The Voice of God

In my writing a few weeks ago, in the post Someone to Talk To, I wrote that these morning writing sessions, lubricated with coffee and heavy cream, are in essence conversations I am having with myself, a back-and-forth process of generating words from thought. The words then flow from the synapses to the fingers and emerge almost miraculously in the black-and-white pixels on the screen so that I can see them, and that engages the eyes and the emulated ear that hears internally, and it has occurred to me that these emulated internals are not merely taxing the neocortex, that there’s something of the lizard brain hissing in there, too, and something of mammalian emotion pleading also to give its grunting and its laughter and its cries some linguistic expression. It can seem as if the words themselves pull from some ethereal space, a locus somewhere out there.

Sometimes I go a-searching, too, when the idea is on the tip of my emulated tongue. That feels like being very close to something, but close is not like horseshoes and handgrenades at all. It either clicks or it doesn’t, and anyway, how do I know what I’m looking for? I am so slow on the uptake! If you dropped me onto a well-furnished desert island, in three lifetimes I would never put together a functional stoicism, and the one I would put together would be missing so many elements that someone better than me would spot immediately, and he or she would say to me, But, did you consider this? And, you maybe ought to think about that. More often than not, it is just that teacher’s directive to reconsider that forces the issue, and the idea just drops. What is happening?

We are the talking apes. We’re the only ones left, and these ideas, they’re linked in a causal chain, and if we could follow them, every talking ape who ever lived at some point gets resurrected, and surely if we kept on doggedly following the chain and resurrecting apes, we’d eventually meet mitchondrial Eve, the all-mother.

Suffice it to say, this ain’t just me doing the talking, so let’s just call it God, this impulse toward the other, this act of giving the otherwise silent universe a voice, God being merely shorthand for that which has no name that can contain it. It. In other writing, I tend to just refer to it as the universe because the word God gets it all bound up in religion, and that helps nobody. Universe takes the personhood out of it, de-personifies it, so to speak, and we must make a hard and decisive move to do that. I am going to call it God for convenience, but understand that I could call it the universe and I would be talking about the same thing.

When we survey the familiar religious systems, we see right away that the first move is personification, but that’s just the first move, and people don’t often realize that. Zeus, Hera, Odin, Jesus, are all personifications, attempts to present God in terms people can begin to understand. In pantheons like in the Greek myths, all of the qualities of people, good and bad, get expressed in their own god. Hephaestus was industrious. Zeus was powerful but also quite lustful. Athena was wise. In the Judeo/Christian move toward monotheism, then tri-theism or trinitarianism, (father, son, holy spirit), it’s reduced to three-in-one in an incomprehensible paradox, with God being the scary all-father and Jesus his more approachable son. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds here, but I want to say again that personifying God, giving the universe a personhood, is the first step, but for so many people it is the only step. Almost everybody gets stuck right there.

God isn’t a person, though. God ain’t your daddy. People who are stuck at the personification stage are going to have a really difficult time digesting that, and Christians with their it’s-a-relationship-not-a-religion sensibility are going to have a harder time still. Contemporary Christians have gotten themselves so carried away with the hands-waving saccharine love-in that the entire religion now actually leads people away from God. The more one follows American Christianity the further from God he gets. God is not love. God isn’t hate, either. God just is.

Christians, most of them, have no idea what they are talking about. I first noticed this when I was teenager, and it bothered me so much when I saw it for the first time. I was sitting in a Wednesday night bible study with my fellow teenagers, and the teacher, the church’s preacher, taught us the Ole Miss, old state U right up the road, was actually Gay U, a den of homosexuals and degeneracy, and we probably ought to avoid it. That was 1993, and for sure there’s a load of homosex happening on Campus at Ole Miss at any given time, but there’s loads of heterosex happening, too, and loads of LSD getting dropped, and also loads of Christians saying prayers, and Hindus doing weird chants, and all of it. You probably get what I’m saying. The university, as in, the Universe’s representative on Earth. All of it has to be there. I has to be there, if it is in fact a true university. I was sixteen years old, and I’d always wanted to go to Ole Miss, and no one had ever told me it was a bad place before, and right then and there I realized that not one of those guys had any idea what he was talking about.

Let me back up a bit. Church was a big part of my upbringing, and my parents sent me to a Church of Christ summer camp up in Henderson, Tennessee, called Mid South Youth Camp. Great place. My dad went there when he was a kid during its inaugural season, and I went, and I sent my own daughters there, so we are three generations deep here. Those were the best summers. It was Church of Christ, so we sang a lot, a lot of a capella, and that’s so uplifting and spiritual, spiritual being that feeling of being a part of something bigger than oneself, that feeling of belonging. It was co-ed in terms of there were boys and girls there, but boys went to bible class with other boys, and went swimming with only other boys, and so forth. One of the classes I’ll never forget. The guy, a skinny guy with a beard who I can still see with my emulated eye, taught us out of this book called “From Knee Pants to Romance”, and it was so good that I kept that book, a little phamplet actually, and I still have it, and I really need to scan it because it was so good. It was about how us boys were starting to get interested in those females, you know, and it was about how to be into chicks in a godly sort of way. It contained the phrase “heavy petting”, the first time I’d ever run into that phrase. It was about how boys ought to be respectful of females and how knocking them up outside of marriage was bad news.

Christianity was always at its best when it dealt with reality in a straightforward way, and I’m glad I had some experiences with it doing that. It is at its worst when it starts hiding things and starts concealing truth. In that Wednesday night class, it would have been a completely different story if the preacher had talked about how you actually do, probably, need to lay down with a few dogs at some point, and wake up with fleas. You actually need to do that, probably, so that you can find your own level in the mix of things, the place where you can operate. Christians start hemming in God and they just lose it, man. They just lose it. God doesn’t care. God just is. For Christians, though, they are so removed from God that they get it precisely backwards. Not only does God care, a lot, he cares about the most trivial nonsense. He cares about it all. Gay people are fine, you see, because people are going to do anything and everything that is within the scope of things they can possible do. Guys have penises and they are just going to stick them where it is possible to stick them. It is going to happen. Most will probably want to get up and do a flea dip and keep on going. The prodigal son, you know, he had the sense enough to come on home, and the father had the sense enough to kill at the best fatted cows and throw a party when he did.

God doesn’t care. God just is.

One of the things that Christians never get in their bible studies, and these lying fuckers are always “studying”, is anything in the way of historical context. I’m talking about anything at all, really. I don’t want to go too far into this in this piece, but I do want to say that the entire enterprise operates in a Wizard of Oz fashion, as in, don’t peek behind the curtain. There’s a lot of that built into how Christains actually behave in their churches. There’s a lot of questions you’re not allowed to ask, and if you can ask them, you often get just plain bullshit answers, and you keep on asking them, they’ll ostracize you. They’re under a great amount of social pressure here to “take it on faith”. Curiosity killed that cat. And so, the honest high IQ people in the church end up leaving and searching for answers elsewhere, the dishonest high IQ people figure out a way to earn profit and get tax breaks.

There’s a particular way the protestants do it. You’ll go to a service and listen to the sermon, and the preacher will pull out a verse, almost out of a hat, and he’ll talk at legth about that verse for an hour or so. Plenty of Christian preachers earn a decent living doing that. Sometimes, you’ll run up on a biblical scholar type, the kind of guy who gets serious with his concordances and can talk about the original Greek, but what I’ve never heard is a preacher get down and dirty with, say, the Book of Job, and start talking about the evolution from a Canaanite pantheon to the Hebrew monotheistic all-father Yahweh, much less about the innovations that came along with Jesus. There’s swathes of interesting stuff behind the curtain, but nobody wants you to look behind it. When I used to attend church, questions hung in the air like woodsmoke.

Don’t get me started on evolution and how Christians just willfully destroyed any and all of their credibility when that egg hatched. Do I want to go into that here? No, not really, but suffice it to say that if you’re out there and you don’t understand evolution and particularly human evolution, you don’t understand anything, and I mean that most sincerely. If you’re sending your kids to the greatest monument to human stupidity ever erected, that Noah’s Ark creationism museum in Kentucky, and you’re doing it seriously, as in, my-grandaddy-ain’t-no-monkey, God help you. You don’t understand anything, as in, you’re a true Christian now.

God doesn’t care about any of that. God is just the truth, and any religion that steers people away from the truth, like contemporary American Christianity, is by definition a false religion. The Christian God, so timid and afraid of truth, and so hemmed-in and constrained and boxed-up, is no god at all. It is an idol.

God doesn’t care. Once we stop personifying God and release it from the love box, we may start to notice a few things about its nature, about the nature of the universe. Just off the top of my head:

• God is studying diligently and passing the test.
• God is procrastinating and failing the test.
• God is driving safely.
• God is driving recklessly and dying in a horrible crash.
• God is being faithful.
• God is being deceitful.

God is doing everything right, and your wife still leaves you. God is observing all the traffic laws and still dying in a horrible crash. God doesn’t favor anyone, and he doesn’t smite much, either.

Imagine me, so slow on the uptake, taking this long to do any of this work, and further, imagine the fits and starts I’ve been through, all so I can at this point in my forty-seven years as a talking ape state that God doesn’t care, God does in fact play dice, and God has a wicked sense of humor. Those are the three most essential qualities of God that I understand as of this writing. More might come later, but that’s what I understand right now, and I’m going to say it again, it’s taken every day of those forty-seven years to even arrive at that.

Did you know that Derek Chauvin(ist), the guy convicted of murdering the greatest African American who ever lived, these two men quite universally centered to usher in the greatest cultural shift of several generations, the ramifications of which are still not entirely clear, was married and divorced from the winner of the Mrs. Minnesota pageant, making him quite literally Mr. Minnesota? I was talking to someone about this stuff, and I asked her, has the universe ever winked at you? And she said, the universe has stared me directly in the face, and then she told me about Mr. Minnesota. God has a wicked sense of humor.

I’ve been looking for God to wink at me and missing it the entire time. Stupid me, but what did I expect? Like I said, I’m always slow on the uptake. People are talking apes, and it just so happens that talking apes are the only creatures we know about who routinely give voice to the universe. We are the butt of all its jokes, and through us, God understood that it likes to laugh. It is what it is. I have been searching for it, looking for positive evidence. I’ve tried to be open to receiving a wink from it, open meaning consciously attuned to receiving it, without having really any idea what form it might take.

Imagine my surprise coming to only recently understand that it has been winking at me all along.