imagine Jesus
if you can — imagine pure
goodness incarnate
— now you are in fairytale
land — the place you began from
This morning, as I wrote this poem, I felt a great weight of obligation — an obligation to think, for once, deeply enough about Jesus and what he means to me. I long ago gave up believing the official version, where he was the divine son of God, spotless and without sin. But although neither Jesus nor the Christian message could be said to rule my life, nevertheless these are psychological factors which exert an incredibly powerful sway subliminally, partly because I myself once believed them literally, partly because my society and my ancestors once believed them literally — and partly because their complete unreality fulfils a human need — which is nothing other than a need for unreality in and for itself. I dreamed I was in Israel, but the geography was all wrong. I pulled myself up over some sand dunes at the edge of the sea, and saw the sea before me. Away over towards my right, down the beach, was a place called Bethany. I suggested we go back to Bethany. But in the dream, by turning right towards Bethany, we were travelling south. So the whole of Israel was somehow facing the wrong direction (in the dream, its Eastern rather than Western boundary was the sea). Alice Through the Looking Glass.
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