Jesus Jesus On The Wall

“Mom, why does Abuelita have a bleeding guy hanging on the wall of each room? It’s kinda creepy.”

My son was 10 years old when he asked this, and it took me a minute to understand what he meant. Over the past couple of years, my children have been spending a month in Colombia each summer. It’s a great opportunity for my husband and I to get some time alone, all while they bond with their Colombian family and learn more about my culture. That question, however, I didn’t expect. What he was referring to, were the crucifixes that my mom has in all of our rooms, and that have been there ever since I can remember.

My mom takes after her mom, who was also a fervent Roman Catholic—when they moved her house, one of the things that landed in our library was this giant cross, with Jesus bleeding in it. Contrary to me, who grew up around it, my son was confronted with something completely foreign to him.

My kids have grown up in a Muslim home where, as part of religious precepts, the depiction of prophets or god are forbidden. So, objects and images that held a religious meaning for me as a child, to my kids are just that—objects and “posters,” as my daughter called the images at the church I took them to after my grandma passed last year. I left the Roman Catholic Church when I was fifteen, and despite years working to deconstruct my Catholic upbringing, I had never for a minute sat down to think about the violence that it is to grow up seeing the depiction of someone bleeding hanging on your wall. The reason I never questioned it, though, seems pretty clear: growing up around it had made it normal. Added to that is the idea that “you should respect religion, even if you don’t agree,” which makes it harder to question problematic beliefs because challenging them is usually conflated with insult and disrespect.

My children, on the other hand, were perfectly equipped to bring it up. Not only they didn’t grow up around it, but they’ve never been told that they need to respect anything religious regardless of how awkward it is. If anything, they are exposed to a lot of criticism of both Christianity and Islam, and they know it is okay, even encouraged, to challenge things that others let slide simply because “that’s the way it is.”

A couple of years back, my husband decided to put together a little Sunday school with our kids and some of their Muslim friends, to which I agreed to be a silent observer. During one of the classes, my daughter asked him why there weren’t any women prophets. He answered with arguments that seemed more like talking points he’d been given than carefully thought-out responses. After he was done, my daughter looked him straight in the eye and told him “That doesn’t make any sense.”

A lot of things don’t.

We are conditioned, not only in religion, by the way, to accept certain things as just being true. We’re fed arguments that don’t make sense, usually when we’re younger so that we don’t question them much, and they will shape what we see as normal down the road. In the case of religion, though, an extra layer is added. Once our questioning crosses a certain line, the immediate response becomes that our faith isn’t strong enough; that is used to settle the argument. “If your faith were stronger, you’d understand it” or also “You don’t need to understand. If god wants it from you, then you should trust that it’s the best for you because he knows you better than you know yourself.” I’ve heard both arguments; more to the point, I’ve had them told to me. In the case of the bleeding Jesus, to this objectively terrifying artifact, we are told to attach an all-loving, selfless act brought forth to save humanity—talk about gaslighting!

On the Muslim side of things, something I’ve heard a lot of meaningless justifications for is how women have to pray behind men, and how their place at the mosque is always smaller and in the back somewhere. Even arguments that seem to be innocent enough, like saying women are more “comfortable” praying behind men, or that it isn't mandatory for women to pray at the mosque, find their origins in a heavily patriarchal mindset defended even by those who claim to care about women’s rights. Those arguments become so ingrained in people’s minds that no one questions them, or even does differently when given the chance.

In Turkey, at least until we left in 2016, women did not attend Friday prayer. The one time I tried to attend, I ended up praying in a basement in Antalya’s 100+ degree weather because the women’s section needed to accommodate the men who were coming to pray. A lot of the women I met at the time had grown up learning that they didn’t “have to” go to Friday prayer, some were even taught to see it as an advantage. The idea is that god “facilitates” things for women by allowing them to pray at home. Never mind that this not only confines women to the home, but it also leaves the men to relay back what they hear at the mosque, which is already told by a man. Can we seriously trust men to have our best interests at heart? But the reality is that even if women wanted to attend the prayer like it was my case, they wouldn’t be allowed to.

When my mother and sister-in-law were visiting us in Miami, I invited them to come with me to the mosque for Friday prayer. They said they didn’t want to because they didn’t feel comfortable coming, since it was something they weren’t used to. Oftentimes, we assume that when people have the freedom to do something and they don’t do it, it means that they freely choose not to. There are a lot of factors that come into play when making decisions, more so when those decisions have to do with what god may want or like from us.

If today I wanted to hang a crucifix in my kids’ room, they’d be revolted and wouldn’t let it happen. If I did it anyway, far from bringing them a sense of peace or comfort, it’d probably be a thing of their nightmares. But when it comes to things like women having to pray behind men or always being given smaller places in the mosques, oftentimes behind a heavy, dark curtain, those could be harder for them to recognize as problematic, because they’ve grown up surrounded by people who see it happen without questioning it. Many girls will grow up hearing their moms say that they feel uncomfortable praying in front of men, passing that discomfort onto their daughters. If anything, such discomfort says a lot more about the environment a woman is walking into when going into the men’s section of a mosque than anything else. What are those men thinking of that instead of making you feel safe they make you feel uncomfortable?

It is time that we stop looking at anything coming from religion as justifiable simply because it comes from a “higher place.” More often than not, people use this as a way to continue imposing harmful beliefs on others without any accountability, and with a get-out-of-jail-free card to avoid challenging their views. We don’t do ourselves or others any favors by perpetuating the premise that we should “respect” religious precepts independently of where they come from. Respect should be for people, and beliefs should be scrutinized if we want to overcome those ideas that have impacted us negatively for years, if not longer.