Jesus Surprised Random Old Lady "Knows" What He Wants

An Article in the Modern Love Section, a Terrible Clip of a Lady with a Puppet, and a short declaration of how Jesus does love you

File: Christ-jesus.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

First of all, congratulations to Daniel Daleiden on having all the charges dropped against him! Second of all, there wasn’t anything particularly interesting in the New York Times’ Ethecicst this morning, but I have something else awful. I’m going to break with tradition and not provide the link because it is so unutterably disturbing. I’m sure you could find it if you wanted to, but I promise, it won’t edify you. Why would I then bring it up? Because it shows us what time it is. And after the article, I have a terrible little video that further illuminates the point.

The NYTimes piece is in the Modern Love section by someone with a propensity for sadomasochism, a subject about which I am sufficiently well informed by having, a long time ago, simply glanced at the definition. I was meant to read the book bearing that name in a college course I took called “Decadence,” but I decided my soul wasn’t worth it and wrote the essay and took the exam without cracking the spine. This was in the days before Google, and so I found a dictionary in the library in the way one did so long ago and looked it up. Since then I have given a wide berth to things like 50 Shades of Gray, and everything of that nature and I wish I had never read this article, so that is too bad.

Indeed, I wish very much that I could sue America’s Paper of Record for ever publishing anything like this. It’s absolutely appalling and, as a dear friend commented, someone should call CPS. The fact that it was published, and lots…or however many people still read the NYTimes, means I shall make of it what I can. Here is one bit:

In my experience, pain negates the need to control moments. It allows me to just exist in them. It took me natural childbirth and four ultramarathons to realize that.

And here is another:

I read somewhere that people’s kinks are a desire to control what they fear. For instance, a woman afraid of being sexually assaulted might arrange a scenario known as “consensual nonconsent,” where a partner overpowers her physically, but she is in control the entire time, having meticulously set the scene, including a “safe word” that will end the act. This kind of playacting can provide a remarkable sense of power and control.

And here is a third:

Outside, I got in my car, turned on my location sharing, texted my boyfriend (“all good, location on, going with him”) and followed Peter’s car back to his place. When he opened the door, I was hit with the fact that I hadn’t kissed my children goodbye. They were happily engrossed in something when I left, and I had taken advantage of that to slip out quietly. When I tried to pull their faces to mind, I instead saw their little heads happily bent over a pile of toys.

And finally, skipping the substance, here’s the last line:

Later I would drive home in a fog and forget the chicken. I would bathe my children and kiss my boyfriend good night and lie in the dark, feeling bound but not confined.

In between the writer describes what the stranger, Peter, does to her *with her consent.* As I said, don’t read it. It’s one of those weird pieces of deathless prose that manages to be simultaneously shocking and banal. One expects to read about untethered, ungoverned desire, about two people sinning and all the reasons they might proffer to justify such an action, about pathos and intrigue. Instead, it is the usual glance into the interior life of a selfish, broken, irreligious woman who, in former times, would have simply had a husband and children and been reasonably deft at needlework. Rather than being able to bake a good pie and gossip with the ladies after church, she is mentally ill. The piece is not about sex and passion, but about how social media robbed her of her ability to “live in the moment.” The only way to get it back, it turns out, is to search out hideous kinds of pain within certain parameters she sets for herself. Long gone are the days of romance and heartbreak, of love and desire. Something as taboo as sadomasochism is reduced to an exercise in self-care, of setting proper boundaries. It is, what’s the word I’m looking for? Lame.

As I said, don’t read it. I hope I haven’t said that so often that you are tempted to rush over and search it out. It is a mundane tragedy, another occasion to peer into the soul of a society that has so lost its way it doesn’t know how absurd it is to have someone write, and then publish, such a piece.

Whoever is editing the Modern Love section must be irretrievably untethered from reality. Can you imagine what the weekly meetings must be like? “Well, Xad, what do we have on the docket? Who is writing what and when will it be published?” “Ah yes, Gender-Fluid Editorial Director, we have three pieces about ethical nonmonogamy polycule mapping this week, one about inter-religious marriage and divorce, one about how to be miserable on your honeymoon because your husband has been sleeping with someone else for the last eight years that you’ve been living together out of wedlock, and one about BDSM.” “Well, that’s perfect Xad, make sure that none of these pieces have any speck of sane judgment about them. Remember, anything and everything—except for two people who fall in love, get married, have children, have grandchildren, and die leaving a long legacy of affection, self-sacrifice, and financial security—goes.” The team wanders away, gazing at their cell phones trying to decide which flavor of kale smoothie to order for lunch, complaining about the rubes in Middle America who voted for Donald Trump.

It’s absurd that any person who is so deeply unwell in her soul, mind, body, and spirit, would be invited to put all of that on display for the entire English-speaking world to gawk over. This, honestly, is unkind. This person needs help. She needs a pastor and, depending on what kind, a counselor who can help her work through why she is compelled to seek out extreme pain to feel like she can live in the world. I know that many people are dealing with mental and spiritual issues that make day-to-day existence feel intolerable. Should these people be told that what they are dealing with is actually so good that it’s basically a form of Love, that greatest and most misunderstood of all American virtues? And yet the Times is willing to vaunt this as just one among many “options” for how to arrange life.

But that is not all that is absurd about the politics of love and despair. Let us just briefly pass by a very stupid and trite video I found on X. It is of a white-haired, grandmotherly old lady in a clerical collar chatting with a grotesque and irritatingly high-pitched, sickly sweet woke red monster-puppet. The monstrously annoying puppet asks, “Does Jesus want America to be a Christian Nation?”

The grandmotherly lady utters a resounding “No” and then goes on to explain:

Jesus wants America to be a loving nation, and an open nation, and a nation that is open to all religions and to diversity. And Christin is one of those. and Christian is great when Christian is a loving religion. And so, when we are Christian in America, those of us who are Christian, Jesus wants us to be loving. But we also may be Jews, or we may be Muslims, or we may be Buddhists, or we may be Hindus, or we may not be anything at all. We may just try to love our neighbor as ourselves...and that's really what God cares about and what Jesus cares about. Jesus has never wanted America to be a Christian Nation and only a Christian Nation.

The puppet, who has been making sipping, yummy noises all through, interrupts to say, “I think Jesus maybe wants America to be a loving nation.” To which the grandmotherly old lady responds:

Loving and just and kind and good and to welcome all people who are good people who are loving people.

The idiotic puppet finishes off this extravaganza of bad theological tasks with:

I will fight for that.

The Old Lady says she will also and the whole wretched thing is over. And what I’d like to say is, Blech. How awful is it to end up saying that only “good people who are loving people” should be allowed to live in America? I’m pretty happy that all the undocumented criminal offenders are being sent home, but I don’t know of a living conservative alive who wants to limit the American population to “good people.” That would mean we would all need to move away, for there are no good people, no not even one.

Also, I really hate it when people try to pontificate about what Jesus would like. I’m not a fan of people saying that they feel the Spirit of God leading them to move jobs or states. I prefer it when people take responsibility for their own actions and then look back on their lives and give God the glory and the credit for his providence. How do you know whether or not God wants you to become an Influencer or a Community Organizer or an Apostate Bishop? You should look at all your gifts and abilities and inclinations and take the wisest path—after praying about it—and then, when you look back, you’ll be able to see how God directed you.

This business of saying that “Jesus” doesn’t want a Christian Nation is just bizarre. How does the Grandmotherly Lady know that? Has she read the Bible? Did Jesus come down from his throne in heaven to say, “I don’t want America to be a Christian Nation.” I’m pretty sure it is up to the citizens of each nation to, as far as they are able, order their lives in accordance with the revelation of divine truth. People *should* all be Christian, all of them, because Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and the only way to the Father. No one should not be a Christian. I don’t think that’s too shocking a thing to say.

But, of course, most people are not Christian because they have either heard the gospel and rejected it or not heard it. The remaining population of the world who is Christian spends a lot of time praying for people who aren’t and trying to convince them to change their minds.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, here is an apparently kind older lady who ought to be able to wrap that poor sadomasochist in a warm embrace and tell her all about how Jesus lived in the moment so that she would never have to, and how he endured all the suffering of the cross to spare her the torment of sin and death, and how if she goes to him and asks him for help, she might, in time, find healing and relief. But she can’t do that because she knows a stupid tiny demon version of Jesus who thinks that, to be saved, all you have to do is “love your neighbor as yourself.” Good luck with that.

So anyway, I don’t know what Jesus is up to today, except that he is in Heaven, seated high and lifted up on the right hand of the Father, and that he is listening to every scrap of a prayer you might pray, that he is inclined toward you, that all your pain and your suffering and your disappointment, your sense of being suffocated by life is within his grasp, that he endured everything that you do not only so that he could sympathize with you in your distress, but so that he could rescue you out of it. If you need help, go searching for a true Christian who can tell you about this Jesus, who will pray for you and take you by the hand and lead you into green pastures to rest beside still water.

For Love’s sake, don’t take any advice from the New York Times or from so-called pastors talking to creepy puppets. Have a nice day!