I’ve never had much of an interest in Jesus. Jesus Luz perhaps, Madonna’s latest lover, but not Jesus Jesus. I could never see what the point was. And therefore Easter has never meant that much other than loads of chocolate and pimples. With the exception of course of that one year my brother and I saw the Easter Bunny.

I attended a public school and when the scripture teachers descended twice a year I would convince Mum to write a note to excuse me from class. I resented Sunday School while my age was still in single figures and at High School would simply wag to avoid any remnants of religion. 

I formed an opinion from a young age that religion wasn’t for me. I blamed it for causing all wars and for the oppression of women and animals. The Ancient Egyptians worshipped the mere moggy and the Pagans worshipped their animal ancestors as symbols of God. It was Christianity that delegated them to second class citizens (although not necessarily Jesus).

Throughout the years my ignorance remained in tact, continuing well into university when I became quite serious about geology. A science that proves the earth is 4.6 billion years old, the only science that can well and truly blow the bible narrative out of the holy water.

I was struck every time I climbed the stairs of the Geology Department, by that framed pictured of an ocker-like figure wearing stubbies… worn too short (it was taken in the 70’s). One leg cocked on a rock, offering up a prized fish. Ian Plimer quietly obtained hero status in my mind, for his passion, his unquestioning atheism, and (most of all) his antiestablishment connotations. Once the head of the Newcastle University Geology Department his crusades back then included fighting the Christians (he mortgaged his house to take a group to court who claimed a rock outcrop to be Noahs Ark). Professor Plimer now wages a different war, but no less controversial… human induced global warming.

I would attend church irregularly but only for weddings. Never reading the hymns aloud I became the opposite to a ventriloquist, miming the words so as not to appear rude, but emitting no sound at all (dare I speak to God). I was the ventriloquist’s dummy. Oh and not forgetting that time I dutifully attended Sunday morning mass thanks to a practical joke on behalf of my brother. He asked me to be Godmother to his eldest daughter and then informed me that I would have to attend mass in order to be eligible (I still haven’t gotten him back for that one… any ideas?). 

Faith was never on the agenda but it popped up again when I first left the country and had my initial inkling in Hinduism. Befriended by a small Malaysian man (what I would later recognise as a typical Asian tourist parasite, men hell bent on shagging/marrying/annoying/boring-to-death western women) who forcibly acted tour guide on my visit to Batu Caves north of Kuala Lumpur.

272 steps later I was browsing the deities carved into the rock and was bewildered by the oddness of the Hindu religion. The bizarre stories about talking elephants (Ganesh) who collected mangoes and killed their offspring. And female Gods (my inner feminist delighted) with multiple arms and multiple personalities… no doubt.

At the end of a very tedious four hour tour my guide was curious about Christianity. He said “don’t you have a guy that does this”? He stood straight upright, arms out wide at 90 degrees (yes as if he was nailed to a cross); his head slumped forward like a freshly murdered messiah.

I laughed but it trailed off into self scorn, not quite embarrassment. All those years of repelling religion had led me to become an ignorant Australian twot. I was just like the hundreds working in London, scattered in hostels from Earls Court to Shepherds Bush, experiencing England with their heads stuck up their own rectums. What happened to learning for the sake of learning?

I continued travelling for a year (and 1 day) delving further into Hinduism in India, a country rancid with hallucinogenic drugs its little wonder the Hindu Gods are so vivid. But also Islam, Buddhism (not a religion but that’s another story) Sikhism, Judaism, and Christianity. Then off to Europe to explore cathedral after church after cathedral, feeling something, feeling nothing, feeling something. I challenge you to stand in the largest of them all, St Pauls, and tell me you feel nothing (I know I felt my heel hurting as for some strange reason I had doubled-up with another lady in the revolving doors on the way in. I caught my heel as I exited… the clunk echoing throughout the giant vacuum, not one person not turning to stare).

Travel definitely ignited an interest. News of the mid west US damning Darwin’s theories and favouring “intelligent design” pissed me off. But my lack of faith was not truly questioned until I met the only man I’ve known that I truly could sacrifice my own precious, and extremely self indulgent, time for. No it wasn’t God.

I met him in a pub in Perth while I was having one of my drunken Newcastle moments. It was a Newcastle trifecta this time… the DJ was playing Better by The Screaming Jets (who are from Newie), I looked up and there was the Newcastle Maine tap, and I can’t remember the third coincidence… probably the fact that I was from Newcastle. In true Kramer style, I turned to the first person I saw to reveal my Newcastle trifecta.

I woke up at his house the following afternoon to his brother singing a Spanish opera in the lounge room. I looked up to spy a large brown cross hovering overhead. He carried rosary beads and kept a bible in the glove box of his car. It never worked out because “I didn’t believe in God”. I didn’t understand.

Fast forward five or so years and I am writing this waiting for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to start. Something I would never have considered doing ten years previously. Back then Mel was more focused on fighting evil in Lethal Weapon four. On Sunday nights I watch “The Story of India”. Not just because I have an interest in Indian culture but because the first part explored the beginnings of religion in the Far East. And later that night on Compass there is “The Hidden Story of Jesus” a fascinating look at Jesus through the eyes of the other major religions. Had Jesus possibly studied the teachings of Buddha?

So this Easter 2009 I embraced a healthy intellectual interest in Jesus. I still can’t tell the story of Jesus fully or partly. I can tell you that absorbing “The Passion of the Christ” was made all the more difficult thanks not to the subtitles but the incessant advertising of MacDonald’s, Jenny Craig, Oz Design, car insurance, corn chips and ironically “paradise rooms” (hell… it felt like I was watching David Lettermen).

But this Easter was ever so slightly more meaningful, especially compared to when we were kids. Back then my brother and I used to fight, not over who got the most Easter eggs… but who received the most grams of chocolate.