Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Religion Gave Him a False God
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
October 2001As I write, I am looking at a soybean field in Ohio, steeling myself for a memorial service for my wife's brother, a man I loved.
There will be recountings of happy memories, Beatles music with a video presentation of photos, other pieces of 60s nostalgia, and a party-style luncheon with a NASCAR theme.
The truth about Jerry will never be told, partly because those in charge believe a popular lie about God.
Religion is being carefully locked out.
For most of his life, Jerry never encountered religion that wasn't demanding, condemning, black-and-white. The religion he encountered had no room for his own challenges, unhappiness, and life pain. He learned to think of religion, of God himself, as enemy.
He tried to do his duty, providing for his family; he tried to enjoy some of the pleasures of life. At 59, he had a pony tail second only to Willy Nelson's in vintage and color. His key cultural icon was James Dean. He attended the annual memorial services, rode his Hogs, and shared in the Dean who in real life and on film just couldn't connect. To use the word of those days, he was alienated without fully knowing why.
He rejected Christian fundamentalism, but had nothing to put in its place; so he pulled back from religion entirely. More than once he said to me, "But what if they're right?" If he didn't accept the package, would he toast in hell forever?
Like many who had been traumatized by or through religion, he couldn't really process a middle ground. He retained fear instilled at an early age.
In the last ten years of his life, however, he began to find a different way. Some of the chemical buffers he had put between himself and his pain went away. He began to deal with reality face to face. He worked on being a father. He made some difficult choices and entered a companionship that gave him a chance to relearn a lot about relationship and its transforming power.
He didn't live long enough in a new world of relating, loving, and reflecting for the religious questions to transform with the rest of him.
There are those who love him dearly but who still mourn him as a lost soul cooking in hell. I am not so ready to do that. Jerry travailed and was heavy laden. It was to such as he that Jesus offered rest and refreshment.
Jerry was not without a spiritual side, but he was never evangelized in words he could hear, in concepts with which he could identify, in a way that truly set him free from the idea of religion as escape from punishment.
I see him as a seeker who was ready for more transformation, but who didn't live long enough for it to manifest itself very much in language.
He took an interest in my work and would discuss these very newspaper columns but he had not yet fully come to the place where he sensed the Son of Man would be seen eating with him as he did with Zaccheus and so many others. He didn't yet realize that God was for him.
Knowing where he was in his journey, I have no trouble committing him to the care of God in whose knowledge, vision, and service he will grow.
The prayer I have for him is from "The Time of Death," and includes the words, "may his heart and soul now ring out in joy to you..."
It's what he was searching for all his life. It's what religion made it hard for him to find. It's what his new relationships were pointing him to.
The Christ who said, "I have not come to condemn the world," the secret Christ for some of us, has by now introduced Jerry to James Dean, and they are probably talking at this minute about what they lost and what they found.
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