Upon This Rock [an excerpt]

(fitting only because this post has the word rock in the title.)

This week for Creative Non-fiction we read a piece by John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Upon This Rock,” about an (agnostic) reporter’s experience attending the Christian rock festival Creation. I actually read it when it was published in GQ last year (how sophisticated and male of me, I know), but this time I read the version that came out in his 2012 book, Pulphead.

The piece is hilarious and frustrating and heart wrenching and humbling and so honest. As someone whose prayer is always “I believe, help my unbelief,” I felt tied to both John Jeremiah Sullivan (with a name like that, what God-fearing Christian wouldn’t?) and his Jesus-freak buddies.

I don’t usually like to use this space to just regurgitate things, but rules are made to be broken, right? (Really, I have always hated that phrase. Rules are rules, people.) So here is one beautiful section of the essay, a few too many paragraphs to be called a “quote,” because I couldn’t bear to cut any more out.

“At least once a year since college, I’ll be getting to know someone, and it comes out that we have in common a high school “Jesus phase.” That’s always an excellent laugh. Except a phase is supposed to end–or at least give way to other phases–not simply expand into a long preoccupation.

…

My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell. It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all.  It’s that I love Jesus Christ.

…

Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers–there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who know Him.

Why should He vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?

Once you’ve known Him as a god, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being–the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things–the pull that won’t slacken.

And one has doubts about one’s doubts.”