According to the Story, God was perplexed. He/She/They (HST) studied creation and declared it “good.” Well, mostly good. HST’s most ambitious creation remained a puzzlement, an often troublesome life form on a showcase planet, this veritable paradise. The other life forms were governed by instinct. Paragons of predictability. The less programmed Humans, however, were incorrigibly restless, dissatisfied, ambitious, always pushing the envelope. Essentially ungovernable. That incident in the Garden. Even after expulsion, they kept trying to sneak back in and eat from the Tree of Life. Only the two guarding angels with flaming swords kept them out.
According to the Story, things got worse. Fratricide, warfare, excesses of every kind. God was driven to genocide. Noah and his family were granted a last-minute reprieve, mostly so the other species could be saved on his Ark. Turns out the Divine needed humans after all — some mysterious interconnection — and promised not to drown them ever again.
Humans continued to cause trouble, but further study showed Humanity wasn’t all bad. Many were good to their core, even when their behavior was questionable. Temptation remained their weakness.
Gradually, the Deity became aware of a different sort of temptation: Curiosity. What was it like to be Human, he wondered, what was it like to be so … complicated and conflicted? The thought wouldn’t fade and was accompanied by an unfamiliar sensation. Up to that point, the only emotions Yahweh felt were anger and disappointment. Clear-cut feelings. This new sensation was pleasant and unsettling at the same time. Feeling with, not feeling within. What to call it? Empathy? Compassion? Only one word seemed to cover it: Love.
When a Big Feeling took hold, Zarathustra knew, it could not be willed away. Recalling that Wild Week of Creation so long ago, he knew desiring something so intensely usually made it happen. Back then it was the “Big Break,” launching that giant cue ball into a Bermuda triangle of tightly compacted particles, scattering them in every direction across the great green velvet void. The Almighty set everything in motion, then rested … for a very, very, very long time and waited to see how it would all turn out.
But this time was different. Curiosity was an itch HST couldn’t reach.
God had to become Human.
Going undercover, pretending to be Human, just wouldn’t cut it. The Almighty would have to experience life as a Human Being — not for a week or a year or a decade, but an entire lifetime, beginning to end, birth to death, womb to tomb, conception to resurrection — in order to completely comprehend them.
This time Brahma wasn’t sitting back, watching it all on cosmic closed-circuit TV. Instead, the Supreme Being was in a Bethlehem food trough, lying on a bed of straw, warmed by the body of his birth mother. Hungry, crying, feeding, overwhelmed, staring down the long and winding road of human development, enthralled by joy, delight and heartbreak.
According to the Story, Emmanuel grew up to be one of the world’s great teachers and spiritual ascendants, a virtual God-Man who changed the course of history, but all that was secondary. The main objective was understanding what it meant to be a Human Being.
Christ, he made mistakes, made friends, had a temper and a sense of humor. He explored the entire range of emotions, including awe. He may even have winked a time or two. And Jesus wept, as the angel describes in the film City of Angels: “A feeling so big the body can’t contain it, so it weeps.” He listened, learned, loved. He couldn’t have made love the center of his teaching without getting personally familiar. He recognized his own divinity in that loving, and spoke to the spark of divinity in everyone else. He felt pain and sadness, learned to help and to heal. He took the plunge into life’s “full catastrophe” (as Zorba the Greek dubbed it) and the full glory of it too. Tolerance, open-mindedness, even righteous indignation on occasion. Beauty took his breath away. Wisdom was not his default setting but hard won through lived experience.
Above all, humility, however much he sensed the growing power within. Parables reflected his deepening knowledge of living. He saw how much suffering afflicted human beings, self-inflicted in some cases but inflicted oftener by others. He saw poverty and cruelty but it must have brought tears to his eyes to be surrounded by so many tender hearts.
Did he know the ecstasy of physical intimacy? Mary Magdalene’s presence is suggestive. But he understood desire and intimacy in its many forms, all the highs and lows of having a body, dallying with the devil’s dismissable temptations.
He went all the way to the end, enduring the most painful, and loneliest death then known to the world. In Gethsemane, he prayed to be rescued from martyrdom. In despair, he called out from the cross, “Why have you abandoned me?”
And that is the moment God understood what it means to be truly Human.
In the aftermath, his followers focused on Divinity instead of learning the lessons of Jesus’ Humanity.
But it was Divinity who learned the most. A Wrathful God of Judgment gave way to a Merciful Deity.
According to the Story, God became a lover.
And so must we.