…and I’m about four years old. My dad’s bringing me back from Sunday School; I’m not old enough to go to the “Big Church” yet.

Banging my bobby socked/Mary Jane’d feet on the car cushions, I ask my dad “Jesus sounds really nice. When do I get to meet him?”

Dad laughed and laughed. “Honey, Jesus died about 2,000 years ago!” And the expression on my face made him laugh even harder.

“Sheesh, Dad! You’re getting me up early on a Sunday morning to go learn about some dead guy??”

When he stopped laughing long enough, I’m sure he explained in some foreign four-year-old language, how he died, but was risen from the dead, blah blah blah. I’m sure you know the story. I didn’t get it, wouldn’t get it for sometime, but that didn’t mean they stopped taking me to Sunday school to learn about some dead guy.

Think about it. We teach our kids to sing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so” LONG before they can read, or understand the concept of “being dead.” “Being dead” -to me, at four years old - meant those doodle bugs in my back yard curled up into a little ball and stopped moving. But you know, sometimes they uncurled and scooted off once they thought I’d gone away, so maybe that’s all Jesus did, too. What did I know? I was just a kid.

We went to church anyway, that’s what was expected. It wasn’t just your average church, either. Oh no, it was one of the biggest, most wealthiest, churches in the state. Not like the mega-stadium churches you see these days - this was a real church, with carpet and pews and altars and huge, 20 foot real Tiffany stained glass windows. It was, and still is, a gorgeous church.

And somewhere between bobby socks and pantyhose, I figured out what this whole Jesus thing was about. It was a beautiful story, a wonderful myth. Some people freak the hell out of referring to Christian mysteries as a “myth” or a “story” - I don’t know why. Myths aren’t fairy tales. As Tom Harpur writes in “The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light” -

A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what’s going on. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius gives us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself. As Campbell repeatedly made clear in his many books and in the interviews with Moyers, the deepest truths about life, the soul, personal meaning, our place in the universe, our struggle to evolve to higher levels of insight and understanding, and particularly the mystery we call God can be described only by means of a story (mythos) or a ritual drama. The myth is fictional, but the timeless truth it expresses is not.

In short, a myth is a true story. “True” in the deepest sense of being. But simply because something is a myth, doesn’t mean it didn’t actually happen.

At some point in every religion, there is a “buy in” stage, where you’ve learned enough about the religion to know what it’s about, and you have to accept it as a story you can believe in, before you can further understand it’s mysteries, or you don’t, and you go along your merry way, in search of another religion that you can grok better.

I know that the many different stories of Jesus and his life, can be traced back to other myths, other religions, other stories. Anyone who’s scraped the shallow layer of the rock, knows this. But what you see, once you scrape that top layer off, is a wonderful amalgamation, much like a opal, shining in the light. All the different colors and traditions all blend in beautifully, and create it’s own little multi-colored, multi-faceted gem called Christianity.

And ya know? Just because they occured in other paths and other religions, doesn’t mean they didn’t also happen to Jesus. In fact, in many cases, like when he enters Jerusalem on an ass - he flat out says - “I’m doing this because I’m supposed to/it was prophesied.” That sounds to me, like someone who knows exactly what story line needs to be followed in order to make the myth come true. The other stuff that’s been thrown in? eh, why not. Why waste a good story?

I love a good story. In fact, if I had to do something besides nursing, and got paid for it, I’d be a professional folklorist. I don’t think that profession is exactly recession proof, however, so I’m sticking with nursing.

The story of Christ really is, the greatest story ever told. But not only do we get to enjoy the story, there’s a great big ol prize at the end.

SO what happened? What happened that would lead me away from Christianity, into the path Paganism?

Well, that’s another story, for another day.