Naomi Wolf encounters Jesus...

... as a thirteen-year-old boy.

Let me clarify.

Naomi Wolf, whom you see to the right in the photo by Adam Houseman, was -- appearances to the contrary -- herself the thirteen-year-old boy.

Or so she claimed in a Sunday Herald interview (January 22, 2006) with Torcuil Crichton, from which, I'm excerpting her own words:

I am not going to be in the closet about this any more. I'm on a spiritual path, I answer to a higher authority .... [That authority is] God. I believe absolutely that every single one of us is here with a spiritual mission. We come in knowing it and then we forget. If we're lucky, we re-remember. That's part of what this book is about, helping people re-listen to their soul because their soul knows exactly what they're supposed to be doing, even if it is not always clear it knows the direction in which to pull .... [The experience was] completely not the appropriate spiritual experience of someone of my background .... I was completely dumbfounded but I actually had this vision of ... of Jesus, and I'm sure it was Jesus .... But it wasn't this crazy theological thing; it was just this figure who was the most perfected human being -- full of light and full of love. And completely accessible. Any of us could be like that. There was light coming out of him holographically, simply because he was unclouded. But any of us could become that as human beings .... On a mystical level, it was complete joy and happiness and there were tears running down my face. On a conscious level, when I came out of it I was absolutely horrified because I'm Jewish. This was not the thing I'm supposed to have confront me .... I opened the door and there he was .... I wasn't myself in this visual experience .... I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him [Jesus] and feeling feelings I'd never felt in my lifetime, of a 13-year-old boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven't talked about it publicly .... It's very embarrassing. We're intellectuals, we're on the left, we're not supposed to talk like that .... I don't want to be co-opted as the poster child for any religion or any agenda ... There are a lot of people out there just waiting for some little Jewish feminist to cross over. I so much want to distance this from Christianity. It has nothing to do with any religion whatsoever .... [I am reading what the rabbi Jesus had to say, as a Jew,] not as this whole Christian construct but as a teacher and a social activist, as a rabbi and as a healer .... I absolutely believe in divine providence now, absolutely believe God totally cares about every single one of us intimately, that we're not alone, that we're surrounded by love. That everything is OK.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Aside from Wolf herself, I can't think that many people will be happy about her vision. Doubtless she realizes this, too, for as Crichton observes, "Wolf's very soul is about to become a theological battleground, and she knows it."

Christians are likely to be fascinated, but repelled by the strangeness of her visionary identity as a 13-year-old boy, and critical of her insufficient Christology, whereas Jews will probably find even the low Christology excessive. Feminists will worry about the 'patriarchy' implicit in Wolf's identity as a boy admiring an idealized, older man. Leftists will worry that she's drawing too close to the dark side. Rightists will note that she's still on the left. And the secular elite that Wolf herself belongs to will think that she's gone mad.

I'd need to know more about her vision, but offhand, I'd say that it seems partly shaped by kabbalistic assumptions, which might account for the quasi-gnostic point about our having forgotten what our souls previously knew and our subsequent need to re-remember (though this could also reflect Plato's views on anamnesis). Wolf's identity as a thirteen-year-old boy might connect to the Jewish coming-of-age ritual, the bar mitzvah.

Wolf herself will have to tell us more about all of this. I expect a book will emerge within a year or so. Meanwhile, she might like to do some reading of her own on similarly unexpected encounters with Jesus -- say, that of a drunken Anne Lamott, suicidal and bleeding from an abortion, to whom Jesus appeared as a cat:

I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my [deceased] father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there -- of course, there wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.

And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, "I would rather die."

I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because that's not what I was seeing him with.

Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone.

This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood. But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: You let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.

And one week later, when I went back to [the] church [that I had been attending for the beautiful music], I was so hungover that I couldn't stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling -- and it washed over me.

I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God's own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, "F**k it: I quit." I took a long deep breath and said out loud, "All right. You can come in."

So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.

Stunningly well-written, and touching in its honest sincerity, this religious confession ... but being who I am, I have to wonder if Lamott had ever read Robert Musil's short story "The Lady From Portugal" ("Die Portugiesin"), where God appears as a kitten.