Why do you call God Jesus?

Why do you call God Jesus?
-by William Hay

“Why do you call God Jesus?” he asked
“My mother called him that.” I said
“That’s all.”
“It’s no small thing to me.  She introduced me to God and called him Jesus when I was a little child.  I remember praying at the side of my bed on my knees with her beside me. That’s no small thing.  Praying beside your mother on your knees.  I still look back on that time as truly wondrous. She told me she knew Jesus long before she knew me. She said she’d asked Jesus for me and prayed to Jesus for me when I was a baby in womb. That’s pretty special. Coming from your own mother. Knowing that she called out to Jesus when she was carrying me."
“Alright, I get it. But what of your father. Doesn’t he count?” he asked.
“Oh yes, my mother and father loved each other very deeply. My mother said she’d asked for my father and prayed for him. He wasn’t particularly caught up with God himself but he did call him Jesus too. It’s just what they called God in my neighbourhood.  That was God’s name.  Everyone knew that when I was growing up.  Everyone knew God just like today they know Steven Jobs.   All the other men and women in my child hood called God Jesus.  Certainly it’s what they called him in my church and Sunday School."
“And you’ve found no better name?"
“Not really. I’ve tried on a few others but they don’t seem to fit long for me.  I liked Higher Power for a while. I still like Holy Spirit.  I do like Christ. They’re kind of like nick names, the way I see it. Jesu sometimes fits too."
“But if you were born in Syria you would probably call God Allah, in Israel Yahveh, in India , Krishna.  Because that’s probably what their mothers called their Gods.” he asked sounding a bit full of himself
“Yes,” I said, reflecting seriously on the question.  “I suppose I would have called God what my mother called God if I was born in other countries. Even if they were Christian I would call Jesus by a different intonation. The Gaelic way of pronouncing Jesus is a different thing altogether.   The sounds wouldn’t be quite the same but somehow the meaning would remain the same."
“What do you mean?"
“Well the words aren’t as important as the devotion of the heart.  I don’t think God is like the Apple Phone Siri. I rather think Jesus is more like an Emergency room nurse.  I’ve known some of the finest and they’ve that uncanny skill of understanding exactly what a person needs when they’re having difficulty talking due to pain and English isn’t their first language. Jesus is like that. Here we have Babylon but in the language of the heart our meaning is heard.I know Jesus understands me when I’m praying even when I’m not quite sure what I’m saying. The Pentecostals take that even a step further with their ‘talking in tongues’.  The Quakers take it a different way with their ‘silent prayer’. Come to think of it, if Jesus were a government God,  we’d be praying in triplicate.
“But they’d be different God’s."
“I don’t think so. Not at the Mother and Child level. That’s why I love the Madonna and Child paintings so terribly much. I cry seeing them. I really believe there’s a purity of communication between mother and child that captures the spirit of Jesus like no other image. There is no greater miracle on earth than birth. Despite all our science and superiority there’s something utterly sacred and mysterious about conception. It’s truly wondrous.  Human creation is such an important process and a series of exceptional occasions.  Society has done all it can to marginalize it.  Still, it remains truly glorious."
“And you still call God Jesus."
“Of course. Throughout my life I’ve come to know Jesus is  the best name for God. I’ve looked at all the others. I’m forever studying. It’s just that Jesus is so very different and special than the other Gods people worship.  Jesus is unique. Jesus is God. It’s quite simple for me. "
“And you don’t think if you were raised in India, or Iraq, or as an aboriginal, you’d think the god of your people would be like Jesus."
“No I wouldn’t. I’d rather be born in those nations than the Godless aetheist nations which have know such horror and pain of communism with no one to blame but themselves.  At least countries with a God can turn to something more. They're moving in the right direction.  We’re so limited , so finite as people. That’s the miracle of the Jesus story.  Neitzhe understood this. Other Gods were powerful Gods.
There were also hearth Gods but Jesus was both, God incarnate, an infant God, paradoxically powerful in his weakness. He was a crucified God. He was a vanquished God. A rebel and a healer, a loser and a winner. His was a story of miracles.
As I’ve become older I’ve come to know why the story of Jesus is called the greatest story of the world. It just seems more remarkable the older I get.  The resurrection is comforting but more so I imagine all that power and grace in the little baby Jesus and the restraint.  It seems there is no other God that is so restrained and so forgiving.  When I was young I admit I liked Yahweh better and Allah seemed spectacular spectacular.  I wanted a God that smote my enemies. I loved the stories of the Pharaoh’s armies being swallowed by the sea. I liked the Gods of Greece and the stories of Troy and the Argonauts.  Even the Great Spirit God was more appealing than a Jew dying on a cross. I was pretty vengeful when I was younger.  I probably still am. I’ll turn the cheek 70 times 70 but then I’ll smite with gusto. I don’t think that’s quite what the way it's meant to be.   But it is the way I’ve chosen to interpret it.  Slow to anger then all bets are off.
 "Forgive them for they know now what they do." That’s been hard.  My greatest fear has been the ignorant and delusional.  I think of Pilate in later years realizing that he killed God, the people there going to their graves in old age, realizing that they didn’t do more. I imagine the guy who helped carry the cross slept well but the others in the story, well, it’s what I think about and it’s not at all about war and conquest and the Big Guy.  It’s none of that Hollywood idea of God.  In my version of the Holy story I’d probably choose Jerry Springer or George Costanza to play Jesus rather than Charlton Heston.  Gregory Peck might do it best but only because of his ability to portray the thoughtful. I like Mel Gibson but that's because he's capable of playing the crazy like Peter O Toole. And Jesus only did the crazy thing in the temple when people were using the holy ground for mere marketing.  The whole Schwartzeneger set just don’t seem to have what it is I see in Jesus.  He's just not action hero material.
Jesus still lead from the front not from behind. He was first into battle like the marines but not to vanguish but to save. I really think the story grows on you. I’ve read the other stories of God again and frankly they’re great like Superman and Captain Kirk even but there’s a comic book quality at the end of the day for me. I love the Bhagadva Gita.  There's something particular appealing in monkey gods and elephant gods.   But the atheist's "State as God" Communist Manifesto grows thin pretty quick.  I like the aboriginal Turtle God story but they’re not the same for me. That may be because I am not as familiar with them as I am with Jesus.  I actually believe that the more I talk to Jesus the more like him I become. I don’t want the stigmata of St. Francis which makes the story even more poignant. That it can reach out for hundreds and thousands of years, as powerful as that and more so, is itself uncanny.  I’m thankful to know the story and to know Jesus. It’s all a little scary though Awesomeness has that quality.  It’s not a bland flavour by any means. The Church can bore one to tears with the weight of flavourless beurocracy and cowardice but the Jesus story has none of that lethargy.  Jesus is to my mind the spiciest God there is.  But then for me he’s the only one.  Three in one but one."
“Well you’d better talk more with him because you’re a long way from Godly by anyone’s account,” my friend laughed.
“Isn’t that true. My mother, if she were alive today,  would radically agree with you. Then I really think, especially now she has passed, that she knew Jesus more than I ever could know.  She had the peace about her."
“Not like you, you old rogue.”
“Not like me. Maybe some day. Jesus is calling.”

My God

My God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotential. My God is OM.  One Mind. Sounds like HOME.  Also AMEN or ALM.  We are created in the ‘image of God’.  This is the imagination as it were. I was surprised by a friend still dichotomizing reality.  He actually believed there was God and something else.  But Phillips addressed this best in “Your God is too small.”
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth etc.  In the beginning there was God and not ‘God and building blocks”.  God the Creator.  The creator created creation of the creator.  No of nothing else there’d be God and nothing.  The essence of the message of the great mystic, St. John of the Cross, who wrote Dark Night of the Soul was NADA.  Not God. There is nothing in this creation that is NOT GOD and to think of some thing like money, or an individual person, or substance, or a book as God is to make that thing an IDOL.  NADA means that’s ‘not god’.  CS Lewis the great Christian theologian and Jew lover said, “Don’t look for the architect in the wall.”
So this computer, my fingers, the seen and unseen, the indivisible divisibleness, the alpha and omega, are all God.  God is one.  God is love. These are statements of God or the nature of God or attributes.  Medieval theologians seriously asked how many angels could fit on the tip of a needle.  That was even before electron microscopes and that was before the Haldron collider particle accelerator.  Looking as deeply inward there is as much expanding mystery asthere is looking outward into the galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope. The sacred is in the ‘aha’ moments.
Dr. Carl Jung talked about the 4th dimension, that world of synchronicity, where the 12 steppers are spiritually ‘rocketed’ , and what to the genius is commonly known as the “flow.” Right now my friends are asking if they write the poem or the poem writes them but that’s because in moments of insight the separation ceases to exist.
I like words.  My schizophrenic patients were as much an influence on this as the Oxford Dictionary.  But a world like “I-DEAS” holds in it the NADA truth of ’thoughts’ as ‘creatures’ the term C.S. Lewis used for them, not to be ‘idolized’, not to be given God like power, not to be worshipped.  Sensations are like this.  The drug addict, a true materialist hedonist, seeks that sense of ‘pleasure’ and worships it.
The idea of Jesus is profoundly different from the notion of Krisha.  In the eastern religion man evolves upward, much of his own doing, reaching higher and higher to greater and greater complexity until eventually he becomes God, experiencing Nirvana and passing beyond this dimensional world, beyond time and space into the One Mind.  This is contrasted by the western idea of enlightenment inherent in Jesus.  For Jesus is God come to meet and lift man up as on eagles wings to be with God.
The Christ Conscious yogi or mystic chants, “I am he I am he, make me the sea”.  By contrast the western Jesus aware saint says.  “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”
Prayer is speaking to God. Meditation is listening to God.  And the Sufi's twirl. In the experiences of dissociation there is a crack in the consciousness which lets The sacred in.  Carmelite Nuns meditating under PET Scans showed orgasmic brain waves enlightening all regions and special parts of the brain brightening and glowing for days after.  With cocaine, like other drugs, the functional MRI shows the blast  followed by the lights of the frontal lobe, or last developed, most human aspect of brain, shut off for weeks and months.  Devolution as opposed to evolution. The language of the left, getting high is really getting low whereas the language of the right in going slow is really going fast but neither matters because all roads lead to Rome where there is but one God and God is both heaven and hell. The concept of eternity or infinity wasn't the true translation of the Biblical and ancient texts because that waited the mathematic abstracts of Cartesian thought, the contribution of "Zero" of the east , (the story of Zero by Given a must read for the scientifically mystically minded). To the agrarian mind , 'a long time' is all that they measured time in, more truthful in reality than the abstraction of the mathematical without all the false prophecies of computer projections and numerological worship. One goes to hell for instance 'for a long time'.
Martin Buber the great Jewish theologian and mystic described the relationship of God and human as Person and God.  I and Thou.  HE said the primitive experience, or paranoid experience as psychiatrists would experientially describe it would be as fear based, I and It, whereas I and Thou is love based.  The immense beauty of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the mystical genius of Michelangelo was in showing an awakening languishing Adam reaching up with his finger as God is reaching down.
I am not Alone.
God is love.
God is chasing me as I am chasing him.
Jesus is dancing with me.
Jacob fought with  the Angel.
In the dance, in the struggle, in the crisis and calamity, it is all still God but I in fear retract into my own alienation and refuse to open up to the feeling of the sunshine on my face or the breeze in my hair.
When Alexander the Great met Diogenes, the cynic he asked him what he wanted and Diogenes answered that he wanted him to stand a little out of the sun.
The Wisdom literature is great.  The teaching stories are a delight. The path of virtue is the challenge.  We crawl as children and walk as men and women.  We have but this day that begins with a program of the past which we can not ascertain except with circumstantial evidence.  The past is a linear hypothesis that science says may indeed not exist except in the changing imagination of the collective unconscious.  Similarly we are part of God’s imagining of the future and can be in the here and now where the omnipotential is the greatest and we can embrace “Thy Will Be Done” or insist on ‘my will being done’.  Indeed the two are inseparable because separation is an illusion. The fish in the water don’t know the water any more than we listening to a gesticulating lady are rarely aware of her using the movement of the air to massage the relationship as she might be adding perfume to the conversation.  The subtlety upon subtlety is mostly beyond us unless we meditate and pray. Still the cacophony of the world. Still the senses
Be Still and Know That I am GOD.
Time to shower, another day of work, an experience with soap and water, then a rush to dress in fine clothing, the product of 80,000 years of industry and tailoring talent, then the immeasurable joy of climbing into a vehicle and experiencing the wonders of the scientific age, combustion and electricity and the pavement and city planning and law and order and a true genius of potential.
My little dog is patiently waiting for another walk that he might sniff the air and go with me to wherever I might take him today.  And I am to God as he to me.  I love that Dog spelt backwards, the words again, with their curious insights, spells God and the nature of the relationships.  I walk with Jesus as the footprints in the sand have taught me.  There is Grace, thank God.
I am not alone.