Thoughts on YAV weeks 1-3: Why I’m Doing the Jesus Thing - Leah B.

As I was preparing to embark on my YAV year, a spiritual mentor emailed me the following questions:

Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
Do you believe in the resurrection?

I told him we should talk.

Quakerism, though officially a Christian denomination, is pretty light on Jesus. I always appreciated this fact, preferring to worship, at various points:

• the color orange
• every blonde female ever
• trees

These things brought me joy and awe, all the things I imagined real Christians derived from stained glass depictions of a dead hairy white dude.

We grow and change, though, right? I have to say, I now feel more passionately about the color blue than I do about the color orange. I also think that stained glass white dudes have little to do with Christianity as I conceive of it, as I am experiencing it.

I am convicted by the story of Jesus of Nazareth, a young, innocent man humiliated and killed by the authority charged with keeping the peace. Do I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior? It’s complicated. Do I believe in the resurrection? Yes.

In the first three weeks of my YAV year, I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of listening. I’ve heard some very radical sermons. I’ve heard the stories of DACA recipients shouted in protest before city hall. I’ve heard the stories of women chased out of their home countries, told in the visitation room of a detention center.

I’ve also had the opportunity to ask questions. Over cinnamon coffee, I asked local church leader Brad Munroe how I, how anyone, can be expected to believe in God when witnessing or experiencing the kind of injustice that abounds in these borderlands. In our government. I find myself reverting to the belief that Christianity is a tool for oppression, a story to pacify the masses.

Brad reminded me of a passage from the book “Night” by holocaust survivor Ellie Wiesel. Wiesel recalls standing in a crowd, forced by SS officers to watch the execution of two men and a child. “Where is God?” a man behind him was lamenting. Wiesel writes:

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows.

So, the resurrection? I find it everywhere.

At a DACA rally, during a moment of silence honoring people of color killed by our current justice system, decaying in the desert or bleeding in the street.

Inside the walls detention center, watching asylum seekers in jump suits realize they will be indefinitely imprisoned for trying to survive.

I don’t find awe or joy in Jesus. I find deep dismay and a call to action, which feels equally powerful.
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For the record though, I still love trees, and I’m dating a blonde. Some things never change.