Or They Sermonize

Or some of the professional God people sermonize about experiencing God in such a way that they make God sound like. Oh. Ho-hum. Well, that’s fine for you, but leave me out of this please. This sounds. Oh. You know. Like something I can live without. Like something professionals. Professional God people. Are paid to talk about, and so they do.

And this is what gets me about a lot of them. A lot of what I read. There’s this. There’s all this talk. Talk talk talk and more talk. Oh, you know. Instructions. Like they’re instructing you on the assembly of a very complicated backyard gym. A backyard gym that’s come in maybe one thousand and one pieces. There are drawings. Many drawings. Showing what attaches to what. Pictures of the tools you’ll need. For example, you’ll need a wooden mallet, a tack hammer, a claw hammer, a maul, a pair of needle nose tweezers, a pair of needle nose pliers, four crescent wrenches, three different types of screw drivers, a hack saw, a chain saw, a backhoe, a wheelbarrow, four hundred pounds of dry cement, four hundred pounds of gravel, three trouble lights, one B-1 bomber, three one hundred foot extension cords, one hundred and seventy-five feet of half inch nylon rope, a spade, one super computer, a shovel, a trowel, a miter box, a table saw, and a partridge in a pear tree.

And sometimes I want to stand up in the middle of the sermon or in the middle of the book and just walk away. I mean. Jesus. This sounds. Oh. Like maybe the guy was on his way to the beach with his towel and umbrella and summer reading and everything, sun tan lotion, et cetera, and then ended up somehow negotiating a merger between a hemorrhoid ointment manufacturer and an actuarial firm. And the merger talks broke down. And then started again. Broke down. Started again. Broke down. Started again. And it takes three years to get the deal done. And then they finally come out with the first hemorrhoid insurance product on the planet to great yawning and heavy eyelids. A company that will get you coming and going. Either way. They don’t care.

Sometimes I feel like the professional God people are turning God into a career, for Pete’s sake. Or a cow. A milk cow. Or a whole herd of milk cows. Don’t you. I mean. Maybe what we should do is cycle people through these jobs and back out into the private sector. Maybe we ought to get them back out into the real world where the rest of us live so that they can get a life, so to say. I mean they seem to want to make God sound so hard and arcane and philosophically complicated. So outside normal human experience that. Well. You just get tired, straining to figure out what in Sam Hill they’re talking about. You get weary slogging through the gumbo. I swear, sometimes I think what’s going on here is that the professional God people are in cahoots with the gumbo makers. And what happens is they get kickbacks for all the gumbo they pour around their churches and seminaries and cloisters and conference centers and publishing companies. If they fill up all these places with gumbo and keep them filled, they get all-expense paid trips to Tonga or Tahiti or somewhere like that where they all cavort for a month a year and call it a religious retreat.

I know. I know. I’m not being exactly kind to the professional God people. I should treat them with a little more Christian charity. But I read this stuff they publish, like a good little Christian. I read it and read it. I listen to the sermons. I listen to them all sermonizing. And I wonder what in the heck they think they’re doing. Whether they might have made a wrong turn in college and gotten lost in a Monty Python movie.

Or. Who knows. Maybe I’m the one who took a wrong turn in college and got lost in a Monty Python movie. Maybe I live in a bizzaro world where God walks down the street like he owns the place, pops up everywhere I look like some sort of Woody Woodpecker, and everybody else must live in the regular world where you have to stress and strain, must turn yourself into an intellectual troglodyte, must live underground for years and years in the dark, before he gives you a peek. And then it’s a very quick peek before he retreats into the planet’s molten metal core, where of course you cannot follow.

Sometimes it feels like one of those one hand clapping games. You know. Where you close your eyes and the other person stands on the other side of the room, and the other person either, A, does nothing, or, 2, claps with one hand, softly. And you’re supposed to guess which one.

And this has been going on for. Oh. Millennia. Millennia. Not just centuries. Millennia.

Pity the poor trees, then Man. Is what I’ve got to say on the subject. Pity the poor trees that have been slaughtered to support all this sermonizing. Support all these intricate instructions and descriptions and explanations. And then. Man. Pity all the poor Christians who have been convinced they ought to listen to all this elaborate brouhaha. All this droning. All this medicine for insomniacs. All this idea making. All these febrile infelicitous fleeting fluctuations recorded on the unfortunate reprocessed bodies of fallen forests all over this fair earth. All over this God-fashioned, God-breathed, God-teeming place.