JESUS, that trickster, is taking the wheel!

Why on Earth would I dust off my Substack after 4 years? I don’t even know if morally I’m supposed to be using Substack but one day at a time here, people.

Everything is awful right now. I don’t know how else to put it. How do we go on? How do we continue to create in this environment? How do we raise children in this hellscape? Why are so many children suffering and dying on our watch? I’m really struggling, and I’m sure you are, too. But we’ve got to create some light for ourselves and for others, and doing that through our writing is what we know how to do, right?

I’d love to keep in touch so please subscribe and share and tell me what you’re posting about. I’ll never charge a penny. I completely understand why those who DO charge do it! Writing is art, writing is labor, and artists deserve to be paid for it. But my updates on here won’t necessarily be my art, it will just add context or drive you towards my art elsewhere and hopefully invite you to share with me.

I’ve got 4 stories coming out in the next month or so, and all of them are about Jesus. I’ll share my Jesus stories with you as they are released, but I wanted to provide some context.

This may not be the wisest career move. But I so resent how symbols of love and peace have been stolen by cruel individuals and groups. We can’t even be hippies any more because we’ve got weird anti-vaxxer people there and don’t get me started on superheroes and Oz characters AND omg you absolutely cannot be a bigot and love Gandalf! Or romantic comedies. Or dragons. Or anything really. If you have so much hate in you please stay away from my symbols of love and inclusivity. You failed the test! The Muppet Babies obviously didn’t work on you. Fraggle Rock didn’t mine deep enough to reach your buried heart. Go back to the beginning and start fresh.

Which brings us to Jesus. The Bible is hard to trust, because it’s been manipulated and used as a tool for oppression basically from the beginning. But if we look to Jesus and what we know about him in the mythological sense (and the historical sense, I suppose), it’s pretty obvious what he stands for. He stands for LOVE! He insists that you give to the poor. He really loves immigrants. He didn’t actually say anything about gay people, he loved animals, and he had a sense of humor, which is why we have things like Godspell.

So I’ve decided to reclaim Jesus from those who would use him against me. My Jesus makes his appearance in the ‘80s, as a kind of contrast to Satanic panic. He’s 12-feet tall in a nod to Oral Roberts’ 900-foot Jesus. He’s Brown because Jesus was (gasp) not white. And he’s a trickster, in the grand tradition of so many of my favorite tricksters, from Loki to Anansi to Reynard and the kitsune.

Jesus is very inclusive as a historical figure and genuinely radical in terms of religious figures. And yet, though I have a very dense spiritual life at the moment (and Jesus is a part of it), I’m not sure how I feel about him. I do know that I’ve always felt peace when I think about Jesus, which I take as a good sign. And despite having gone to some great churches in my life, that peace is definitely not the result of how Christianity has treated me. So I take the resonance seriously but I also think that now is the time to take the symbol of Jesus and have some fun with him.

Some of the stories might seem controversial, but are they really? If Jesus sees us all the time, he’s watched you do a lot of bad things. You and me. I bit my knee off in jail once (LONG STORY) and Jesus was there, watching me be an absolute garbage troll. The whole point is that he still loves us even while witnessing this stuff. So I’ve used my fiction to bring some of that to life. What if Jesus really did appear while you were cruising in the local park? How does Jesus actually feel about predatory priests? Why does Jesus let so much bad shit happen to good people?

Why are the bullies winning?

It felt like time to explore these concepts, so I’m excited to share these stories with you.

Love,

Mike