This piece is the winner of the 2019 Emily Gould Nonfiction Prize. This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Gisela Levy
Every morning when I wake up, I recite a simple set of prayers: “God, please keep me clean and sober today no matter what, and please grant me knowledge of Your will for me and the power to carry that out.” When I pray I see Jesus: his beige skin and his crimped, shoulder-length hair the color of chestnuts; his long, slender nose and his raspberry lips, shrouded in a ginger mustache and beard; and his amber eyes, which are downcast and subtly averted to his left (my right).
My prayers require complete focus and I have to say them quickly, otherwise I begin to have what mental health specialists refer to as “intrusive thoughts.” Suddenly Jesus and I will sprout ivory horns from our heads; a serpent will uncoil from his mouth, and a serpent or an erect penis will pierce my back and explode through my heart; and Christ’s eyes will darken and fill with disdain. (“It’s all very ‘William Blake,’” says my psychotherapist.) These images used to upset me when I was a kid, but today I know they’re merely symptoms of scrupulosity, which is the type of obsessive- compulsive disorder that I have.
I developed scrupulosity when my family left The Lamb of God, a charismatic renewal community located in the Baltimore suburbs, when I was twelve. Effectively excommunicated, I no longer saw my friends with whom I had been raised since infancy, nor my teachers who taught me creationism and about Sodom and Gomorrah and who prayed over me daily. At my new public school, my classmates tormented me for my gender nonconformity (which turned out to be homosexuality), and then my parents split up. I didn’t know if God had abandoned me, or if I had abandoned God.
Atop a tall bookshelf in the family room of our new home, my mother displayed a large clothbound Bible with a small painting of Christ on its cover. Late into the night, while the rest of my family slept soundly in their beds, I would kneel behind the pink Laz-E-Boy, lift my head to the Bible, and repeat prayers of praise and repentance while images of openmouthed serpents, blood- soaked horns and penises swirled through my mind. Please forgive me God, I love you Jesus, please keep us safe, I would plead, because if I didn’t then my mother would be raped and murdered, or my sisters would be killed in a car accident. After each set of prayers I made the sign of the cross as many times as it took to get it right—perhaps I hadn’t tapped the proper location on my chest or my shoulder touches were asymmetrical, or maybe I needed to gaze more reverently at Christ’s face.
The Christ who returned my gaze from the cover of my mother’s Bible was, I discovered recently after a somewhat exhaustive Internet search, a replica of the Christ in Heinrich Hofmann’s 1889 painting, “Christ and the Rich Young Man,” held inside Manhattan’s Riverside Church. I recognized the image the moment it appeared on my computer screen; the likeness of Hofmann’s Christ is as familiar to me as my own reflection.
*
The first and only time I’ve been to Riverside was about a month ago, for the fortieth anniversary gala of the church’s LGBTQ ministry, Maranatha. The gala was held in an expansive room in the basement of the church, and it is to this room that Robert Rodriguez, Riverside’s tour leader and gift shop manager, leads me after I inquire in the visitor’s center about viewing “Christ and the Rich Young Man.”
Altogether, Riverside possesses four of the German painter’s works, Rodriguez explains as we descend the marble steps into the basement: “Christ and the Rich Young Man,” “Christ in the Temple,” “Christ’s Image,” and “Christ in Gethsemane.” The latter is the only one that was built into the foundation of the church in 1930, and it hangs in a small prayer room next to the nave. The rest were donated by Riverside’s financier, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1941, and they hang behind locked wooden shutters in the basement hall, which explains why I don’t remember seeing them at the gala.
The hall is empty when we enter, and it looks altogether different without the elaborate floral centerpieces and mingling guests. My eyes are immediately drawn to the ceiling, where intricate vermillion and white tapestries paper the spaces between the dark wooden beams that run the ceiling’s length. Rodriguez, following my gaze, says that the Australian tapestries were once featured in a commercial for Gloria Vanderbilt’s blue jeans. Anderson Cooper can remember dashing through the long marble hallways of the church while his mother transformed the basement into a catwalk, or so he told Rodriguez when he toured Riverside a few years ago.
I place my backpack on an empty table as Rodriguez removes a set of keys from his pocket. He moves to the wall behind me, where the bar had been erected for the gala, and inserts the key into the center of four dark brown shutters. He swings the shutters open, revealing the Christ of my childhood.
*
“You can take a picture if you want,” Rodriguez says.
“Oh, OK, yes,” I answer, and pull my iPhone from my pocket.
“Christ and the Rich Young Man” is very large—about four feet by five—and is hung quite high, making the lower half of the painting eye level for a six-foot-two man. I have to step back to capture the entire painting, and then further for a second photo that includes the wooden shutters and—for some reason I insist on this—the round clock hanging above the painting. (It reads 1:20 p.m.) Built into the wooden frame are four consecutive rows of tiny round light bulbs, which, rather than improve the view of the painting compromise its dimension by creating unseemly glares over its darkest portions: the poor man and woman who linger in the shadows outside the Rich Young Man’s dwelling, and the dim hallway through which the young man will disappear once Christ concludes his lesson on charity.
Christ’s face, particularly his right cheek and forehead, attracts the most light. His hair is parted in the middle; his beard and mustache are unkempt; and his eyes, though not entirely vacant, are looking right through the young man, as if he knows he’s wasting his time. The cream trim around the young man’s crimson turban also catches the light, either from what looks like candlelight or from the light bouncing off of Christ’s face.
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” the young man asks, according to the Gospel of Luke. The color of his robes recalls the mint green Escada gown worn by Best Supporting Actress Kim Basinger at the 1998 Academy Awards. His ecru sash has a two-inch navy blue and gold border. His porcelain-doll-like face resembles Zac Posen’s.
“You know the commandments,” replies Jesus, whose robes are pale burgundy and hunter green.
“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” the young man says.
Jesus gestures toward the loitering impoverished villagers. The desperate woman wearing a cloak the color of storm clouds tries desperately to catch the young man’s eye, as the feeble old man—who looks like Michelangelo—collapses to the ground. “You still lack one thing,” Jesus says. “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
The diamonds on the young man’s turban shimmer.
He places his hand on his jutted hip and looks away.
*
The summer after I turned thirteen, a young man and woman approached me on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. “If you get into heaven, the streets will be paved with gold,” the man said as the woman handed me a tiny red book filled with scripture. For weeks, maybe months, I walked around holding the book tightly in my right hand, its red cover staining my sweaty palm. In my left I cupped an inch-long metal crucifix I had found in the bottom of my mother’s jewelry box, it’s edges leaving tiny indents in my skin.
*
“Christ’s Image,” which was sketched by Hofmann but completed by his understudies in 1894, hangs on a neighboring wall. It is a portrait of Jesus at thirty-three, shortly before he was crucified (or perhaps shortly after he was resurrected). Christ’s shoulder-length hair is again parted in the middle, but his mustache and beard are more neatly groomed than they are in “Christ and the Rich Young Man.” He holds his left arm across his body, extending his left index and middle fingers in front of his chest, as if he’s flashing a peace sign. His face is expressionless and entirely unreadable.
In this painting Christ’s robes are pale pink and white, but the primary hue of the painting is blue. Either due to the bad lighting—again, a distracting glare from a poorly conceived light fixture—or the cloud-covered steel blue sky that stretches for an eternity behind the Christ, the image has an underwater quality, as if the painting lies submerged within the ruins of an ocean liner.
“Christ’s Image” is the painting before which Hofmann frequently prayed as his mother died from leukemia. For a year after her death, his paintings consisted of dark greens, grays and blacks.
*
During my last year of middle school, I began leaving class a few times a week to pray in the bathroom. I couldn’t go into a stall because that would mean I was ashamed of my Christian faith, so I knelt on the cold tile floor next to the long row of sinks. I would repent and plead for my mother’s protection as quickly as I could, lest a schoolmate walk in and discover me, and then make the sign of the cross a few dozen times before sprinting back to class.
When I got to high school, my rituals no longer allowed for a trip to the bathroom; I believed I had to pray, make the sign of the cross, and lift my hands in praise right there at my desk. I could recite my prayers silently, but it had become necessary for me to say ‘Amen’ out loud because the word had started to sound jumbled and incoherent in my head, as if it wasn’t a word at all. This was difficult because I couldn’t interrupt my teacher, and also because I wanted to disguise what I was doing. Thus, when I lifted my hands in praise, I pretended I was stretching; to make the sign of the cross I was merely brushing the hair off my forehead, scratching an itch in the center of my chest, and sweeping dust from my shoulders; and the word ‘Amen’ was just a yawn or a cough with a little bit of song added to it.
In high school I also began to cover all of my exams with faintly drawn question marks. This was because if I got one of the answers wrong but had answered affirmatively then I would be lying. By adding the punctuation, I was making it known to God and to my teachers that my answers were merely conjecture.In my journals, which I had been keeping since I was 10, I stopped capitalizing all proper nouns besides “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Christ,” along with their pronouns (He/Him/His), because if I was capitalizing regular folks’ names then I was giving them the same dignity as I was God, which would be blasphemous. Similar to the question marks I wrote on my exams, I wrote “I think” and other qualifying words in the sentences that included any type of data, lest I had gotten the information wrong. (“We got home around 12:30, I think.” “We only have approximately seven days of school left, I think.”)
I also went through all of my old entries to cross out curse words, negative statements I may have written about others, and any passages that suggested I was lacking in faith. I scribbled next to these entries, “Forgive me Lord!” and “I love you!” and I circled all of the places I had written “God” and “Lord Jesus” to emphasize my passion for His name.
*
“Christ in the Temple,” tells the story of Jesus as a young boy, on the day he stole away from his mother and ran to the local synagogue, where he testified to the rabbis about religion and his Father, God. “Most of the rabbis thought Jesus was crazy,” says Rodriguez. “But there were a few who believed him.”
In this painting, which Hofmann completed in 1882, four bearded rabbis and one beardless rabbi are gathered around Jesus, who wears a simple white tunic with a gold sash tied around his waste. The rabbis wear mint green, burgundy, pink, and brown. Some are silver-haired and some have dark brown hair, and one looks like Santa Claus.
One of the rabbis sits in a chair with an open book across his lap. As Jesus speaks, he points to the book. Perhaps this is a book of scripture that the Christ Child brought with him to Temple, or perhaps the rabbi was already in possession of it and Jesus is telling him of the chapters which are yet to be written.
*
During the first few years after we left The Lamb of God, alcohol was the most adequate solution for my mental anguish, but when I was sixteen I started smoking pot. Then it was opioids, benzodiazepines, and speed; and finally, heroin.
At nineteen came a psychotic break. My mother took me to the hospital, and I escaped through the back door of the emergency room wearing nothing but a hospital gown and socks. I hid in the snow behind the dumpsters until I couldn’t bear to watch her search for me anymore.
*
As Rodriguez closes the shutters over “Christ’s Image” and “Christ in the Temple,” I look up at “Christ and the Rich Young Man” once last time. Nothing sinister protrudes from Christ’s temples or uncoils from his mouth, and his eyes appear kind if not imploring.
Feeling experimental, I close my eyes and recite my morning prayers, even though it’s well past noon. Still nothing. My skull and chest remain intact; the air is void of matter. I don’t know what this means. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything.
Rodriquez returns. He closes and locks the shutters over “Christ and the Rich Young Man,” and we ascend the marble steps to visit the last of Heinrich’s paintings.
*
“Christ in Gethsemane,” completed in 1890, hangs in a small prayer room to the right of the nave, where, Rodriguez tells me, a family often prays over the body of its deceased loved one prior to a funeral service.
The doors to the room are inches thick and as heavy as cast iron.
“Do these ever close?” I ask him.
“All the time,” he says.
Inside the room are three kneelers covered in red velvet. One of the kneelers is stationed directly beneath the painting, so the worshipper can look up at the Christ who kneels and looks up at God. The painting tells the story of the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is during the hour after the Last Supper, when Christ prays to his Father and tearfully accepts what is to come to pass: he will be betrayed by one of his disciples, arrested, and crucified.
“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” Jesus confides in his friends, just before they fall fast asleep.
In the painting, Christ wears a blush pink robe and a forest green tunic, and he kneels before a giant slab of stone. His outstretched arms appear disproportionately long; if he were standing, the tips of his fingers would fall level with his knees, like an orangutan. His spindly fingers, woven tightly together, rest solidly upon the rock. The long folds of his tunic billow elegantly across the stone floor behind him.
The majority of the painting is of the shadow of night, which lends to Christ’s isolation and anguish. Three of his beloved disciples lie but “a stone’s throw” away, and yet he toils alone in the dark with the Father who readies him for the slaughter.
“If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me,” he pleads, before quickly acquiescing: “Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
The moon peeking out from behind the black clouds is yellow. Its rays extend only but so far before they dissipate, miles and miles and miles above Christ’s head. And yet there is a light that reaches him from somewhere, because he is bathed in it. He glows. Behind his head shines a halo.
The Father sends an angel to strengthen His son’s resolve.
*
Late one night during my second visit to the psych ward, I knelt before my bedside and begged God to help me. The horns and serpents were spectacularly vivid during this time.
Please forgive me, Jesus, please God help me, please keep us safe, I prayed.
There was no relief. None.
Finally I said, “Fuck you, God!”
In my mind I screamed the words, and suddenly everything was silent.
Nothing was broken—not my mind or my spirit or my heart.
For the first time in months, maybe years, I felt hopeful. I believe God had just wanted me to be honest.
*
I was a guest of honor at Maranatha’s anniversary gala at Riverside; the organization had chosen me as the recipient of its annual scholar award for my “service to the LGBT community.” When the presenter asked me to come up and share with the crowd how I had learned to reconcile my sexuality with my Christian fundamentalist upbringing, I joked that I would have to get back to them about that and instead read a speech I had prepared earlier in the day.
“Six years ago, on the night that we won the marriage equality campaign in Maryland, something in me changed,” I read to the crowd. Crystal glasses clinked and silver steak knives scraped across the surfaces of porcelain china. My husband, sitting at a table to my right, held up his iPhone to record my speech for my mom. “Suddenly the future was full of possibility, not just of the right to marry the man I love, but a future in which young gay and lesbian Americans didn’t have to grow up thinking they were undeserving of the love and respect of their peers, or that there was something wrong with who they are.”
Directly opposite the podium, some twenty yards away and just beyond the wine bar, Christ’s downcast amber eyes and chestnut-colored hair were steeped in shadow behind a pair of locked wooden shutters.
I had no idea he was there.