if anybody begat me, it was god. not immaculately, as with jesus, but the good old sinful way. snuck into my mother’s bedroom one night and did the divine deed. an incubus from the land of gold and ice molesting my pious mother in that soft suburban bedroom. i do hope she enjoyed it; god always does.
it’s not that i don’t have a biological father, but that he doesn’t explain anything. a physical necessity, he circumvents entirely the question of meaning. god’s there for the why, i invent god to explain myself. which i know, even in these days of exaggerated claims, sounds a bit arrogant.
but how else could i have believed all those stories - of cherubim and resurrections, talking donkeys and 969-year-old men - not until i was 5 or 6, like any self-respecting child who’s sufficiently perspicacious to realize that storks and heaven and santa claus are happy phantasmagoria veiling bloodier things, but into double digits? who clung to otherworldly fantasy not as an alternative world but as the primordial and superior one? who, as his life stretched into what is generously called adulthood, continued to expect that the words that came from the mouths of priests and deacons must bear some resemblance to their deeds? i was duped. but i wanted to be duped. and that wanting i call god.
if god is the author and spirit of absurdity, then god is my father. if god is the sinews of the imagination that permit us to defy, transcend, and succumb to nature, then god is my father. if god is the darkness that congeals and scabs on the heart of suffering, god is my father. but, who knows? god sometimes is just cabbage soup on a cold day.
there are three types of men who, in this age of post-god and enron fraud, are sufficiently desperate or silly to hang their identities on divinity’s bleak future. calling themselves priests, deacons, shamans, bishops, rabbis, or imams, i haven’t met one who didn’t realize what he was doing until it was too late.
the first is the type who thinks he’s virtuous because he has no claws. oracle of the god of clichés, bland as cheap mozzarella cheese, eternally secure by means of his $65,000 a year and the praise of the senile, gray as sitcom laughtracks broadcast from tombstones, he comprises 90% of the priesthood. he is boring. we will ignore him.
the second is the man whose passion is empire-building, but is too untalented to make it in citicorp, thus hides behind the fading bite of the cross. he dreams of going public on the stock market with his 3000-strong first glass baptist of the holy order of melchizedek, trading baptismal futures and telesalvation options for an e-wing on his e-church towering over a prime intersection on god’s electronic highway. rev. k. melvin udder, ceo, gigajesus corp. where all things throb to the beat of cheap forgiveness.
the third is the one who wants sex and knows that according to the ancient wisdom, divinity and diddling go together like itunes and ipods. come, my darling, feel the sweet wounds of jesus, which are nothing other than your own lonely silent pain. oh living water, thou font of knowledge. sprinkling or immersion, i play both ways. ride yahweh’s hobbyhorse to heaven’s cloudy bouncing bed. wholly holy holey is the cored broad almighty. all that gas and sputum.
it took me 33 years to realize that god’s holy men used his holiness for their own ends and that god, to the extent he or she or it or they existed at all, surely belonged anywhere but in an institution. maybe in fire. maybe in ice or poker. but never, in the name of names, in an institution. 33 years. i’m a slow learner.
i know you’re asking—where then does god belong? in the graveyard? the history books? 9th & hennepin? nairobi? an obscure and transient url? wait. patience. god, unlike you and time, is never in a hurry. i’ll tell you where god hides, where he went to suck his thumb after the death of faith and nature and love and hope … but first, some stories.
but first, some sex.
but first, some talk about some sex.
two old priests were sitting on a pew in a church where they both had served the lord for over 40 years. one had been faithful to his vows and not only had always been chaste but whenever he saw a woman who caused his groin to waken from its pious slumber, immediately fell to the floor and prayed until his knees bled and he knew he fully belonged to god - and only god - once more. the other had taken every opportunity to exploit the vulnerable women who had come to him in their weakness and distress, sitting beside them on the couch of their souls, fondling their hands in an atmosphere of deepest compassion, gently kneading their thighs as if he were preparing the host in the bakeries of heaven, parting the waters as if he were moses leading himself to the promised land of the body, drawing forth the holy scepter to seek the void from whenceforth springeth all life. rev. chaste contemplated rev. lecher, his flabby lines of decadence, the anxious bulge at the center of his robes; he hesitated a moment, then said with the tact of one long accustomed to human sensitivities, rev. lecher, i know you, like i, have labored long in the strange unfathomed mine of souls and have not once flinched from the duty of your destiny …
wait … let’s leave these two brothers on their aged pew. another reverend’s intruding.
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