In his most recent response to me [What shall we do with this cross? Viewpoints, March 27], fittingly published in the run-up to Easter, Rev. Dean Lueking shares what is special to him about the story of Jesus dying on the cross and rising again.

Dean, as I read your thoughts, beautifully articulated as always, I became dissatisfied with my own part in this conversation. I had the feeling “there’s something I’m forgetting to tell Dean.” I sensed it was important – in fact it’s the heart of the matter for me.

I lived in England in the countryside until I was 22. A perfect summer’s day there is sunny and pleasantly warm, the sky a beautiful deep blue. Usually the frequent wet days in between ensure a profusion of color and growth everywhere around. An amazing variety of wildflowers compete for space on unmanaged fields and every small grass verge.

I loved to be outside on those perfect summer days. School was out and my time was my own. I was connected with the world around me in a beautifully simple way. I drank it in and felt happy and free.

There was a simplicity and joy and freedom I had then which I lost along the way as I walked deeper and deeper into institutionalized Christianity. I didn’t realize it was gone until I started to walk away and rediscovered it again.

I have so much freedom I didn’t have 10 years ago. I’m free to be outside and stay there, fully connected and appreciative. Ten years ago I felt I had to turn inwards continually to thank Jesus or ask him for advice. I didn’t realize how distracting and disconnecting that was until I gave myself permission not to do it anymore.

I’m free to enjoy my relationships with other people to the full extent. I can appreciate their uniqueness without value judging them. As we interact, I’m free to follow the conversation wherever it may lead. I can explore what connects with them and abandon what doesn’t. I have no agenda, no essential message I have to pass on, regardless of whether it resonates with them.

I’m free, not to be self-centered but to fully live out my values in the hope of being the best human being I can be. I’ve always wanted to make a positive difference in the world I live in. All that has changed is, I’ve let go of a framework which told me what that looked like and asked me to wear an outfit which often didn’t fit me very well. It was uncomfortably constraining, but I wore it because I thought I had no choice.

The heart of the matter is, I’ve found a joy and freedom and simplicity I love. I’m free to live life to the full. My former outfit still hangs in my closet, and I could wear it again, but why would I, now I know I don’t have to? That would be madness.

Dean, in your most recent response to me, you asked about sharing with me what you have learned from people who live in other countries. I would be happy to read about what they’ve taught you.

You also asked: “Would you or anybody else make up a God who comes to us in the form of a suffering servant, an itinerant rabbi who was nailed to a Roman cross for the sins of the world? Would you invent a risen Christ who turned traitorous disciples into trustworthy witnesses with Good News to spread, down through the centuries, even to us in our time?”

I think you were implying the answer is “No.” However, I can’t categorically say that no one would make up a God like that. People are creative, and the stories they make up are sometimes strange, unusual, moving and beautiful.

My own feelings about this story are deep and very mixed. I see beauty in the sacrificial love and humility in it. On the other hand, it’s very hard for me to accept that the only way God could rescue humanity would be to require the bloodshed and brutality of the cross. That part drives me to wonder: Is this really the best story that ever could be told, or is it only the best story anyone could tell 2,000 years ago? Which would mean it’s long overdue for an update, since people have learned many things in the last 2,000 years. I apologize if that sounds very irreverent. I don’t know how to stop asking these questions without giving up a part of what it means to me to be human.

You continued: “The gods we invent have a way of always favoring our side, looking like us, dumbed down to our well-pampered illusions, and then finally walking out on us when the chips are down. Against these gods, the Holy One of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a stumbling block, an affront to all human pride and the death of our astonishing capacity for airy unbelief and gross ingratitude.”

I don’t know how to respond except to say when we read the Old Testament, we must come away with two rather different impressions of the God portrayed there. When I read it, I do see a God who favors the side of the authors. Weren’t the Jews God’s chosen people, whom he aided in battle against other nations (except when he was so upset with them he refused to help as a punishment to them)? When God sees the golden calf and tells Moses he’s going to destroy all the Jews because of it, doesn’t God look rather like us–at least those of us who lose our temper?

Sometime in the last few years I decided that if I read a Bible passage and God sounds mean, or proud, or vindictive, I’m not going to try to explain that away any more. Maybe that was a bad, or evil, or foolish decision–but for me it seemed the only way to keep myself anchored in reality. If I habitually practice explaining things in the Bible away, what’s to stop me doing that with the rest of life? I don’t want to go there. And if Jesus is indeed the truth, surely it’s not possible he would want me to go there either.

I used to love going to church. I was there every Sunday, ready to worship God with my Christian friends and learn more about how to be a faithful Christian. I volunteered at church as much as my family circumstances would allow. I was “one of the faithful”—not perfect but doing my best to seek God and go in the direction he wanted me to go.

Sometimes as I read the Bible, or observed the world around me, it was hard to understand God’s ways. I always gave him the benefit of the doubt, though. I assumed that my inability to understand was because he was God, and I was only human.

I thought I was open enough to give any evidence for or against God a fair hearing. Yet how could I have been open when I responded to everything by trying to make it fit what the Bible said? If I couldn’t make it fit, I’d shrug and assume it was because I couldn’t see things from God’s perspective. So much for me being open. In fact my belief system was an impenetrable fortress.

A few years ago some difficult personal circumstances drove me to ask new questions. I started wondering, “Can I afford to be this trusting and accepting about everything concerning God and the Bible? Is it wise of me to so heavily discount what I see and hear just because it doesn’t easily fit what the Bible says? Maybe what I should be discounting is what the Bible says, not the evidence of my own eyes and ears.”

I knew I was venturing into territory where Christians warn each other not to go. Yet rather than turning back, I continued on. I began evaluating the God of the Bible according to my human standards. Why? Because I realized I needed my God to exceed the best standards I could imagine.

How did God do? Not so well. I finally admitted that an all-powerful, all-knowing God who hadn’t been able to figure out how to save most of humanity from eternal torment seemed meaner than I was.

I was no longer sure I liked, trusted or believed in God enough to want a personal relationship with him. I decided that I needed to stop trying to have one, so I could find out if I missed it. From then on I stopped all my attempts to talk to God (personal prayer) and listen to him (personal prayer and Bible reading).

I barely told anyone and especially not my Christian friends. I didn’t want to go from being “one of the faithful” in their eyes to “a problem that needed fixing.” I went to church and outwardly participated as I always had. It made me feel like a hypocrite, and I would rather have been honest, but I was afraid of the repercussions.

My desire to be a better person was as strong as ever. And I couldn’t help thinking that if God did exceed my own standards, surely how I lived was what really mattered to God—not what I believed.

Surely such a God wouldn’t mind that I wasn’t praying or reading the Bible. He’d say, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I understand. You do what you need to do. I’m here if you change your mind.”

I was happy not praying or reading the Bible. I loved the freedom of simply doing what I felt moved to do. I no longer had to conform to “what the Bible teaches,” yet was free to if a passage came to mind which I liked. I was pleased that now I wasn’t trying to guess at God’s will. I’d eradicated any risk of confusing his with mine.

These days I think I could convince people I’m an atheist. Yet I still want to live according to what I saw in Jesus’ life. I still remember what the Bible says and feel called to “respond Biblically” when I face challenging situations. Sometimes I wonder whether my strange, un-Christian practice of deliberately not cultivating a personal relationship with God hasn’t actually given him more freedom to work through me, not less.

I finally stopped going to church last year. I’m in the process of “coming out” to my Christian friends. Some people (not Bible-believing Christians) have suggested I try a more liberal church. But I don’t want to belong to any group claiming their way to God is superior to some other group’s way.

All I want to do is get on with my life and respect how other people get on with theirs—as long as they’re trying to make the world a better place.

Church wasn’t helping me do that. That’s why I’m not going any more.

This month I’ve been taking a course offered at Unity Temple called “Jesus for Unitarian Universalists and other Modern Persons”. I’m not a Unitarian so I guess I must be a Modern Person, whatever that is. It sounds flattering, anyway.

I actually belong to a very conservative Church in Oak Park where a few people have expressed a combination of shock and concern that I am attending such a course. Perhaps the rest of them are blissfully unaware that I am. Certainly the initial reactions didn’t encourage me to be especially open about it. To be fair, I know the reactions are out of concern that it will not be ‘good’ for me spiritually, to subject myself to the teachings of this course. And I do appreciate that concern.

I really don’t want to think I’m going just to get a reaction out of conservative Christians; I hope that’s not why. I think I’m going because I genuinely want to know more about what some other people are saying about Jesus.

The particular views shared in this course are those of the Jesus Seminar members – a group of academics whose studies, speculation and yes, perhaps also personal biases, have led them to certain conclusions. They believe that there is a core of historical truth in the New Testament gospels but much of what is contained in them is myth and legend that developed around Jesus after he died, rather than being descriptions of the actual events of his life and his actual words.

The most frustrating thing to me about a course like this is that there’s little time to present much more than the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar. I’m the sort of Modern Person who always wants to know how and why people come to the conclusions they do. I don’t know how to begin to assess their validity otherwise. I suppose one answer is to read the source books for the course and I am doing some of that. Another is to read the conservative Christian books that tell me how tenuous what the Jesus Seminar says, is. They will find every loophole there is. But when it comes to personal bias I don’t believe the conservative Christian writers are any better than the Jesus Seminar at being objective. It’s hard to step outside one’s own belief system – it’s hard to even see a reason to, in fact.

And trying to walk through what the Jesus Seminar says, for many conservative Christians, is probably a bit like being invited to the post-mortem dissection of your best friend. It won’t change the friendship you had and it’s certainly not how you would want to remember them. Although that analogy falls very short since conservative Christians believe Jesus is very much alive, even though he is not present in a physically material sense. Anyway, that’s probably why I’m the only conservative Christian taking this course – to my knowledge – and I wouldn’t expect others to rush into it.

I think my church would argue strongly against the idea that Jesus (as taught about and worshiped there) is not for Modern Persons. After all, do we not have contemporary worship music and powerpoint? But more importantly, don’t people have the same basic needs and problems that they always had? Has the solution for those changed? Do we need a different Jesus today from the one proclaimed by the church since the writers of the ancient creeds took their stand on who Jesus is? Does the underlying message of traditional Christianity really need ‘updating’?

My church would say, in the strongest possible terms, definitely not! But the Jesus Seminar would deny that they are going forward from what traditional Christianity teaches into something new. They would say they are rather going back to look at who Jesus the person ‘really’ was, before the beliefs developed that coalesced by late into the first century, into Christianity.

Their search is for Jesus’ original teachings, they might say. They are impressed enough with their picture of Jesus that many of them call themselves Christians, although many conservative Christians find that claim absurd. Anyone can say they are a Christian but according to conservative Christians you aren’t really one unless you believe Jesus is God, his death was for you personally, his resurrection really happened and he’s the only way you can have a relationship with God. And you are going to hell if you aren’t really one – hence the vital importance of teaching ‘the truth’ about Jesus and not the ideas of some group of people whose starting premise is that the Bible is full of made-up stories.

It seems fascinating and ironic to me that both my church and this course want to ‘set people free’ by teaching them ‘the truth about Jesus’. My church offers God’s forgiveness, salvation and eternal life through a right understanding of Jesus (and acceptance of him as Lord and Savior). One main goal of the course at Unity Temple is to encourage people who had dismissed Jesus when they decided Christianity was not for them, to take another look at him. To ‘give him his due’, as it were, as a great and influential person who is worth studying.

I don’t feel comfortable saying to other people “you’re wrong!” when it comes to things I can’t prove either way. That doesn’t mean that I never comment or ask questions. In fact it’s possible that my comments/questions during this course might have revealed a little skepticism about some of the content.

But I also ask questions or comment at my own church, regularly. Trying to do it with appropriate ‘gentleness and respect’, since that is one Biblical admonition about how Christians are to interact. I would hope that asking questions and commenting at least shows I am listening to what I hear and thinking about it. It seems to me that that’s the most likely way for me to find ‘the truth’, whatever (or Whoever) that may be.

And besides, isn’t that exactly what a Modern Person like me ought to be doing?