Faithful While Faithless

Raised in the faith of my fathers, I know that today, Palm Sunday, begins the most important week in the Christian calendar, even if you've lost your faith as I have done along the way to here and now. 

If I could think hard enough, what follows might be considered a contemplation. I can't, so it isn't. It may not make sense to you; that wasn’t my intent. I needed to hold the world still for one moment to make sense for me. Your mileage may vary in ways neither of us can contemplate.

Karl Glogauer was the wrong man at the right time.

The protagonist in Michael Moorcock's novel, who travels from the future to the time of Christ, Glogauer, instead, meets a profoundly retarded child of Mary who is, in Moorcock's account, most definitely NOT the Son of God. 

Glogauer then assumes the persona of Jesus of Nazareth, based on his recollection and knowledge of the accounts in the Gospels of the New Testament, culminating in his crucifixion to fulfill those accounts, which shaped history to the moment in the future in which he journeyed into the past to complete the story.

Perhaps the most simultaneously unsettling and reassuring aspect of Behold the Man is not the death of someone else in place of the Son of God but its emphasis and reaffirmation of the importance of the belief that He lived at all. 

For you, for whom today is an Ecce Homo experience, my sincere congratulations are tinged with more than just a little jealousy and envy.

Not everyone has the comfort of your beliefs and the reassurance of your faith. Some may not wish to have it, while others who once did are forced to realize again the distance traveled from then to now, involved a bridge of faith that, once abandoned, has been destroyed and can possibly never be rebuilt.

As even Mark reported, help for one's unbelief is not easily obtained, and perhaps the realization that such assistance can only be given, never earned, is part of why pride becomes the greater sin, especially for those with so little reason to be proud. 

It's the shadow of doubt that creates the chink of vulnerability in an armor of faith that condemns a wanderer to know the path but refuses to walk it again.

Sometimes it's the belief, and sometimes, the believer.
-bill kenny