A friend from the Barnardsville home church that I attend recommended the book “Tortured for Christ” to me. My healing journey has followed a theme of torture: the torturous agony I felt when I recovered memories of childhood sodomy from family members, the torturous fascination I developed when I indulged in vengeance fantasies and its more benign cousin in the form of Shibari art, and then the astonishment I experienced when I saw the capacity of Jesus to love through torture. So naturally, I picked this book up and Lord, what a book it is!

There’s a section in it that I love so much. I’ve read it out loud to multiple groups of people. It is titled “Russians—A People With Such Thirsty Souls”. The context is Romania, right after World War II, when communism had taken over and its an account from a Lutheran minister who was a part of the underground Church there—Richard Wurmbrand.

He writes (emphasis mine)—

For me, to preach the gospel to the Russians is heaven on earth. I have preached the gospel to men of many nations, but I have never seen a people drink in the gospel like the Russians. They have such thirsty souls.

An Orthodox priest, a friend of mine, telephoned me and told me that a Russian officer had come to him to confess. My friend did not know Russian. However, knowing that I speak Russian, he had given him my address. The next day this man came to see me. He longed for God, but he had never seen a Bible. He had no religious education (thank God for that!) and never attended religious services (churches in Russia then were very scarce). He loved God without the slightest knowledge of Him.

I read to him the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus.

The Sermon on the Mount represents to me, the crux of Jesus’ message. There is so much wisdom there. One could return to it again and again. If someone asks me where to start exploring the message of the Christ, I’d point them to the Sermon on the Mount. I credit my friend, Michal, for being one of the two guiding lights that showed up as I heard the call of Christ, approximately a year ago while I was attending a kinky Christmas party at a local sex-positive community (a story for another time). Michal was quite open about her love for Jesus in the trauma-healing, conscious community that I am a part of here in Asheville. It was quite unusual. Christ lived in my mind as the “most religious” of all the “religions” and just completely lived in a separate mental compartment as “trauma-healing”. What a deception that was! The extent to which I’ve been able to truly heal has been miraculously remarkable through the grace of Christ. I remember Michal speaking about the Sermon on the Mount while I was still navigating this early on and I’m quite grateful for her.

After hearing them, he danced around the room in rapturous joy proclaiming, “What a wonderful beauty! How could I live without knowing this Christ!” It was the first time that I saw someone so joyful in Christ.

That passage really resonates with me because oh Lord, what an experience it is to not be aware. To not understand the extent to which there is a God. Growing up in India, there were many who spoke of God. It was a part of the language. But I don’t think people get it. People don’t get that God is living. God is alive. He speaks! You can directly communicate with Him!

The direct communication aspect of a relationship with God is tucked away in a corner of many Hindu rituals. And often, you have to talk through the priest. So you walk away with this sense that God is a higher-up in some kind of an Indian government bureaucracy. So just like you expect very little from the bureaucracy, you expect very little from God!

So it is quite wild to come to this awareness that God is a living being, who is really powerful and who loves you deeply, and wants to talk to you and hear from you.

He expects obedience from you but the flavor of obedience that he expects is so good for your life that why wouldn’t you obey Him? There is truly no reason not to obey Him.

Most reasons people find for disobedience arise from an incomplete understanding of the situation. Every complete understanding of a situation and the action that is born from such a complete understanding, is very aligned with the guidelines that God has laid down for man.

As I say this, I recognize I’m speaking from my current belief system. Who knows what I’ll be saying ten years from now. But this is my subjective perception of objective truth that is beyond the material plane. Many people limit reality to the material, but reality clearly extends beyond that.

So it was quite joyful for me to find out that God actually exists, beyond just a dead idea, beyond just the chanting of mantras in a language that you don’t fully understand. So delightful! The stories of Jesus are just so beautiful. He just seems like a really nice bloke. A good friend to the people around him. Prior to regularly reading the New Testament, I used to regularly read the Buddhist suttas. The Buddha seems so aloof in comparison. With Mona Lisa smiles. There was some serenity that I could perceive in his presence, but I absolutely wouldn’t have called him a “friend”.

Wurmbrand continues—

Then I made a mistake. I read to him the passion and crucifixion of Christ, without having prepared him for this. He had not expected it and, when he heard how Christ was beaten, how He was crucified and that in the end He died, he fell into an armchair and began to weep bitterly. He had believed in a Savior and how his Savior was dead!

It’s absolutely astonishing for me, to imagine someone completely unaware of the crucifixion. Growing up in India, I had some vague awareness of Jesus being crucified and resurrected, but the meaning hadn’t fully landed. The intensity of the crucifixion, and then the resurrection! Holy Lord! It is quite staggering to grasp what that means. At that time, I didn’t even know that Jesus maintained a connection to Love while being tortured! That he prayed for the forgiveness of his torturers! To really drive this home, at the point where I encountered this story, I carried a real possibility (however small it felt) that I’d kidnap, lusciously torture and kill one of my perpetrators on livestream. So you can only imagine the stunning impact of Jesus’ story on how I was oriented. And then to learn that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross had not only forgiven me for all the harmful tendencies I had and all my harmful past actions, but also my perpetrators!

I don’t think I really knew what love was back then. What we often call love is such a diluted, corrupted version. I don’t know how I could’ve possibly understood what it means to love, had I not felt but a sliver of the love of the Father in Heaven, for me. He is the epitome of Love. The felt experience of His love for me transcends every prior notion I had of what love is.

Having heard of the crucifixion and the resurrection, it was quite an astonishing experience for me to get what it represents. So I can’t even begin to fathom what it might be like to not be aware of it at all, like this Russian officer! He was so happy right in the previous section! What a roller coaster to go through!

I looked at him and was ashamed. I had called myself a Christian, a pastor, and a teacher of others, but I had never shared the sufferings of Christ as this Russian officer now shared them. Looking at him, it was like seeing Mary Magdalene weeping at the foot of the cross, faithfully weeping when Jesus was a corpse in the tomb.

I have read the Gospel of Mary. It’s short, but her love for Jesus comes through powerfully. The sidelining of her voice—her Gospel—seems to track with the historic sidelining of the voice of women. There are potent references to her weeping at the cross in the mainstream texts, her being the first witness of the resurrection and her referring to Jesus as “Rabbouni”, a loving form of the word “Rabbi” meaning teacher.

In the Gospel of Mary, she shares some profound esoteric wisdom that stuns the other disciples. In response to that, Peter turns to the others (not her) and asks them if they think she is lying! Bro, why don’t you ask her that question directly?! And this is the guy who himself denied knowing Jesus three times! Compare that to Mary who wept at the cross! So when I come across people who immediately dismiss the Gospel of Mary, my mind connects the dots and goes—oh I understand now why it took over 1900 years since Jesus for women to gain their agency. That too, only in the West really. And many men haven’t yet adapted to that truth—that women have agency. God-given agency.

The nature of freedom is such that once you get a whiff of it, there is no going back. So it doesn’t matter who accepts your freedom or not, once you realize that you are free, the dominos start toppling. Truly. You could bind a free man, but he will forever be free once he gets one whiff of what freedom is. That is what the 2nd amendment captures. The right to bear arms. Once you know you have the right to bear arms, even if they put you in a straightjacket in a locked room, you will continue exercising that right in whatever manner is accessible to you—even if it is muffled screaming. Your spirit may break momentarily, and yet you won’t forget that you have that right once you know it. It is unalienable, in that sense.

Every stage of my own life where I have realized I have access to a particular form of freedom, my mind went “what?! I can do that?” and there was no going back. Freedom is infectious.

Then I read to him the story of the resurrection and watched his expression change. He had not known (!!) that his Savior arose from the tomb. When he heard this wonderful news, he beat his knees and swore—using very dirty, but very “holy” profanity. This was his crude manner of speech. Again he rejoiced, shouting for joy, “He is alive! He is alive!” He danced around the room once more, overwhelmed with happiness!

That line—He is alive!—reminds me again of Michal. I remember she had posted on her Facebook on Easter Sunday—He’s alive! Easter Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. It’s a common phrase people use to greet each other in Churches. You’ll see the letters arranged on these notice boards outside Baptist churches around Asheville. “He is alive!” And I remember when I experienced Michal’s expression of that, there was just something magical in it. To my perception, at least. This is again an example of how we may know phrases and then we really get to know them. The full magnitude of their meaning can take time to seep in. Michal’s expression of “He is alive!” was revelatory to me, at a time when I was gently curious about Jesus. It planted a seed.

The magnitude of what it means to be resurrected takes time to sink in. That a man returns from death!

Not just that, he predicts that he will die and that he will return.
Not just that! Before all of that, he resurrects another dead person—Lazarus—in addition to miraculously healing a bunch of disabled lepers, while asking them to be quiet about it!

It’s crazy! There’s nothing like it! If you don’t have a holy profanity response to that, just stick with it till you do. Perhaps you find it all very improbably. Perhaps, most of you thinks that it’s a lie. But just, for a moment, connect to the part of you that wonders if it might be true. Be honest when it comes to events from the past, you can surmise with a high likelihood that something might be false, but the nature of statistics is such that a high likelihood doesn’t equate to certainty! Don’t be dishonest about that!

So sit with the part of you that wonders—wait, could it be true?—and then let the magnitude of the event really sink in. Let me know how that goes for you.

When he heard this wonderful news, he beat his knees and swore—using very dirty, but very “holy” profanity. This was his crude manner of speech. Again he rejoiced, shouting for joy, “He is alive! He is alive!” He danced around the room once more, overwhelmed with happiness!

I said to him, “Let us pray!” He did not know how to pray.

He did not know our “holy” phrases. He fell on his knees together with me and his words of prayer were: “Oh God, what a fine chap you are! If I were You and You were me, I would never have forgiven You of Your sins. But You are really a very nice chap! I love You with all of my heart.”

Wow, I have teared up consistently with joy when I read this section. It captures so much! If I were You and You were me, I would never have forgiven You of Your sins. Isn’t that so true? We, humans, don’t forgive easily! We really don’t! Sometimes, we lie to ourselves that we have forgiven someone, but somewhere in the corner of our heart, we hold a tiny little grudge.

Especially in the West, where we can each hide away in our own corner. Buy some land, put up these big signs “No trespassing!”. Live out peacefully with all our grudges keeping us company.

If I were You and You were me, I would never have forgiven You of Your sins.

Even when we do, we will hold some kind of a distance. I find that here it is so important to tap into the standard of love that God holds for us. Experience it directly through prayer with Him. Experience it through the story of Jesus. Just so the word itself regains its full meaning. That pinch of salt that brings out the true flavor of what each ingredient offers in a dish. That is the love of Christ.