Choosing Between Jesus and Kim Kardashian on Palm Sunday

I used to watch the Kardashians, back in the bad old days when we consumed TV with commercials because the alternative was literally remembering to take those little Netflix packets and putting them in the mail box and then getting online and picking out another movie. “Oh the humanity,” I would mutter to myself as I dredged out lost disks from inside the cheerio stuffed couch. Thank heaven for Streaming.

I found the Kardashians both mesmerizing and appalling, and the one way to feel better about myself as a person. “At least I’m not Kim,” I could say as I juggled my life and a baby, trying to get supper one-handed before everyone melted down and we just ordered another expensive pizza. But then Bruce Jenner became a lady and I moved on with my life. The kids got too big to hold and twitter filled the gawk-at-celebrities void in my life.

Until yesterday when, in a fit of some kind, I watched Kim answering a lot of questions to a person waving a phone-camera at her as she wandered around her austerely serene monochromatic cream colored mansion adorned with nothing but the occasional chair and plain white piano as a nod toward human comfort. She paused to chat with Kanye and hold, in turn, each of her three surprisingly named children, then kept on in her chill way, walking backward through long blank halls, explaining how she hates answering questions. The one she hates the most is, “What do you do?”

She is so different from me. I don’t glide through anything. I careen from one exasperation to the next, bashing back my list, trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do five minutes ago. I am plagued by guilt and body and personality negativity—I don’t instagram my way through my life delighted about who I am. To go to sleep at night I imagine myself standing in a blank empty room looking out at a gray turbulent sea. There is not even a chair, and certainly not a piano that any small person could come in and bang on.

It’s easy for me, then, to place myself in the crowd of harassed pilgrims jostling into Jerusalem for the Passover, ready for Jesus to do something to make my life easier and my way smoother. The cool, serene marbled hall lies universes away from the fuss and bother of trying to get dinner in a noisy, overstuffed city where everyone is anxious about where the next month’s wage is coming from, nervous about the antagonistic political situation, sure that if only God would do something about all the suffering and trouble roiling in every corner, I would make a better and more godly go of all that Kardashian serenity.

I am one of the crowd crying out for joy and waving a palm, sure that relief is just around the corner.

But, as we all know, relief, when it is snatched away, doesn’t just produce disappointment. Close on the heels of disappointment is anger. And very often rage. And isn’t that the emotion that marks out each ordinary day anymore. There is no calm serenity when you have a phone buzzing in your pocket, alerting you to the mountain of outrages perpetrated on every side of the political spectrum. What do you think about Donald Trump? If you love him, you are alarmed and aggravated by all those who hate him. If you hate him, you are appalled, morally, by those who love him. We all wake up in the morning and draw up the lines of combat and then go to, cutting and thrusting our paths across the internet. God help you if you don’t care and just want to eat a jam laden bagel in peace—bread and jam are full of sugar which will kill you.

The whole point of God is that he’s supposed to make it better. He’s supposed to bring relief and rest from all my enemies on every side. He’s supposed to satisfy me with good things. He’s supposed to make all the bad things disappear and go away. If he was fair and good, I would glide through my life un-troubled, un-anxious, peaceful, confident and happy with my circumstances and myself.

But God assembles the whole world—the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the religious and the secular—and indicts them all in one terrifying week. From Sunday to Sunday he overturns the cosmos, casting a bright and nearly blinding light over the state of human ‘peace-loving’ goodness. The problem isn’t them—it’s you.

And me. I’m the problem. I mean, my goodness, I’ve just admitted to the secret shame of watching seasons worth of the life of the Kardashians. And all so that I could ‘feel better’ about myself.

But I’m not supposed to feel better. When the relief turns to disappointment turns to rage I’m supposed to see that something is terribly wrong. The banishment of serenity and the clutching at outrage is not somebody else’s problem. It is not because of bad policies espoused by the government, and bad tweets tweeted by Christian haters, and unfair economic decisions taken by every powerful person everywhere. Gather up all the bad turbulent misery producing sins in the cosmos and too many of them spring directly out of my own selfish, disappointed, outraged heart. In one moment, I and all humanity drop the dried out palm branch and raise a fist against the Son of God. Why? Because he didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. He didn’t smite mine enemies without. He didn’t fix it all and make it better—according to my own specifications.

And so, in a few days time, when he is raised up on a tree—cursed, abandoned, rejected—it will be both for my transgressions, and because of them. All that anger will gather together against God and a great and terrible darkness will fall. The clamoring anger will fall silent for a few hours. The phone could be left, there, unheeded. The anger dropping into Gehenna whence it came.

For, in those terrible hours, God himself brings about the only hope of peace for anyone, even me. Because at the heart of peace is forgiveness, is someone taking the darkness and absorbing it, accounting for it, satisfying it, and overturning it with light. Not so that you can wander through the marble hall, quiet, cool, serene untroubled, but so that your interior and hidden heart can cling on to the perfect beauty of divine forgiveness. Wherever you are, whatever the trouble—his perfect life and death are for you.