fredericks

I spent a good part of yesterday acting like the informative Christian to a curious co-worker. Totally surreal. A fellow worker at Le Shack found himself intrigued by all the hubbub surrounding Mel Gibson's telling of The Passion, so much so that he wanted to see the movie. Now, this is a guy who will tell you straight out that he's not religious, so I got a good kick out of it and told him as much. He seemed undaunted thought, and, out-of-the-blue, started asking me questions about Christianity. I spent my lunch break going into depth about the differences between Judaism and Christianity and trying to explain that Jews were not and are not bad people. You see, he seemed to come to the conclusion that all Jews were responsible for Jesus' death, something that I hope people unfamiliar with the faith DON'T leave the theater with. The whole experience was hilarious, eye-opening, and so very very...I don't know how to describe it. I tried to explain faith to him; or, rather, I shared with him what faith was to me. That arose after this little exchange:

Him: So, Jesus is God, right?
Me: Yup.
Him: -pause, eyebrow raise- But Jesus is the Son of God, right?
Me: Yes, that's right.
Him: The hell?!?!?

I told him then that faith was believing even when you are faced with what seems like contradiction. Or believing in spite of your own questions. I wonder now if that isn't just stupidity. I've always thought of faith in terms of that scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the scene where Indy has to cross the wide chasm on the invisible bridge of faith (not so invisible, it turned out, CGI'd to look like the surrounding rock face). He closed his eyes and took a step, believing there was something there because he was told, or because he really had no choice (wasn't there a Nazi trailing him, or his dad was at death's door, or something along those lines?) and, voila!, there was something there. Of course, when it comes to faith in a god there's rarely such immediate payoff. So maybe that's a stupid analogy.

He continued asking me questions and I continued answering them to the best of my ability. I did note that my own faith was pretty craptacular, and that I didn't mesh well with organized religion, so I wasn't acting like I was a spiritual leader or anything. Funny bit - when he said that he was raised Catholic and that his friend tried to convert him to Christianity. Protestants crack me up. Or, rather, the belief that one belief is superior to any other belief cracks me up. I sort of threw out a point that, incidentally, was speared hilariously by this week's Onion, that being Jesus was like the originally hippie. He doesn't condemn anyone. The man's all "love love love". The only time I can recall the NT referring to him as being angry was when he threw the moneychangers out of the temple. Do you blame him, though? Can you imagine if you rolled up into your pop's house and saw random guys bartering and trading in the living room? I'd be all "the HELL do you guys think you're doing?!?!" But the Jesus/hippie link then led to an hour of my co-worker talking about how Jesus was most likely a toker. I should have seen that one coming.

That was basically the long and short of it at work. When I came home I was surprised to find one of my brothers saying that he wanted to see the movie as well. I suppose I'll end up taking him to see it if mom or the oldest one doesn't want to take him, but I'm not interested in this flick.

Today's my off day so I spent much of the morning in bed watching episode one, Season 1 of DS9. Man, maybe I've been spoilt by Firefly's most excellent original pilot episode, but the amount of poorly disguised exposition was disgusting. Still, I'm hoping to slowly make it through S1 so I can rent S2.

Stuck home with mom right now. She has Mondays and Tuesdays off now with her new schedule. That's why I'm staying up in the attic for as long as possible. She has her angry face on, and when she has the angry face she's likely to take it out on me. And that's just no damned fun.

Can't believe I've been working at Radioshack for 4 months. And I've next to nothing saved for Hunter in the summer. But I will be attending. If I have to take out more loans, so be it. What's 2g compared to what I have to stomach now?

Queer as Folk S3 comes out on Tuesday. Rental queue, here I come!!!