While divorce may sometimes be warranted and even necessary, it is never a cause for celebration.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Ramon Presson thought he was fine with his parents’ divorce, until he had to play Jesus at vacation Bible school when he was in second grade. This was the childhood memory he submitted to the readers’ essays section of this month’s Christian Century.
Presson writes that any observer would have seen him as resilient after his father left his mother a year earlier. One would have described him as caring and funny, he writes, not hurt or angry.
But he never realized he might be pushing those emotions back until he was assigned the role of Jesus cleansing the temple in the church play. He surprised himself by how much he got into the part.
“I belted out my memorized line between threatening yells and growls, thrashing my whip at the wide-eyed seven-year-old money changers as I knocked over a chair and kicked over a card table littered with fake money,” he writes. “This was not the way we had rehearsed it in class.”
Only after seeing the shock in the eyes of his VBS teacher and the congregation behind her did he realize what he had done. Reflecting on it, Presson sees this experience as a kind of catharsis, “the relief of dropping my mask for a moment and releasing my own anger about the injustice in my house.” That little child didn’t know how to express what was happening inside him, but his version of Jesus did.
This story haunted me as I read philosopher Stephen Adubato’s analysis in Plough Quarterly on, of all things, the movie Mrs. Doubtfire.
Long before debates over drag queens in local libraries or in the United States Congress, the 1990s-era film featured Robin Williams as a divorced …