sisyphus jesus
tattooing my dad and how christianity helped shape my politics
my essay series, American Devotion, is out!!!
i wrote essays about 4 personal encounters with american christianity. after debriefing my catholic schooling, i explore walt disney’s cemetery, a farm in arizona, and christian zionism (free palestine)
below is the first essay. you can read the whole series here.
thanks, bottlecap press :)
Dad carries a cross on his back. I gave him this, his first and only tattoo, on Christmas. I asked my brother for a stick-and-poke kit, and upon opening the gift, my cheeky grin asked my virgin skin family: who’s first? After silent glances, Dad raised his hand. He chose a symbol he wouldn’t regret. I poked the lines an inch tall and half an inch wide, barely noticeable amidst his back freckles and hairs. Dad said it was practically painless. His cross was the first tattoo I inked on someone.
Images of Jesus dragging his crucifix hang on the walls of every Christian church. The Stations of the Cross are key to the Easter story: God’s human son bears the weight on his back, falling and bleeding and crying on the journey to his demise. Finally, he’s nailed to the fate he hauled, dying upon the wooden frame before resurrecting to hang out with his heavenly father, having fulfilled his duty.
Countless times, on 3 continents, I’ve stared at the Stations. Half-listening to a priest’s sermon, scraping candle wax off a pew, I imagined the artists who made the paintings, the cravings, the stained glass. Were they devout? Did they just need the job?
The night before I tattooed Dad, I stared once again. During my family’s annual late-night Christmas Eve mass, the only service I’ve consistently attended since starting college, I sang the hymns from memory and gazed, between poinsettias and candles and embroidered drapery, at the various pictures of Jesus peppered around the church. The artworks depict the thesis of Christianity: the messiah suffered betrayal and death to save us, God’s children, from our sins. Thanks to him, our suffering eventually will end, we’ll be forgiven for our human errors, and we’ll reach paradise, too. What a relief.
Jesus is to his crucifix as Sisyphus is to his rock — although the cross doesn’t fall back down the hill. Instead, the wooden posts collect, adding another gravesite, another homage at which to lay rosaries and lillies, for the same man as the cycle repeats. He, through divinity, repeatedly carries his burden to save us mortals. Easter comes and Jesus dies, annually.
Dad attends church every Sunday. He often does one of the readings or helps serve communion. He taught me and my friends Sunday school when I was a child. My father’s unwavering devotion is a soothing constant, a tendency that never grinds him down. Every year, with every cross Jesus heaves, Dad’s roots strengthen, upholding his Catholic faith like a tree that grows a little taller and a little wider, earning another ring at its center. His practice will continue as he struggles through life until he dies, too, and presumably ends up with his God in heaven like Jesus did.
Although, I’m not the one to call this shot. I don’t believe in Jesus anymore, despite my family’s best efforts.
My brother and I only attended Christian schools before college. Our parents based their moral teachings on the Biblical ones and invested in education that would certainly do the same (and also, hopefully, improve our odds when applying to college). So, I wore polo shirts and plaid skirts and knee high socks. I learned which Gospels to read when, why abstinence mattered, and how to hide our week-long middle school romances from the teachers who forced us to stand arms-distance apart from the opposite sex.
Then, in the thick of pubescent hell, I dreamt of my forthcoming Catholic high school. The college preparatory’s population was five times the size of my K-8, and over a third of the students were non-Catholic. For the first time, school would feel relatively normal, more secular. I wouldn’t have to wear a uniform, and I could kiss my boyfriends publicly in the hallways, like teenagers do in the movies.
I didn’t mind that I’d still take mandated religion classes every semester and go to mass at least once a month. The Bible’s a rich text, and I loved continuously learning new things from a book I already knew so well. Plus, culture references Catholicism all the time, so the stories I’d memorized proved helpful as a budding media maker and consumer. I felt smart, catching and incorporating Biblical allusions.
In our diocese, my high school’s nickname was “the public school you pay for.” The elitist, ignorant insult thankfully rang true in the religious sense. Its Catholic teachings were still riddled with flaws, but compared to my previous schools, Christianity was taught less as a belief forced upon sinners and more as a history, a conversation about morals, an invitation to inner thought.
Often, this prompted us teenagers to connect Catholic values to current events, discussing the ethics of politics in religion class or mass. Situated in the Bay Area, full of “snowflakes,” my classmates largely fell into the following ideological categories:
“apolitical” (somewhere between moderate and conservative, just without much civic education), usually thanks to wealth
liberal with a savior complex
further-left and “obnoxious”
Grey covered the sun when Trump won in 2016, during my senior year. Hallways mumbled “what’s the point” and gossiped about the ugly few who supported him with votes or values. I took philosophy as my religion elective second semester, and my teacher openly mourned America’s loss of a Democratic foothold in the presidency.
Surprisingly, the most pestering Catholics I’ve encountered did not come from my Catholic K-12 schooling, but from my university, one without any specific religious affiliation. They cornered me on Sundays as the sun set, while I walked back to my dorm from the basement radio station on a largely empty campus. They roamed solo, along the concrete paths between brick buildings, targeting random lone students like me. They preached the benefits of a campus youth group while I clarified multiple times that I did not need to cope with college stress by welcoming Jesus back into my life. I left my hometown for new beginnings, not old haunts.
Conservative Christians emerged more proudly at this nonsectarian school, despite living in another “snowflake” haven, Los Angeles. Mainstream academia’s nature encourages students to vocalize their potentially controversial identities, regardless of the surrounding location’s politics. Most undergraduates just burst out of adolescent bubbles and became freshly eligible voters, war draftees, debtors, and young adults, facing political realities more intimately than ever. These teenagers and early twenty-year-olds then figure out how to deal with these new questions and problems. The possible solutions abound. Some take notes from lectures rooted in history and theory; some join religious campus organizations or political movements. They make choices and self-actualize, socially and ideologically, away from hometown comforts.
Bored in a lecture hall, I once peered over a classmate’s shoulder and noticed her designing a social media flier for an event featuring radical conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, hosted by our college’s chapter of the right-wing foundation Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. The sold-out talk sparked deserved controversy throughout campus. Anti-fascist students attempted to cancel the event, fearing Shapiro’s hate speech would swarm the center of campus with white supremacists who might endanger the minoritized communities the commentator targets. YAF then claimed that these leftists marginalized them. Protestors, ashamed our school would approve of this clown’s lecture, chanted outside the 1200+ seat auditorium while he proclaimed facts don’t care about your feelings, his go-to bigoted dog whistle.
Until that class, I had not seen a young woman support a misogynist talking head so openly; right-wing girls at my hometown Catholic schools were shamed into silence. Her Instagram bio contained only a Bible verse.
My whole college experience, in part because of these shameless Republicans, mobilized me in a more tangible way than political moments of my youth. As a kid, I had always complained about those politically to my right. In 2nd or 3rd grade, when Bush was still president, I raised my hand and asked my teacher why people didn’t just cuss him out (which I somehow thought hadn’t happened and might be productive). But, at university, I blossomed. Likeminded peers in my classes and campus organizations emboldened me further. More than ever, I took action for leftist causes and shouted in the streets. My religious upbringing also inspired this. The main two rules of Christianity are 1) love the Holy Trinity, and 2) love your neighbor as yourself. Leftist principles are based in #2.
One June morning, a year or two after telling my parents I didn’t believe in Jesus, I went to church. I was subleasing a room in my university’s neighborhood, in a Victorian converted by a corporate landlord, fitting myself and six other people. During the day, we worked internships and odd jobs, and at night, we ate frozen dinners together on the cracked leather porch couch, slowly transforming from roommates to friends. We bemoaned our career anxieties, our unrequited loves, and our existential dread, worsened by the latest headlines. But, even as adult life seemingly crashed down on our young heads, my roommates and I realized hope in each other. We — budding artists, communicators, entrepreneurs — refined our skills, learned new tools, and used them in pursuit of a more equitable, sustainable, community-centered world. Together, under the pink light of the summer sunset, we parsed through the overwhelm and discovered optimism.
I had woken up early on a Sunday with no plans, eager to leave the house. Eating a breakfast burrito at an empty neighborhood cafe, I recalled how I spent the Lord’s Day growing up. For nostalgia’s sake, I skated to my university’s Catholic church. The priest pointed me towards the skateboard rack, made of the same wood as the pews. I imagined holding my grandmothers’ fragile hands during the Our Father. I assessed Jesus and his cross in the stained glass. After sharing this on the phone, Dad said he felt relieved to know I still engage with faith somehow.
When I told my parents I wasn’t a Christian anymore, they were quiet. They knew they’d done everything they could to lead me down a moral path, and that my faith was a personal belief they could no longer define. They trusted my ethics and decisions. Their hearts only softly broke from my deviation from our previously shared religion. They’re not evangelicals; they don’t believe my abandoning Jesus will send me to hell. They just didn’t want me to desert a higher power, a greater purpose, completely.
I can’t; I won’t. I graduated from Christian schools a non-believer, but not an atheist. I believe in love and nature and hope, synonyms for God. I believe in a good-hearted collective, taking up space, creating possibilities, and forging power to eradicate hate and bigotry. I believe we have a duty to help one another carry our crosses through this life, even when the future we’re working towards lacks clarity or certainty. I began feeling this by way of my Catholic upbringing. My faith and my political values share the same roots.
Since the beginning of Christianity, people across the ideological spectrum have justified their behavior in Jesus’s name. In this series, I dissect personal experiences highlighting the fusion between Christianity and U.S. politics.
read the whole essay series here!
thanks for your eyes + your time. let me know what you think :)
love,
fiona
skateboard rack is the same wood as the pews.... iconic image