April 2, 2007

Who Is This Man?

by Jonathan Odell

I’ve always been a little leery about Palm Sunday, the celebration of Christ’s victorious entry into Jerusalem. After all, the following Friday he was crucified. I mean, how victorious could it have been? Instead it just reinforces my family’s belief that when you go around showing off in public, somebody’s bound to put you in your place.

If Jesus had been part of my family, we would have talked him out of it. We would have warned him about what happens when you draw attention to yourself that way. Making a spectacle of yourself, causing people to ask, “Who does he think he is?”

 We would have advised him keep his aspirations modest and his head down. That a strong wind can’t break a short stick.

We would have reminded him that he was only the son of a carpenter after all. So don’t go getting above your raising. If you have to go to Jerusalem, don’t make any grand entrances. Wear sensible clothes and choose suitable transportation, nothing flashy that would attract attention.

And why do you have to start at the top by being the Messiah? Get a low level position and work you way up the religious career ladder so people know you earned it, and not because you’re the boss’s son. Don’t ever let anyone suspect that you think you’re special or they will surely try to bring you down.

Any way, such is the thinking in my family. To this day, making statements of that smack of optimism or confidence or hope is like tempting fate. In my family joy was a tool of the devil, to trick you into letting your guard down. Joy was a warning, a harbinger of certain doom and calamity. Feeling happy? Then you better duck.

My father was an expert in the art of joy management. When I was growing up, he felt his number one job was to save us from the dangers of joy. And he was always there to kill it before it could spread. We were taught to stay forever vigilant. Be suspicious of any good news. Interrogate hope until it confessed to being foolish.

For our own protection we were taught a useful technique--depression. Being depressed was the safest state of being. It keeps those pesky emotions like joy and confidence and hope tamped down, to prevent you from acting rashly and being disappointed or humiliated later. I remember distinctly one of those lessons.

When I was eight, my Dad was scheduled to travel from Mississippi to Alabama for a company event. They were flying him over on one of those old Cessna single-engine planes and they had an extra seat. He asked if I wanted to go with him and then fly back with the pilot.

This was better than Christmas, I’d never been on a plane before and I spent the next three days planning for it. The total airtime coming and going was probably less than an hour, but I packed cookies and candy and toys and books. I was going flying in an airplane with my father. This was beyond good. He and I never did anything together, just him and me. Every minute had to be celebrated, commemorated and brought back to be remembered and savored.

On the day of the flight, we were standing on the tarmac next to this marvelous machine when the pilot came over to ask if we were we ready to board. I was giddy with anticipation, jumping up and down, effusive to the point of embarrassing my stoic father. With dead aim at my joy, he looked down at me and said, “Settle down. This is not a picnic.”

Then he exchanged knowing glances with the pilot as if he had just executed some important lesson in child-rearing.

He was teaching me that I had broken a family rule. I had brought attention to us with my silly emotions. My unbridled joy. My dangerous spontaneity. I had shamelessly exposed myself and embarrassed my father.

I took the lesson to heart. Not long after I went to a school play. I remember it was on a Thursday night and I found myself laughing out loud at the comedy on stage. To keep my joy in check, I sternly reminded myself that it was a school night and I had no reason to be happy. I had a history test the next day and I still needed to study and the teacher didn’t like me anyway. I kept up this self-admonishment until I had literally transformed my mood.

So over the next few years, I perfected this self-imposed depression.

My personality changed. I became serious, risk-avoidant, studious, mechanical, rehearsed, a cardboard scholar, making sure all spontaneity was nipped in the bud. I made sure nobody ever asked, “who does he think he is?”  I kept my head down and my goals practical.

In fact, it became automatic. When I was 35 I was sitting in a counseling session trying to explain to the therapist the disturbing sensation I had been having recently. I said, “It’s kind of a light, airy sort of feeling, like clouds opening up. What’s that called?”

He said dryly, “It’s called not being depressed.”

So, that’s the long way of saying that if Jesus had been raised in my family, he would probably still be alive today. Bitter, but alive.

We could have taught him how to live a long life without standing out and getting into trouble. Without anybody asking, “Who does he think he is?”

Only lately have I come to understand that Jesus did do it on purpose. He went into Jerusalem, instigating the celebration, inciting the crowds, making public displays of emotion, for just that purpose. He was forcing people to ask, “Who does he think he is?”

He knew he had a price on his head, with his enemies looking for any reason to kill him. His days were numbered. So he purposely rides a donkey down a street littered with palm leaves and crowded with admirers.

Yes, he knew there would be those who were aching to put him in his place. But he also knew that there were others who desperately needed of his teaching.

To make himself known to one, he had to make himself known to the other. To make himself loved, he had to risk making himself hated. For him to live forever, he had to die today.

He spent that entire week in the public eye, celebrating, healing, arguing with the Pharisees, throwing the money changers out on their ears, praying and suffering, doubting, weeping aloud, pleading with God to spare his life, dying pitifully on a cross. And he did it all, for everyone to see. He made a great big spectacle of himself, so that people could answer for themselves, “Who is this man?”

Knowing death was at hand, he became his most accessible, his most vulnerable, his most alive. Inviting people closer, ever closer into an unflinching intimacy.

Again, that’s not how we die in my family. My family has a habit of not dying well. We die old but not well.

My great-grandfather Joe was said to have spend his last days sitting alone in his rocker in front of the fireplace, not letting anyone near him, holding a bottle of bootleg whisky and muttering curses into the fire.

A few days before my Grandfather died at 96, my father and I visited with him for an afternoon. As we were getting in the car to leave, I saw my grandfather through the window begin to cry. Big tears rolling down his cheeks.

I asked my father what was he crying about, and my father said, “Because he loves you and he may not see you again.”

So I left my dad in the car and went back to my grandfather. I put my hand on his shoulder. I said, “I love you papa,”

His face went hard and cold and he angrily shrugged off my hand. I had committed the unpardonable sin of catching my grandfather in an unguarded moment. I had caught a glimpse of who he was inside, his vulnerability, and it had humiliated and infuriated him.

And now my own father is in hospice care with inoperable cancer, pushing everyone away as hard as he can, trying to get by unseen, unknown in his grief and need, his mask of depression in tact.

I’m spending a lot of time now in Mississippi with my father, trying to answer that question, “Who is this man?”

I still don’t feel I know my father that well. There is an African proverb, “You know who a person really is, by the language they cry in.”

My father seldom showed me his tears or his joy. We never learned to speak one another’s language.

On one of Dad’s first cancer treatments he had to go to M.D. Anderson Medical Center in Houston. The company he had spent 40 years of his life building, offered us the use of one of their corporate jets.

We were seated in its exquisite cabin. Plush couches and mahogany tables. Trays of expensive chocolates and candies and a fully stocked bar.

I couldn’t help thinking of that little ear-splitting bone-rattling, single-prop puddle jumper of almost fifty years ago.

As we soared silently through the skies, I looked up at my father, sitting there, staring out the window into blank space. His family all around him.  The shared depression as thick as molasses.

With time running out, I wanted to yell, “See, Dad you were wrong. It should have been picnic.”

I’m still holding out hope for that picnic with my dad.

Like a my father, and my grandfather and my great grandfather, I’ve lived a large part of my life hiding the best parts of myself, the vulnerable pieces, my imperfections, so my enemies can’t hurt me, ridicule me. But by doing so, I’m afraid also hidden myself from those who would love me.

That’s the hardest truth to accept about life: that people don’t know us thru our carefully constructed personas and our packaged presentations. They know us through our vulnerable moments. When we make our raw, messy insides available. Through our inner struggles. Our awkward intimacies, the authentic bubbling of our hearts, our unguarded expressions of joy, our childlike terrors and irrational fears.  That is when they fall in love with us. When we reveal ourselves, uncensored. When we do something that makes people look at us and ask, with genuine curiosity, “Who is this person?” and causes them to draw nearer for a closer look.

So today, I have a new understanding of Palm Sunday. It was a time our Savior, knowing he was soon to die, invited people to share his most intimate moments. Letting people see him at his most vulnerable. Not his most godly but his most human.

Watch me celebrate my love for you, he said. Watch me pray. Watch me doubt. What me falter. Watch me weep. Watch me suffer. Watch me die.

I love you enough to show you everything that I am. I’ll hold nothing back.

 “Because before I leave you,” he might have told them,  “I want you to be able to answer the question, “Who is this man?” And if you can, then I’ll be with you forever.