felt God a little too much. When I cried to the heavens, I was always surprised to see God not in a voice from the heavens, but in the comforting words from a friend or a much-needed smile, letter, text, or email. God whispered in the midst of my agony that healing would come in unexpected ways. I found God in the face of others who saw me as I was and helped me see myself as I am. And the healing always came, even if took years even with therapy and anti-depressants. Jesus was there with me, as a presence that I sometimes wished I didnāt feel because I felt so much pressure to be a āfixer.ā
This piece hardly feels like a review, but I want you to experience the book for yourself. It is a reminder to me of why I am both religious and spiritual. I am both embracing the 21st century and still discovering something deeply compelling about Jesus of Nazareth. And thereās a message for those of us who have been harmed and hurt by religion: Jesusās peace be with you if itās something you need or want.
Freeing Jesus reminds me of a verse in John 21. Jesus has just appeared to His disciples after the resurrection. He shares breakfast with His followers. He shares the message that He wants His apostles to follow: feed my sheep. But the final verse of John 21 (especially the King James Version of the verse) has always spoken to me,
āAnd there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.ā (John 21:25)
And so it is with all the books that have been written over the last two thousand years of experiencing Jesus. The world cannot contain the books that should be written. And Diana Butler Bass wrote a book that needed to be written about how she experiences Jesus. Her invitation for you to experience Jesus anew and to free Him from the box is waiting.