Stairway to heaven

When I was nine, maybe younger, my nanny asked me if I might like to give God a try. She was Christian and didn’t try to persuade me, just told me about him and about praying and crossing myself. Who knows what made me give in – maybe the shiny cross she gave me. I wore it for a few days until my Buddhist cousin saw it and cried, “Do you know what that is?” while removing the chain. That’s pretty much the extent of my contact with God, and anyone who knows me would be shocked to hear that I even got that close.

But a couple days ago I got much closer, right up to the foot of the man himself. On a mountain in Vung Tau, a resort city two hours away from Saigon, stands a 100-foot statue of Jesus, holding out his arms as he surveys the laity 600 feet below. “You know,” my coworker Nguyen said after I saw the icon for the first time, “there were some Boat People who escaped Vietnam a few decades ago, and when they returned, they built that statue as a gift.”

There must have been something in my face because she asked what was wrong. “Nothing. I just think it’s silly of them to take up public space like that. It doesn’t just belong to Christians.”

The next day we made our pilgrimage to the man upstairs – up a very, very long set of stairs. I went for the same reason I would stop to look at a car accident, but in fact if there were nothing up there but an abandoned car I’d still have gone for the sake of climbing the small mountain. The trek was tiring, with plenty of landings where we could rest and gaze down at the town, at the sea that turned into sky, and at the progress we’d made. Like holy harbingers, clusters of statues would occasionally greet us, as if to say: almost there.

The actual statue at the pinnacle of the hike was flesh-colored, domineering, and anticlimactic. I might have been more impressed with a golden calf, but it wasn’t really Jesus’ fault; he had to compete with a breathtaking view. On one end I admired the coast packed with ant-sized beachgoers and grasshopper-sized palm trees curving around the peninsula. I knew I was looking at something so many others must have seen in brochures. On the other end was infinite water and sky. The sight alone made me feel weightless, or as if I were filled with nothing but that floating blue.

Jesus compensated as best he could. Tourists were allowed to climb inside the statue like they would Lady Liberty, either to the balcony built into his robe, or farther up to his outstretched arms. Earlier, when my boss had told me people could do this, I’d asked, “Isn’t that a little sacrilegious?” Little did I know there was a sacred screening process. You cannot enter the body of Christ wearing shorts, skirts, or tank tops, and you must leave your shoes and water bottles at the opening. I wasn’t disappointed, but I felt bad for anyone who’d gone through all that trouble just to be turned away at the gates.

So we'd faced our maker and by providence no one was smote (smitten?) by lightning. Then again, we did get caught in the rain on the way down, Mr. Pina Colada would be happy to know. If it had come just five minutes later we would have been dry in a taxi, but I’m glad it happened. We were only a few flights from the bottom when I stopped to enjoy the wind that was picking up. On the horizon, the same wind was bringing in clouds and, to our amazement, we could see them raining into the sea before the storm reached us seconds later, the sky still light. We ran to a tunnel for shelter and did what was only logical while waiting out the storm. We ate ice cream.