Jesus Brand Spirituality

I am not much given to tears, not ordinarily anyway. For joy? Yes. I can, and sometimes do, cry for joy. Grief and sorrow? We all can cry over them. We all do. And beauty. Always for beauty. But the truth of the thing is that I don’t have a definition for beauty. Neither, of course, do philosophers or aestheticians, when one gets right down to it. In fact, with beauty, almost all of us have to fall back into the tired old saw of “I don’t know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it.”

With beauty, that trite saying means for me that I recognize immediately the strange stillness that always surrounds beauty, like an opening in space and time, making a corona or aura around it. I know by perceived sensation the way beauty goes straight to my thorax when it enters me, rising only later, if at all, to my head. I know the union I feel, if just for a few moments, with all things when I am in the presence of beauty. And I know that beauty makes me tear up just for the wonder of its being possible—just for the sheer miracle that the stuff of creation can be so arranged as to become this that I receive as beauty.

This is not a beautiful book (though it is hardly an ugly one). This, instead, is a book that contains niches and corridors and apses of beauty that catch my thorax and make me feel the salt and burn of beauty rising. The faith we Christians claim has been so dented and chipped and discolored by the centuries, so institutionalized and codified and doctrinalized, so written upon and then so overwritten into palimpsest, that there are few Christians who still can discern the contours of the original. There are fewer still who know, and can persuasively teach, that Christianity was only and always just the container, the wrapping paper being used in shipment through the centuries of time. It is the Jesus beyond dent or chip or discoloring that is the beauty. It is the Jesus beyond the doctrine and the clashing commentary that is beauty.

I have known Ken Wilson for several years, have held in deep gratitude our friendship and his constancy, have sought his counsel, and have profited from his candor and forthrightness. I have also yearned—a strong word, yearned, but an apt one in this context. I have yearned for him to set down on paper the words that follow here. But even having heard Ken Wilson preach, having spent innumerable hours with him in both conversation and correspondence, I was still unprepared for the result of this transposing of his scholarship and insights from oral delivery to printed presentation. The oral can be heard (and now reheard, thanks to technology), but in a print culture, it can never be considered with the same deliberateness or vulnerability as can the read words. The heard is external in formation; the read is first taken in and then sounded; and that principle makes a substantial difference always.

Wilson writes with an easy pen and a light, almost jovial, touch. Sometimes one suspects a bit of tongue is in his cheek. Sometimes one knows he is being deliberately droll. And sometimes he is just a very, very good storyteller. Always he is Jesus’. And because he is secure in that positioning, he sees as naturally and unselfconsciously as a child contemplating his mother or her father. Why this matters—why its recording here is shot through with beauty—is that Jesus loves Ken.

This book, in effect, is a love story between one man and one Jesus. The distinction to be made between this story and all the others I have ever read is that this one is not entirely a monologue. In this one, we catch snatches of a two-way conversation. In this one, there are glimpses of a present Jesus as well as of a Jesus memorialized in photographs or word portraits; and that distinction makes a telling difference here.

But I want to say one more thing before I close this introduction to pages that, truth be told, need no preamble. I want to say that quite apart from the delight of these pages, there is a vital theme running through them, one that is itself beautiful the way a clear stream in a mountain valley is full and beautiful. The streambed is that the experience and exercise of spirituality are inherent in all human beings. The stream is that Christian spirituality is just that— Christian. Or, as Ken Wilson would have it, it is Jesus Brand; and that truth makes the entire difference. Here. Everywhere. Always.

Phyllis Tickle