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I’ve often struggled with the idea of a personal Jesus. the kind that “you accept into your heart.”  You know the kind that raspy alternative Christian musicians sing about on the radio.  Almost romantic like.  I don’t know.  So in my efforts not to throw the baby-out-with-the-bath-water, or the confusing, and unpalatable rhetoric of Christian love, I often try to de-romanticize(Made up word) and wrestle with various understands of what Jesus means.

Can a person mean something?

I almost forgot it was November 5th today. Why does that matter?  Well for those who have watched the movie V for Vendetta, you may remember the significance of that climactic date, and the quote: “Remember remember, the 5th of November.”  So today, or actually moments prior to November 6th, I was reminded of this, by a friend’s Facebook status update, and I started watching some YouTube clips from the movie.

So “V”, the masked revolutionary, is shown building a revolution. His influence and ideas are spreading in a hostile environment.  His ideology and way of looking at the world, is breaking through a cloud of lies, and half-truths being peddled by a church-state governance.  But not without consequence.

But what I find most interesting about this story is al of the questions it raises in my mind. What makes you who you are?  What is more important to understanding who you are, your physical identity or is it how you think, what you value most, and what you stand for?

One of my favorite quotes in the movie:

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.

Sometimes I think its easy to confuse our revolutionaries with their message. I’m not talking so much about becoming so distracted by say Martin Luther King, Jr’s portrait that you forget about his message.  I’m more talking about the the things that are erected in the place of that once living breathing person and idea, now that he physically is no longer present.  I am talking about the momentous currents of tradition that can send us spiraling into an addictive relationship with poor copies, and substitutes of who that revolutionary was – what they truly stood for.  Sometimes figurines, pictures, pipe organs and chapel steeples can take the place of core IDEAS.  A life’s signature forged. A movement hijacked, watered down, or muddled.  Leaving some careening into radical fundamentalism, and others grossly unsatisfied or confused.

Superficial features replace the words and ideas that bring life.

The safety and comfort of hardwood pews, replace the wrestling and pragmatism of becoming the IDEAS.

Fortunately, long after the revolutionary is dead, their words are left behind, and live on.

words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.

Unlike Guy Faux, or V, who both took a slightly more anarchist position as the answer to their worlds respective problems, I started thinking about a religious icon. I recalled Jesus saying, that it was good that he should leave them, so that His Spirit would come to them all.  His Spirit?

The pesky thing about spirit(s) is that you can’t see them.  Or can you? The good book breaks away from the wispy concepts of Spirit and then gives a metaphor we can sink our teeth into.  Fruit.  It goes on to list what the fruits of this Spirit look like.  But then returns in its defining, to a list of characteristics.  Those abstract ideas again.  Like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And claims, that you can identify those that personify the Authors ideas, by these characteristics.

Although this particular date, Nov 5, is significant due to a specific revolutionary act in real history, as well as fiction, I pause, not only to watch some crazily intense fight scenes, but to also to think about these broader ideas. I consider the radicals that our history books record, and I reflect on arguably the largest revolutionary figure known to man(particularly in the Western world).  I do not look at pictures, but on his words.  Is this the revolutionary who shifted time, and space over 2000 years ago, with a message of radical love now displayed in the tangible form of men and women who live and love in the same spirit of reckless and unconditional abandon?  Or is he a religion of complacency, non sacrifice, and weekly rituals?