Jesus Loves Me

We used to sing a song in Sunday School called “Jesus Loves Me” … and it went something like this:
Jesus loves me
this I know,
for the bible
tells me so.
Little ones to him belong.
We are weak, but he is strong.
Yeeessss, Jesus loves me!
Yeeeesss, Jesus Loves Me!
It went on with some other verses that I don’t remember anymore, but that’s not really important. What is important is that I thought Jesus was a big man like my Father, who just happened to leave me and my family. I can’t say that I ever really liked Jesus back then. Strong or weak, he wasn’t around and that sucked.
It occurs to me now that I was wrong. Perhaps with my limited vocabulary or these simple songs, I couldn’t quite understand the way things were, could be, or are. The church laid some heavy shit on us, precisely when we had the fewest resources to even contemplate it. And in being wrong, I was kind of right – without totally realizing it. At least, right as far as I was concerned.

I mean, they told us about wars and killings and marriages and life – lots of it. And the only things I ever had to work that out with was G.I. Joes, the failed marriages of people around me, and my cats forever getting hit by the cars flying down our street. Sure, the bastards that killed my cats were bastards, indeed; but there’s an ocean of difference filled with shades of gray between the cat killer and the man in the boardroom ordering all the children and the cats killed.
I felt like a lot of people should have been struck by lightning, attacked by locusts, etc. None of them were. Still, today, there are men in offices who contemplate the variety of suffering a person could endure without actually killing them. And at the same time, I think about the “horrible” culture of those people we are torturing and how they beat people in the street, cut off hands, and torture others as well, and I think that perhaps they are closer to Jesus than the man in the office, who creates nested hiding spots so that he can not be held responsible, who considers his function removed from the immediacy of a grisly implementation of his reasoning, and who takes his shield in the form of the same tortured logic he used to define how much suffering you can cause. That’s pretty far from Jesus.
But I bet he sang something like I sang and I wonder what conclusion he drew from it. Because at the end of all the logic and reasoning I can do, it’s true – Jesus does love me, and the creepy guy in the office, and much to my dismay, my father. But the name Jesus is just any name – like I name a variable; because I know that this miserable sod in the office is miserable, I know he feels his sins, the same as I do, and the same as my father, and at the same time, I know he values something above himself; perhaps an idea, perhaps a person, perhaps a vision he once had. In that suffering and that enlightening lays the love of an Existence that will allow all range of existence.
And then I begin to understand why they sang that song, and why they made us sing it. I realize that in the face of such evil and at the same time, such love, the only thing to do is simplify the understanding so much, that it can be any understanding, so long as it helps you to feel contentment.