Last year, I had a brief bit of email conversation with the author of a blog who I found when I googled a question that I’d wondered for a while, “Was Rich Mullins Gay?”

Some people who I later told all this to told me things like, “THAT’s NONE of your business, Mark!” which is true.

Some asked me things like, “WHAT! Are you an IDIOT?” I thought THAT had already been established.

Anyway, I happened upon the last email that I sent to my blogger friend, “Jonathan,” last year which, upon my re-reading it this morning, I found interesting as a kind of snapshot of the distance between an aging “Hippie Jesus Freak” and a member of generation whatever it is they call themselves if they call themselves anything at all who have apparently rejected the “Christianity” in which they had been raised here in America.

Jonathan,

I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve changed the font on this email so that I can see this damned script with my aging eyesight.

 
Considering all the blasphemy and sexual perversion herein, “damned script” is a pretty funny bit of phrasing, isn’t it?  Except that you seem confident enough that “there’s no hell,” so I’m sure that you’re not offended.

 
But I digress for the sake of humor here.  Don’t mind me.  It’s how I hold at bay a world that seems to me increasingly bizarre.

I stumbled upon your blog when I googled, “Was Rich Mullins Gay?”  We’ve kind of exhausted that subject, and, honestly, I figured that you had grown tired of our correspondence when your response was delayed again by another move, which makes two in two weeks, but that’s none of my business. And you don’t have to correspond with a sixty-five year old “Jesus Freak,” of course, but I’m glad that you do.

 
“I was once like you are now, and I know that it’s not easy,” wrote Cat Stevens in “Father and Son,” by which I don’t mean that I was ever “gay” or whatever it is that you are.  I mean that I was once more messed up in my thinking about God and Jesus Christ and just about everything else than what you are from what I can perceive from the little bit I’ve read about you in your own writings.

I think that you have an ax to grind, but who doesn’t? I also think that you jump to some hasty conclusions from some eclectic scraps of evidence, but that’s your right to do . . . and again, who doesn’t do that too?

Even if everything you theorize about Rich Mullins, the Elliots, Hal Lindsey, et alia, as being either latent homosexuals or hucksters or both was true, that would only prove my reading of the Bible, NOT disprove it; namely, that all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God, but that God so loves us that He let His One and Only Son take on our sin so that we could have His Life.  

The Bible is unique in all of human literature in both its origin and also the story it tells and the way it tells it.  Whatever else you want to say about the Bible, you must concede that if you are honest.  Don’t you?  How else could a collection of books, written by such an odd assortment of authors, over literally thousands of years apart from one another, as well as geographically separated too, so meticulously preserved that nothing in ancient literature even comes close to the bibliographic attestation of the Bible have such power for good or for evil.  For those who are being saved by its words it is Life and Light.  For those who remain damned in their reading or neglect of it, there is just the putrid scent of death and doom.  Can you name another collection of writings that does that?

But the Bible doesn’t need me to defend it.  The Bible takes care of itself.  Go ahead, try to destroy it.  You’ll just waste your life trying to do so and not ever succeeding.  But why ever would you want to waste your life, your uniquely beautiful life? 

Your writings have reminded me of when I was “a brand new Christian” at the tender age of twenty, and I knew beyond any contradiction that something miraculous had happened to me simply in answer to a sincere plea that I had cried out into a universe that for all I knew may have been empty and absurd, “God, please lead me to do your will.”  I was so afraid that if I read the writings of brilliant atheists, I might have to face something that could disintegrate a fledgling faith that had saved not only my life and also my soul, assuming human beings have souls.  But I read the writings of people even more intelligent than you, Jonathan, and what I found was so weak that I wondered what all the fuss was about.  For instance, Bertrand Russell in “Why I Am Not A Christian,” takes Jesus to task for delivering a man from a legion of demons that Jesus sent to Russell’s wholly disingenuous dismay into a herd of pigs and then also for Jesus cursing a fig tree because Jesus found no figs on it when that fruit was out of season.  Even as a twenty year old I thought, “THIS is it?  This is the genius intellectual who believers in Jesus Christ are supposed to fear?  Jesus, Russell, let’s see you cast 6,000 devils out of some wretched human being or even just wither a tree with your curse, THEN maybe you can criticize a man who you admit did both!”

Anyway, Jonathan, what if you are wrong about Jesus and the Bible?  That wouldn’t mean that your parents were right or that horrible and hypocritical hucksters were right.  It wouldn’t mean that I’m right.  To paraphrase something Rich Mullins once said, “It would mean that God is right . . . and the rest of us are just guessing.”

-Your Friend Mark