Conversations with Christ

I'm asked questions about HIV, whether in a class, a forum or by a friend. The questions are predictable to a degree, and no degree of personal relationship prevents personal ones from being asked. That's good, it's part of my job. The questions that remain alive to me, after answering them, are questions about my religion, my religious feelings and how they've changed. \nI used to believe that Christ was the singular answer, but I lost that among many Christian repetitions of "fag." Then I believed that Christ was an aberration of the collective human psyche that could not compass the idea of God, and needed a figure model to cloak itself in the divine. Then I believed that Christ was Buddha and Mohammed was Vishnu -- you can see the logic; that all revelation was localized to a message and a messenger fit for or fit to change its contemporary times. \nI spent the last year becoming enthralled with little vignettes of the King of Heaven, reinstalling certain parts into my life. I edit a lot: my reconnection is not with the Pauline Church we all know branches of -- nobody gets the pleasure of telling me I'm going to Hell. This was the Christ of the Sacred Heart, the Christ who withered the fig tree, the Christ who answered riddles with riddles.\n My reconnections were with episodes and images, some that I encountered in books, on the Discovery Channel, or popping into and out of my daily life. I see Christ constantly but I don't admit that anywhere near a psychiatric hospital. The image of the driven man, the passionate man and the man whose mission became terribly apparent as time went on, those images speak to me.\nI thought of people I turned away from, a panhandler, a friend with a closet case partner, the anonymous woman I just called bitch from the window of my car. Too focused on myself, too avaricious, too greedy -- Christ walks through your life, too, and usually right at moments such as these.\nChrist of the blonde mane who tortured the walls of my Sunday school is gone to me -- instead there's a relatively lonely looking figure who walks through landscapes of destroyed buildings, the worm in the bait-and-switch of religious politics. He who both refuses to cure or leave me. Embarrassed when asked to do parlor tricks, preferring instead to engender faith by acts of love.\nIt is a hard task to live like that -- it is so much easier to weep at misfortune and curse the darkness. That's why so many people refuse to seek this Christ out, why I worked against it for so many years. There is a horrible balance to maintain between hope and despair, right and wrong, nearly impossible to achieve. It requires work daily, a foot in the world, an eye looking upward.\nI don't have religion as much as I have guides by which I live imperfectly. My religion wasn't changed by HIV, though it goads the seeking. I suspect that to succeed in seeking inspiration, in my case the unbaroque Christ, one has to have reason to let the world go, to stop striving against\nits terrible, efficient hurtle into the future.\nI don't pray, I ask questions -- so many unanswered! I have conversations with Christ.