What would Jesus eat?
There were few tent-pole events at the Catholic primary school I attended bigger or better than the one where we killed Jesus and few roles more coveted among the students than playing the big cheese himself. Some of the kids destined for failed careers in justice (or the penitentiary) wanted to be Pontius Pilate and the bullies wanted to be Roman soldiers, naturally. Although one of them wanted to be Mary Magdalene and it made no sense at all though, of course, the passage of time has rendered this vignette in its due context.
There could be no loaves and fishes moment for this, the most desirable of roles and, being primary school in a country town, none of us had the requisite talent to make a teacher’s selection worth the ensuing jealous misery. None of that. We would find out who played Jesus via the ancient medium of a name drawn from a hat which is considered modern even for Christian times not because of the technology involved but for the heavy lashings of pseudo-egalitarianism.
I had not been long in the school, having moved there only two years prior from the cattle station. This led to two distinct changes in my life: the complete absence of my father and the discovery of meat pies to fill the void he left. It was not a straight swap, I’ll grant, but it was enough for me then. So it was that I grew a little flabby around the belly.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, not that anybody believed it when my name was pulled from the hat. It was me. I would play Fat Jesus. There was a crackle of disbelief in the room. These people were my friends but they were also adherents to a certain Biblical fidelity which required that their Lord, Jesus Christ, not be crucified in a state of being overweight. He had suffered enough.
I was mortified. Torn between my fledgling Catholicism and my desire to not be almost literally and metaphorically crucified with my shirt off in front of the entire school and most of its parents, I remained loyal to the former. The Vatican had not ruled, as far as I knew, on whether Jesus could be depicted with fat rolls on the cross and until they did the laborious artistic interpretations of children everywhere could remain as diverse as the Church was not.
Like most children, I was initially drawn to the faith because it dramatically expanded the number of occasions with which you could absolutely play with lit candles. Having been warned off trying to smoke mice from the hay shed with Redhead matches, this seemed an adequate interlude. Mum was raised Catholic and she welcomed the Flying Nun, Sister Anne Marie Jensen, who flew her own Cessna to remote Outback properties to spread the word.
Anne Marie was cooler than most people you knew (which was precisely four people), wore flannelette and during the big dusty race meets could more often than not be found behind the bar pulling beers for the rowdy customers. In other words: she was fucking legitimate.
We’d hear her call sign first as she approached the station: Foxtrot Bravo Delta. Then, if the sun hit right, we’d get caught in the shadow of the little plane as it flew overhead before landing on the flat airstrip. She usually came bearing books in a region where books were viewed with the same suspicion usually reserved for brown snakes or people who “lived” in the “city”.
One of the books told a simple story about a man, Samson, who lost all of his long hair for a woman he loved. These days men do it for their careers but it seemed a novel concept to me then; that one might be motivated by the passions of a woman or indeed that it was such a terrible thing to look 50 per cent more attractive and well-maintained with a shorter mane.
In any case, these visits were a window to the outside world and one of those rare moments in life where you learn more about whatever was out there through the prism of religion than the other way around.
Sister Anne Marie would take my brother and I for joy flights in the plane, for which we marked her up, but she was never able to point out any angels in the clouds, for which we marked her down. Four stars, would worship again.
When we moved to a small country town and began at the Catholic school I got to go to mass for the first time in an actual church, an experience which I was prepared to hate because all the other kids were moaning about it. But boy, were they wrong!
The mass awakened a sense of pageantry in me and the melodrama of its rituals was intoxicating. I had found my people and my people were breathtakingly ill-equipped for normal society. We sang hymns — in unison! — and my favourite was one called All the ends of the Earth which was almost as good as the Michael Jackson Black or White tape my brother and I had in our Sony Walkman.
As is so often the case, I came for the peppy music and stayed for the mysteries of the Tabernacle. I was almost certain no one else was allowed to look inside the Tabernacle precisely because it looked just like the inside of a Tabernacle and not divine at all but while ever it was a mystery I was willing to stay.
I missed my confirmation by a year (on account of living in the middle of nowhere and on Jesus’s periphery) but chose to do it, instead, in Year 7, that prime age where you pretend to dress yourself but really it’s still your mother picking out what clothes to buy. This is how I, a life form with a notion of agency, came to be standing in front of the church in a billowing Hawaiian shirt and cream pants preparing to take my communion and / or catch notorious criminals in the Pacific hellhole that is Waikiki.
So anyway, I felt keenly the pressures of being the first Fat Jesus.
A kind teacher offered me the choice of playing the role in our Easter Stations of the Cross play with my shirt on but this, to my mind, was akin to playing the Godfather with a Geordie accent.
Having dragged a heavy cross around a breezy shed in front of 200 people, frequently having to crouch and have my gut hang over my Jesus Shorts, it is a minor miracle I was not bullied. The Lord works in mysterious ways but sometimes he really misses an opportunity for building character.
I was prepared for the bullying and prepared to respond in character, long after the event had ended, if necessary. “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do,” I would say in my most calm manner before spinning on my heel and leaving my antagonists to a moment of introspection.
I did feel a great deal of shame while hanging up there on the cross so, in a sense, my Catholic education was working a treat. If I had been crucified for real and not simply strapped to the cross there might have been genuine concerns for its structural integrity.
There was rapturous applause for my turn as The Son of God, sparing me a slightly more believable on-stage death. And nobody mentioned the fact I looked like I’d spent far longer at the Last Supper than might ordinarily be encouraged.
There was one girl, however, a year younger than me who impertinently approached as the play ended but I was still in costume.
“How come you talk with a lisp?” she said, by way of introduction.
This was my moment, to channel the serenity of the Jesus I had learned so much about. To actually intuit: what would Jesus do? So I did.
“How come you sound like the hinge of an old door?”
The ways are, indeed, mysterious.
