Attending a Catholic school for 12 years, we received a lot of exposure to the Bible as well as Catholic catechism and dogma.

I guess I want to write specifically about what I took with me about Jesus. I didn’t feel too close to Jesus. I understood Mary better – a mom with a baby. Jesus was a man. I knew few men and even fewer boys. They seemed a little scary, and Jesus was in the same compartment for me as US presidents, famous, but foreign.

Still, there were a number of things that I learned about him that I was able to appreciate, that stuck with me over the years.

He welcomed everybody, the poor, the rich, the blind, those with seizure disorders, the children, and even the women who were working in the kitchen (Mary and Martha).

While acknowledging the laws about adultery, he refused to partake in the serious punishment that some of the community participated in (stoning the woman) and actually turned one such incident around. He was not afraid of sensuality, permitting his friend Mary (was it Magdalene?) to rub scented oil on his feet with her hair.

He studied the Jewish laws of his upbringing, and taught that the overall intention of those laws was more important than the letter of the law. When a lamb or calf fell into a ditch on the Sabbath, though the law said to do no work on the holy day, he made it clear that the rescue of a helpless animal honored God and the laws better than ignoring the animal.

He truly followed his own dictate to turn the other cheek. When a disciple cut off the ear of a soldier who was a part of the party arresting Jesus, Jesus replaced the ear and gently chastised his follower.

He was very patient. There are only two places in the New Testament where he is depicted as angry. One was with his mother, the other when he came upon the merchants wheeling and dealing in the temple.

A lot of attention is given to his gruesome death nailed to a wooden cross, but we were taught that what was more important was that somehow he returned to his friends and followers after his death (known as the Resurrection).

The Old Testament depicted a God who could be angry and punishing and even capricious at times. The main offering of the New Testament, what made it so new, is Jesus’s emphasis over and over that God is love, and love is the presence of God in each of us.