The Agony and the Irony: Reflections and Speculations on the Christian Conundrum

By Paul Reidinger

An American writer revisits the greatest story ever told -- and finds an unexpected love story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005489434

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

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˙THE AGONY AND THE IRONY

Reflections and Speculations

on the

Christian Conundrum

BY PAUL REIDINGER

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 by Paul Reidinger

For the asker of many good questions, with love and gratitude.

By the same author

Novels

The Winceworthys (2019)

The Bad American (2012)

The City Kid (2001)

Good Boys (1993)

Double Jeopardy (first published as Intimate Evil) (1989)

The Best Man (1986)

Novella

The Varieties of Erotic Experience (2013)

Essays and Criticism

American Empty: Nine Lamentations for the Republic (2018)

Hipsters of the Civil War: Essays in American History and Culture (2013)

Patchwork: Essays and Criticism (2010)

History and Memoir

Autumnal, Eternal: A Reminiscence of Four Northern California Painters, 1992-2020 (2020)

The Roujet Symphony: An American Revelation in Four Movements (2016)

Lions in the Garden: A Canine Meditation (2010)

Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.

– the Gospel of John (7:52)

Table of Contents

Preface

I. Sex and the Single Apostle

II. What Would Moses Do?

III. Prog Springs Eternal

IV. Irony Uncle; Or, The Moral Life

Readings

About the Author

Preface

At the heart of what follows is a portrait of the man known to posterity as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ, and an interpretation of his ministry – or, to put it more accurately, his mission. For Jesus was a man on a mission, and he was a man. He was of this earth. The gospels of his life admit of no serious doubt that he was a real person.

He lived on this earth, then, and – somewhere, somehow, at some point – he died on it. He certainly died as he certainly lived, as we all do and will, but the circumstances of his death are, as the British sometimes say, a matter for speculation.

In no sense do I make any claims for myself as historian or scholar of this vast, intricate and often contentious subject. I offer analysis only, seasoned with speculation, I hope of a plausible sort. My principal asset as inquirer and writer has been an open mind: I am neither a believer in any traditional sense nor an academic with all the biases and blindnesses of the modern academy. My purpose was not to dismiss, debunk or affirm any particular position or belief but merely to describe the truth as it came to me. My grasp of the material, when I started, was both meager and shallow, but it was also neutral. I knew too little to have any real point of view. Ignorance might be bliss, as the old saying goes, but it can also be an advantage.

My position turned out to be, in the end, essentially that of the essayist, and my method as portraitist and interpreter relied chiefly on the tools of the literary critic. My contribution, then, if any, is a reading of material that is both copious and highly familiar. It is unlikely that any story of the past two millennia has been discussed and probed as much as – anywhere near as much as – that of Jesus.

My debt to the countless scholars, historians, writers, philosophers, theologians, explorers, translators, archaeologists and other inquirers whose work reaches far back through the centuries is much too great for me to describe, let alone repay. I merely stand on their shoulders. I stand on the shoulders of two thousand years’ worth of human effort, examination and discussion and say what I see. I am grateful to have been given the chance to see – that it occurred to me even to look in the first place -- and I can only hope I’ve seen something worth seeing and have given an adequate account of it.

•••

One Saturday evening at the end of August 2016, I glanced out the French doors into the twilit garden and saw, perched atop the back fence, an unfamiliar animal. It was about the size of a large cat, but I knew the neighborhood cats, and this creature wasn’t one of them. It was too big. Its color, a reddish-gold shade like that of nut honey, was different from that of any cat I’d ever seen. And its haunches and posture were distinctly un-cat-like.

The animal, whatever it was, gave me a quick glance before leaping into the neighbor’s garden. My last glimpse was of a handsome plume of tail fur.

What was it? Not a cat, surely. I reached that conclusion almost at once. Nor was it a raccoon, whose movements and coloration were unmistakable. As a longtime keeper of chow dogs, I’d had plenty of run-ins with raccoons over the years. The dogs and I had encountered more than a few skunks too, and they were far smaller than the golden mystery animal and always black with a white stripe. They scuttled along rather awkwardly.

How about a possum? No. They were naked-looking and not graceful. A coyote? Coyotes couldn’t climb. A coyote wouldn’t be atop the fence. And coyotes tended to be grayish in color, with only hints of gold and red. They also tended to be mangy-looking. I had seen quite a few mangy coyotes in Golden Gate Park, loping through the underbrush.

By a process of elimination, I concluded that the fence-sitting animal had to have been a red fox. I had never seen a fox in the flesh (or fur) before and was surprised that one would have appeared in a garden in the middle of the city, but strange things happened in cities, and a fox it most certainly had been.

On the following Tuesday evening, at about ten, the animal reappeared, in the same place on the fence. The sun had long since set beyond the western hills, leaving behind a world of gray shadows, one of which moved. As the shadow atop the fence peered into the house and at me, who peered back, I made out its unmistakable facial features in the ghostly wash of night: the long, narrow muzzle, canine yet not, and the pointy, upturned ears. After an extended moment of eye contact, the fox once again leaped down gracefully into the adjacent garden.

I never saw it again. I supposed that it might have been reconnoitering a place for a den in a far corner of our garden -- which was fully enclosed, inaccessible from the street and thus safe from coyotes, a dangerous predator of foxes -- but that it changed its mind when it repeatedly found one or more human beings looking its way. The fox wisely did not seek or welcome the attention of people.

At the time I regarded the fox as a passing curiosity, certainly not as a sign. But the world nonetheless soon began to turn in some odd directions. In the presidential election a few weeks later, Donald Trump – who had been given virtually no chance of winning – won.

Just days after that, on Thanksgiving, we rescued an elderly chow chow whose aging owner had surrendered him. His arrival in our little household ended nearly a decade of doglessness. Immediately life became stickier and more viscous. Just days after that, Steve’s long-sputtering parents suffered serious flame-outs and began their long spirals down to the sea.

In successive autumns, wildfires broke out, and palls of smoke hung heavy over San Francisco Bay. Death followed death, followed by pandemic, retirement, riots and more wildfires, more suffocating smoke. The world of the fox disappeared with the fox, to be succeeded not so much by a new world as by a succession of blurry and chaotic events that conformed to no known pattern and made no sense. The world, having been tipped upside down, was then tipped upside down again and again, as if by some kind of relentless machine, until one could no longer tell which side was up or whether there even was such a side any longer. Life and the world became acrid in every sense, and it became difficult to breathe.

I did not blame the fox for the tumult. In fact I rather missed that gorgeous and elusive beauty of the half-light, last glimmer of the old world. I found myself hoping he’d escaped to some better place. And I saw, but only in retrospect, that the fox had been sent and was a sign – a warning, perhaps, but maybe not only that. The fox said: I am change, change is coming, be ready.

I. Sex and the Single Apostle

In the beginning was the word, and the word was family. Family, the word, is merely a puff of shaped breath or a few scorings on paper or screen. Like all other words, it is an abstraction that purports to represent a reality, a part of the world we live in. A large part of that world consists of families. Families can be real enough, or not. They are natural and plentiful but by no means inevitable. A family must be loving if it is to be at all; a family must be love. Without love there can be no family, only a word.

There can be loveless marriages – and more on this sad subject anon – but there cannot be a loveless family. In my reckoning, there is no such thing. A loveless family is a contradiction in terms, a nullity, division by zero. A loveless family is not a family at all; it is only a bundle of legal rights and obligations, a web of blood connections and, too often, bad blood.

Often such a failed family is the result of a loveless marriage. It is the fruit of the poisonous tree. That was the case in my loveless family, as I came to understand it. On paper, or in photo albums, the loveless family might seem to resemble any other family. It might seem to be quite ordinary. Such is the power of the written word, of written language – to say nothing of photography and social expectation – to conceal and distract, to show people what they expect and wish to see. It is human nature to expect to see what one wishes to see, and if people wish to see anything, it is family – in particular, a happy family. If people believe in anything, they believe in family. They will move mountains to believe, or not to see.

In mid-October 2001, just a month after the terrible terror attacks in Washington, D.C. and New York City, my parents flew west from the Great Lakes to visit me in San Francisco. They spent a few days in the city before continuing on to southern California, where my father’s brother, my uncle, had lived for more than half a century.

My uncle had served in the Navy during World War II and had been in Tokyo Bay, aboard his ship U.S.S. Munda, shortly after the Japanese surrendered in September 1945. Somewhere in the trove of photographs my mother kept in the hall closet was a small black-and-white snapshot, slightly blurry, of that homely little vessel, a lump of steel floating on the gray water.

My mother hated the Japanese, but she hated her brother-in-law more. She hated him with a fervor that seemed – to me, anyway – quite out of proportion to his offensiveness. In superficial ways he did indeed give offense; he reeked of sweat, beer and cigar smoke, and he talked far too much. But he was affable, not evil; he was not hateworthy. Yet clearly my mother felt otherwise.

I had long been puzzled by her hostility toward him, but I had come to accept both these phenomena – her hatred, my puzzlement – as routine. For some reason I had stopped wondering why she loathed him as she so openly did. Perhaps, on some level below that of consciousness, I just didn’t want to know.

He was family, after all, after a fashion. He was her brother-in-law, and she had no blood brothers, only an older sister. In those circumstances, one might have thought that she would cherish him. At the very least he should have been exempt from hatred, at least from his own kith and kin.

Hatred was for outsiders, not family. It was for the Japanese and the Germans. We hated the Russians or the Minnesota Vikings, not members of our own family, even if they were only – lowly – in-laws. Thus I naively saw the mysterious contradiction well into my forties.

By the autumn of 2001 my father’s brother was fifteen years into suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him. His difficulties did not noticeably kindle sympathy in my mother. In a small irony, or possibly a large one, he and she would die of cancer within days of each other, in December 2005. But those somber days lay four years in the future.

In the meantime – in that autumnal moment – my mother was distraught. One mild evening she came with us on the dog walk to the neighborhood park, while her husband remained at the house to watch television. Once free of his presence, she made it abundantly clear that she’d had enough of him, and then some.

"I know what I should do!" she exclaimed at one point as we stood at the gates of the park, under the spreading branches of a Monterey pine tree.

And what would that be? I asked her. What should you do?

She wouldn’t say. She clammed up. I felt a twinge of remorse for pushing so hard – harder than I’d meant to – on an obviously tender point. I supposed she was implying that she should ask for a separation and file for divorce. That was the most drastic step I could imagine. If she were feeling especially dramatic, she might kick him right out of the house, with only a suitcase and a toothbrush to call his own. I had never seen him brush his teeth.

As a token of repentance I offered to do the dirty work myself. I would fire him, I told her. I would give him his notice. I would give him the boot. But again she demurred.

It was sad to think of old people behaving in such a way, but it did happen. In modern times, under the relentless ministrations of modern medicine, people were coming to live such long lives that they wore out not only themselves but those around them too, even, or especially, those closest to them. They exhausted the patience of others – of everyone.

It might well be that most people weren’t meant to be married for fifty or sixty years, just as most people weren’t meant to live to be ninety. With time, even once-sweet marriages might go sour or stale. And who knew what time might do to marriages that had been rotten or toxic from the outset?

It left me somber to consider that people nearing the end of life’s journey would be trying to throw each other overboard. It wasn’t as though you were going to be refunded the half-century you’d foolishly squandered, or be given back your misspent youth, but maybe the very imminence of the end and the strong sense of waste filled the agitated elderly with desperate urgency. It was now or never, and suddenly never really did mean never. Never meant failure. Never meant a failure to act. Never meant going down with the ship, and one’s last words would be a gasp and a gurgle.

Over the years I had rather come to assume that my mother feared my father. I came to believe that she lived in fear of him. She never said so, but she never said a great many things of the greatest importance. If she didn’t say it, it was probably important. And if she did fear him, she had good reason to. In family legend he was a drunken brawler who’d had his share of scrapes with the law and from time to time seen the inside of a jail cell.

He himself was usually the one to relate these tawdry tales, always in a tone of genial comedy, as if he were telling a series of excellent jokes at his own expense. His self-reported and self-deprecating chronicle of boyish mischief reminded me of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but then there were the considerably rougher stories of adolescent and young-adult mischief, and these cast darker shadows in my mind. There was some other shape moving there in the shadows, fleeting and indistinct, but for many years I declined to see it. I accepted his self-serving apologias on the comic terms he offered.

Unlike my mother, I did not fear him, and if she had agreed that I should be the one to tell him that they were through and he was out, I would not have hesitated to do so. I would have taken no pleasure in dismissing him, I would have felt no joy in it, but I would not have flinched, either. I would have seen such a dismissal as quite deserved. I was her son, after all, I was on her side, there was no doubt of that. I knew that much at least.

I had begun to see that in a marriage consisting of battle – a war marriage in the most literal sense -- there were inevitably sides. There were only sides, and a child must take a side. A child must be on one side or the other of a marriage fractured by conflict. He could not be on both sides, or on neither. There was no middle ground. Neutrality was not possible. There was no Neutrality Act to protect the children of troubled marriages.

Since as late as the autumn of 2001 I still believed that my mother could only have been thinking of separation or divorce, I could only think of separation or divorce, though separation would surely lead to divorce. Divorce was the nuclear option. It was the ultimate step, or so I thought.

Divorce would end the marriage, but there were other ways of ending a marriage as yet unconsidered by me. Death, for instance, ended plenty of marriages – ’til death do you part wasn’t merely a phrase recited at weddings. And marital acrimony was an unstable and unpredictable substance, potentially deadly.

I did not, in that evening moment at the gates of the park, take her silence to be the silence of the prospective ice pick, the shotgun blast, the icy-cold beer laced with a fat dose of rat poison. The hate that dared not speak its name in that quiet hour was a murderous hate, but I would not even begin to understand as much until many years had passed and she was many years in her grave.

Divorce – a Via Dolorosa of depositions, court dates, judgments, orders, division of property, alimony and lawyers’ fees – was not the prospect that kept her sleepless night after night. No, it wasn’t that. When, around the turn of the millennium, she’d told me that she could not sleep, my heart filled with alarm, but in classic male fashion, my basic response was to suggest possible solutions: meditation or valerian root. I did not understand, and could not have accepted even if I had understood, what she was telling me about the depth of her desperation.

Her deepest secret was that she wished to do murder. She pictured herself offing her husband – which would make her a murderess, a mariticide. She lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling, plotting the bloody slaughter of her hated husband, the bloodier and more gruesome the better. She hated him that much.

She hated him more than she hated his brother, who – I finally came to see -- long served her as a kind of safety valve. And she hated her husband helplessly and hopelessly, for she could not do murder, she could not transform herself into a murderess and she knew it.

She had no interest in divorce. That ship had sailed. Divorce simply would not do. It would not suffice. It really couldn’t hold a candle to murder. It could not free her from her imprisoner the way murder could, and she could no longer survive in his prison. She could no longer continue to live in a world in which her husband continued to live, and in the end, she didn’t. The world wasn’t big enough for both of them. One of them had to go, and it was her. She went. She died, not he. He would not go – she could not find a way to make him go – and so she went instead.

She went in his place. She deferred to him, in other words. She submitted. She bowed to the inevitable. She had been raised to be a lady in the aristocratic tradition of an older American settlement – now long forgotten – and a lady of that settlement did not contravene her husband, let alone smite him in the skull with an ice pick as he slept off yet another one.

Despite much winter and much ice in the wintry land of my childhood, we never owned an ice pick, to my knowledge, just those plastic wedges to scrape clean the windshields of automobiles, and they would not be of much use as a lethal weapon. I never saw an ice pick in the garage. Nor was there ever a shotgun or other firearm in the house. My mother must have been the world’s most under-armed aspiring murderess.

The thoughts I have come to believe she must have been thinking all those miserable years must have filled her not only with frustration but shame. She had been brought up to be a lady, not the killer of her own spouse. And what would God think? God knew her thoughts, surely, as He knows all thoughts. How could He forgive her? She must have wondered. She must have hesitated.

Perhaps she came to believe that He couldn’t forgive her for even thinking the thoughts she thought. Perhaps that was why He seemed to have abandoned her – or so it might have seemed to her and certainly seemed to me. She did not deserve to suffer and wilt in an illimitable desert of bad marriage, but that was what happened to her. That was where she found herself. That was where she lived and died.

My God, my God, Jesus cries from the cross (Matthew 27:46), why hast thou forsaken me?

And yet [l]ove is patient and kind, Paul the Apostle assures us in his first letter to the Corinthians (13:4). Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Maybe so. Maybe he was right. He was a strange man, Paul, dogmatic, humorless and indefatigable, not unlike our own John Adams. He spoke often and sometimes beautifully of love but plainly had a quite dark side, and perhaps that is why he fixed on love. Maybe he was appealing to the better angels of his own turbulent nature.

Love was a word I seldom heard in my childhood and youth. My mother rarely used it, and neither did her mother, my grandmother. In fact I never heard the word pass the elder woman’s lips.

•••

From time to time in my overcast youth, I would find myself listening to my father as he told his hilarious tales of comic criminality. There was time spent in jail in Hudson, a border town on the St. Croix River. There was an account of the time when police came looking for my father (then a teenager) at home, only to be turned away by his mother with assurances that they were surely after the wrong suspect.

There were his fabulously named comrades-in-arms: Peanuts Galdi, Berval Thorson (who, I was told, later spent time in prison) and someone known to me only as Squealer. The origins of that nickname I could hardly bring myself to guess at. At the same time, there was never any sense that any of this mischief was committed for economic reasons; my father’s father was a railroad man who held his job throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s, and money was not an issue. My father’s family was not impoverished. His behaviors had other roots.

There was a story about a car pushed into Dells Pond, the small man-made lake on the Chippewa River in my hometown where, during the lumber boom of the nineteenth century, logs that had been floated down the river from the North Woods were held until the adjacent sawmill could turn them into boards and studs.

The imagery of the Dells Pond story had a farcical aura: a pack of young rowdies shoving a car down a steep wooded bank into the dark water, probably under cover of night. It was like a scene from an action movie, and thus it lodged in my mind for decades – unforgettable but suggesting no deeper meaning.

It was only after I had inadvertently drifted well into middle age that I began to wonder. I wondered: why? Why did they do that? Whose car was it? Not theirs, surely. Peanuts Galdi wouldn’t stand idly by while his friends shoved his car into Dells Pond, assuming he was lucky enough to have a car in the first place. A car was a valuable possession. Young men have long craved cars.

So it couldn’t have been their car. It couldn’t have belonged to any one of them. It had to have belonged to someone else. Perhaps it had been stolen. Who would have stolen it? Most likely they had. Why? Because they could? Was it all just an outsized prank, grand theft auto on a lark? Or was there more to the story?

Was the car, in other words, evidence, and did it contain additional evidence? Was it necessary to dispose of all that evidence? My father was a highly intelligent person, brilliant in fact, and he would have taken care with evidence if doing so was an aspect of self-preservation or otherwise served his purposes. He was not one to get caught with his pants down, so to speak.

A few blocks from his childhood home, on the bottomlands along the river, lay a railroad yard, and from time to time he told tales of the men who’d gathered there during the Depression -- hobos, he called them, drifters, the lost and nameless, the forsaken and forgotten. In winter the hobos kindled fires in trash bins or barrels to keep warm, and in all seasons they drank Sterno, which was a form of wood alcohol, or methanol, commonly sold as lighter fluid. Sterno was poisonous but evidently intoxicating. The hobos, my father said, would pass the Sterno through some kind of fabric or mesh before they drank it. He knew the procedure, but for decades I would not grasp the significance of that detail.

For many years, a certain romantic haze hung about these bleak pictures as he’d painted them in my mind: a railroad yard in winter, hobos huddled together, drinking lighter fluid around a fiery trash can. The mind pictures were kin to photographs of Great Depression life I sometimes came across. My father’s father was a railroad engineer, and so it did not strike me as unusual that my father had trained his youthful attention on railroad yards or indeed anything to do with railroads, including hobos.

But it did finally come to me that my father knew more than a little about these wretched souls. He hadn’t merely observed them, he’d moved among them. Even as a small boy, he’d known where they gathered and what and how they drank. From them, most likely, he learned how to ride for free on freight trains, and he took at least one such trip himself, when he was fifteen, to pay calls at brothels in the Twin Cities.

I imagine that he watched and considered the hobos. He took note, I do not doubt, of their vulnerability and social invisibility. Predators are acutely sensitive to weaknesses in prospective prey. That is the basis of their strategy. The hobos were drunks and were destitute, and they were without protection. They lived outside society’s protective envelope. No one knew their names, and no one would ever notice, or care, if one of them vanished. Hobos disappeared and died all the time, if only from drinking Sterno.

If a hobo somehow ended up dead, in the trunk of a car that, let us say, ended up being pushed into Dells Pond by a pack of ruffians – well, who would be the wiser, who needed to know, who could possibly care, what was it anybody’s business? It could not possibly matter how or when or why or in what circumstances the hobo disappeared. The only matter at hand would be to keep such questions from arising in the first place, and that would be easy enough to arrange. Cars with bodies, duly shoved into bodies of dark water, sank swiftly and surely.

•••

My mother, in her first year of college, took up with a man named Bergwall. He was several years older than she and was a football player bound for medical school. For a time he replaced my father as my mother’s beau.

In my father’s gauzy telling, he and my mother had plighted their troth as young teenagers. At age fourteen they’d agreed to marry, or so he claimed after her death, when she could no longer take the stand to testify. The college man and future physician Bergwall was thus, in my father’s view, not only an unwelcome but illegitimate presence in my mother’s life. My father quite naturally didn’t like the new arrangement. He didn’t accept it or, as events would sensationally show, acquiesce in it. He resisted it. He objected to it.

In fact he objected to it in dramatic fashion. He went so far as to assault Bergwall with his fists, he told me long after both Bergwall and my mother had died. He didn’t mention being drunk at the time, but I took that as a given as he related the story. Bergwall and my mother were sitting somewhere in a parked car, it seemed, talking – or at least talking – when my father approached the car and slugged the other man. As justification for the attack he claimed, rather lamely, it seemed to me, that he thought Bergwall was hurting my mother.

Apparently the entire meaning of the tale, at least for my father, was to be found in the final detail, which was that Bergwall ran away from the assault. Bergwall was a coward, my father seemed to be telling me, and therefore the attack was justified. The attack on Bergwall was justified because Bergwall didn’t like being attacked. Bergwall’s response to an attack out of the blue by a drunken thug proved that Bergwall deserved to be attacked out of the blue by a drunken thug.

The attack, and Bergwall’s reaction to it, further proved that Bergwall was unworthy of my mother. The violence was self-justifying. More than that, it was completely effective.

My father, through his strategic thuggery, had proved that he was worthy of my mother, because he was willing to fight for her. Indeed, he had proved himself willing to start a fight for her. He threw the first and only punch, and that was all it took. That lone punch settled matters. So he seemed to see it. So he tried to induce me to see it.

How had my mother seen it? She was sitting in a car, talking with her boyfriend – or kissing him? – when out of nowhere came a flying fist, redolent of beer. Chaos ensued. One man withdrew, leaving the other – the drunk and violent one – to seize his prize. Drunken violence won the day. Drunken violence paid off.

How could my mother possibly have failed to see the dangerous meanings in all this? She and her boyfriend, a pair of college kids, had been spontaneously set upon by a drunken thug. She would not have been at all out of line in reporting the incident to the police. But apparently she did not do so.

Violence and drink, moreover, were clearly central to the drunken thug’s very being. This was beyond obvious to me. Drink and violence were basic