Visit #1: The Tri-OON Guy
He had walked by the big, wooden door many times and just as often had felt the urge to open it. It looked to be ajar, not tempting him but inviting him. “Come here, look inside, bet it’s interesting.” What made the unlatched door even more enticing was the fact that the front door of the church was locked, so clearly someone did not want him entering the building. Carelessly, they left the church’s back door accessible. That was the door he had waked by so often.
He’d never been in this church before. No one in his family attended any church. He went to a synagogue once when his best friend Stewart celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. That was fun, for the first three or four hours. All in all, he had to admit he was more than a little curious.
One Saturday morning he awoke, and the first item of interest delivered to his consciousness was a declaration: today, I am going into the church. He ate a bowl of Cheerios Oat Crunch cereal, his third favorite, left his house, and sought the back door.
It was indeed unlatched and unlocked. That did not make it easy to pull open. It was made of wood, heavy and thick. This not only did not surprise the boy, it confirmed a conviction of his, that all Church doors, front and back, were big and thick and wooden and heavy and hard to open. A thin, insubstantial church door was just unthinkable.
Inside he was greeted by a dingy wall three feet in front of his face. This was because he was in the middle of a long corridor. A bare light bulb screwed into the ceiling offered eerie illumination. Turning his head to the right he saw a room at one end of the corridor. The room looked uninteresting, so he turned his head left.
Several paces down that way was a door, not much different from the door to his bedroom at home. The position of the door led him to believe that this was an entrance to the churchy part of the church. (It provided access to the sanctuary, but he wasn’t current on technical terms for various areas of a church.)
He opened the door; it was reassuringly thick and heavy, not really like his flimsy bedroom door. He entered. Immediately to his right was an altar. The carpet behind it was worn, and he assumed correctly that the minister stood there during services.
The boy looked about and smiled. The church was all his. “Hello,” he called, aiming all the way back to the choir loft. The returning echo caused him to emit a laugh, which also echoed. As he glanced around he saw a number of statues, all of them seeming to have adopted similar positions, standing straight and looking down, none of them wearing normal clothes. What they wore were robes, top to bottom, covering everything. Fashion sense was not in evidence.
When he looked off to the left, against the side wall, he noticed a quite different scene. It became clearer as he walked toward it. It was a picture, or rather part picture. The items in the picture bulged out like little statues. He looked along the wall, all the way to the back of the Church, and saw that there were a lot of these bulgy pictures lined up side by side.
He walked to the first one. A man in a robe was standing with other men beside him. At the bottom was an explanation: “Jesus is condemned to die.” It wasn’t hard to tell which one was Jesus. He was in chains and bleeding from the head because someone had pushed a circle of thorns into his skull.
He knew some things about Jesus but not much. Most of it had to do with Christmas when he was born in a stable and animals sniffed him and all. But this was something else. Someone condemned Jesus to die? Now he was curious. He walked to the second picture.
“Jesus receives his cross,” was the inscription at the bottom, and, sure enough, a couple of guys were putting a large wooden cross on his shoulders. The boy felt a little sick at this. “They made you carry your own cross? That stinks. What did you do to deserve this? I thought you just healed people and stuff.”
He soon realized that the pictures were sort of like pages in a storybook. The story was easy to follow as the boy passed from picture to picture, 14 in all, circling the entire church. Jesus falls under the weight of his cross, not once but three times in three different pictures. A man named Simon helps him carry the cross part way. Jesus passes his mom and then some women who are crying. Finally, he reaches the execution spot, and he is stripped — that’s the word that was written — stripped of his garments, nailed to the cross he was carrying, dies, is taken down and buried. Some storybook.
After making his way to the last picture, the boy meandered back to the one with Jesus on the cross, Picture No. 12. Jesus was hanging there looking down at two people standing on the ground below him. There was a man and a woman, also in head to foot robes, looking up at the man on the cross. “Is it true?” the boy asked. “Is this what happened?”
“Pretty much.” The answer came directly from the picture, although nothing in the picture moved at all. The voice didn’t echo, it just sounded clearly in his ears, like it was coming from air pods, which it wasn’t.
The boy looked up at the man on the cross. “Did you say something?”
“I said the pictures are pretty accurate.”
“So all this happened?”
“To me, yes. Well, except…”
“Except what?”
“I’m a little embarrassed to admit it.”
“Go ahead, there’s no one here but me.”
“I fell a lot more than three times.”
“How many times did you fall?”
“I’d already been through a lot and was frankly exhausted. When they put the cross — the thing was heavy, no joke — put it on my shoulders, I slipped right away. I think I fell or stumbled about every two steps.”
“That’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
“I’m just saying the storyteller got it wrong, saying I fell three times.”
“It’s fine. It’s actually better that way. My teacher calls it poetic license. It means the storyteller can change the story to make it more interesting.”
“Poetic license?”
“Yeah. Look, if they did a new picture for every time you fell, it would just be a story about you tripping and falling. They rest of the story would get lost in all the tripping and falling.”
“I get it. It flows better with just three falls.”
“Also, three falls gets the point across that you fell a lot.”
“What brought you here, uh…”
“My name is deVan. Small ‘d’ capital ‘V.’”
“Nice to meet you deVan. I’m—”
“I know, Jesus.”
“Right.” Jesus paused. “deVan. That’s an unusual name.”
The boy smiled. “Yes. I thought it up all by myself.”
Jesus squinted or would have squinted if any visuals accompanied his clear air pod voice. “You thought up deVan? Didn’t you get a name when you were born?”
“Yes, but I changed it when I transitioned. I’m transgender.”
“How did you come up with deVan.”
“How did you come up with Jesus, Jesus?”
“It’s complicated. My name in my native tongue is Yeshua; the Greek is Jesus. It means, roughly, “he is going to save you.” I got that name before I was born.”
“Before you were born?”
Jesus paused and then spoke. “How is the transition going?”
deVan smiled. “I started hormone blockers a while ago. I get weekly sessions with Dr. Wingott; she specializes in trans kids. We talk about how everything’s going. I know you’re from a long time ago. Do you know anything about transitioning.”
Jesus chuckled. “I went through a pretty big transition myself.”
deVan’s eyes widened. “You transitioned to a boy?”
“Yes.”
“So your sex registered at birth was female?”
“No, my transition began before I was born.”
Jesus now had deVan’s full attention. “This I want to hear about.”
“The uncomplicated way of putting is, I was God and then I became human.”
“That does not sound uncomplicated.”
“Yes, there are many much more complicated ways to say it. It starts by understanding that God is a triune God.”
“Try-OON?
“Three in one. God has three divine parts or persons.”
“Really?”
“At least in this church.”
“What do you mean “in this Church? Are you someone else in other churches?”
Jesus sighed deeply. “I’m quite different in some other churches. You just happened to break into a Catholic church.”
deVan raised an index finger. “I didn’t break in, Jesus. The door was unlocked.”
“You happened upon a Catholic church. That why there’s all these statues.”
“Other churches don’t have statues?”
“Not on this scale.”
“Do they all have the 14-picture story on the walls?”
“Only the Catholic churches. They call it ‘The Way of the Cross.’”
deVan mused. “Not creative but pretty much on the nose.”
“They are also called the ‘Stations of the Cross.’”
deVan smiled. “That makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Yes. They’re like stations, train stations. You go around and stop at each picture, like a train.”
“Hm,” Jesus said. “I never thought of it that way.”
“Anyway, in this church you were one of the three parts of the what kind of God?”
“Triune.”
“Sounds like a Marvel villain. Try-OON, three-headed evildoer from another dimension!” What do the other churches say?”
“The Unitarian Universalist place two blocks over doesn’t generally go for the three-in-one notion.
“What’s their pitch?”
“If you stumbled into the Unitarian place instead of here, I would have been more or less a really good guy.”
“Then I’m glad I stumbled into here. You’re a lot more interesting here.”
“I’m glad you stumbled into here, too, deVan. You’re pretty interesting yourself.”
deVan smiled up at his new friend. “Now you got three people looking up at you on that cross. Tri-OON, you might say. Can I come back again?”
“Break in any time, deVan.”
“OK, Jesus.” And deVan left the way he came, resolved to visit his new friend again soon.
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