Christianity For Dummies

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened during from summer 1958 through winter 1959. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]


[Above: Some results of a "for dummies" image search. At least three of them are real books.]

After a couple of weeks my Grandmother returned to her house and my Mother and I went back to living in the garage. I turned 9. We lived there, just the two of us, from summer through fall and part of that winter, while my Father finished out his duty in Taiwan. There was a great deal of sexual abuse. It's difficult to estimate the number of rapes that I endured but there was at least one incident per week.

That fall I started 4th grade at the same Van Asselt Elementary school where I had started 3rd.

My social life was complicated by the fact that my two best friends were brothers living next door, one a year older and one a year younger, and the two of them didn't want to hang out with each other.

I tried to look for a girlfriend but ran smack into the "boys of that age don't like girls" mythology that is so entrenched in American culture. It's one of my biggest regrets in life that I caved into the peer pressure and not only stopped looking for a new girlfriend but pretended I didn't like girls to get by. The regret probably fueled a lot of my determination to not conform later.

The combination of sexual abuse and sporadic social isolation led to long bouts of day-dreaming. At that time most of the day-dreaming was the sort that everyone expects of a 9 year-old. I used the apricot tree in our back yard for a space ship, and flew it to Mars. The old decrepit tool shed, underneath which my Grandfather, when he was alive, raised chickens and rabbits, had a raised sheltered entrance big enough for two adults to stand on. It was my time machine.

Christmas was memorable because we had a plastic tree that stood about 14 inches tall on our coffee table. I loved it.

At school I tested high on math and was separated every day for an hour from my 4th grade class-mates so I could attend math period with a 5th grade class. I still complained of boredom, but was told flatly that I wouldn't be allowed to skip any further ahead, for now.

Throughout all this time I was attending weekly Sunday School classes. My Mother had been brought up Baptist but publicly converted to my Father's Episcopalianism. She kept up appearances by attending Trinity Episcopal on First Hill with my Father's other relations. The church had a Sunday School class that met in the basement at the same time as the service they all attended, so that us fidgety bored kids could be educated in the ways of God, and not disrupt mass.

Being an avid learner, I tried very hard to make what I was taught my own. I paid close attention to all the doctrine and tried to figure out how it could made sense to me.

I'm convinced converts never really believe what people born into a religion believe about it. This applied to my Mother, whose Baptist fatalism did not get replaced. It also applies to people we don't necessarily think of as converts. For instance, say some guy is raised as a Christian, then decides as an adult there is no God. We wouldn't say he was a convert, but he is willing a convert to atheism. It's been my observation of such people that no matter how confirmed they are in their atheism, they always bring to it most of the same metaphysical assumptions they had as Christians. They'll also bring a lot of the social mores and habits. If they come from a proselytizing tradition, they will still proselytize, for atheism now. If they were brought up Puritanical, they will still confuse serious with somber.

I began as a polytheist. I was prepared to drop that for Christian dogma, but I couldn't easily jettison the metaphysical underpinnings of polytheism. I tried anyway.

A turning point occurred soon after my Father came back from Taiwan. He came back some time around January of 1959. He still wasn't around all the time because he had to commute to and from Fort Lewis a lot.

One day while he was gone my Grandmother was sitting on her living room couch and talking to me, while my Mother was in the basement using Grandmother's washing machine. Grandma stopped talking in mid-sentence, in mid-word even. Her mouth was still open to pronounce the word she was saying, but the sound stopped. After a minute I panicked. I waved my hands in front of her face and shouted. She sat there like a statue. I was witnessing one of her strokes for the first time.

To be clear, I didn't know that this was another of a string of strokes. I hadn't witnessed the previous strokes, so I didn't know this was in any way the same.

I was afraid she was going to die. She already looked dead.

My Mother called an ambulance and Grandmother went back to the hospital.

That Sunday I insisted on attending Mass with my parents for the first time, because the mythology was that I needed to pray for my Grandmother to get well, and praying supposedly worked better in church.

I was aware of everybody around thinking I was cute, praying so hard for Grandma. The minister was told about it after the service and I overheard him remarking what a fine, pious, boy I was becoming.

A few days later Grandma had recovered and came back home, and I was sure my praying had helped bring that outcome about. I remarked to that effect to my parents. They just laughed, and said, "You know, it was the 6th or 7th stroke she's had. She lived through the others without your help."

It completely demolished the fragile hold I had on Christian mythology. I had to start all over trying to make sense of it with the new understanding that what I got told in the Sunday School classes was just the simplified Christianity for Dummies version.

Peeve: Lent

So, what are you giving up for Lent? I want to give up poverty.

It's like the day after Thanksgiving, No Buy Day. If you're poor, every day is No Buy Day, unless there are big sales with massive discounts. Let's think of a day of the year that has big sales with massive discounts. Hey, I know, how about the day after Thanksgiving? Thank you Concerned Middle Classes. Enjoy those big screen TVs and X-Boxes you buy the day after the day after Thanksgiving with the extra money you have that we don't.

Lent's like that. When the churches that push giving up for Lent do without tithes and collections for forty days, I'll believe they know what they're asking of people. It doesn't have to be the same forty days. They could still gouge people during Lent, while backing off during Advent, so folks would have more money for Christmas. And post-Thanksgiving and post-Christmas specials.

Let's see the Pope wear plain clothes and live in a single room at a Motel 6 for 40 days. Then he can tell harried housewives they shouldn't touch that Valentine's Day chocolate.

[Left: Only 12 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge, San Rafael's new Motel 6 is ideally located to serve the needs of the major religious leader during any Advent papal cut-back. Above: Of course, his home-sweet-home will still be there when the 40 days are up.]

You may wonder why I care. "Wes," you may be saying, "we know you don't consider yourself a Christian, so why do you get worked up about Lent?"

This is a good question and I am glad I asked it. The fact is that Christianity is part of my ambient culture whether I like it or not. They even baptized me without my expressed consent!

While I'm at it I can't resist relating the etymology of the word "noon", which I found by reading the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Lent. The original phrase was Latin nona hora, meaning the ninth hour of daylight by Roman reckoning, meaning 3 PM.

When the church started you were supposed to eat only one meal a day after nightfall. But already by the 5th Century it was acceptable to break the fast at the none hour.

By the 9th Century the "none hour" came to be understood as a duration which began around 2 PM and ended at 3 PM.

[Right: Nobody tells Charlemagne "Big Charles" he can't start breakfast by 2 PM.]

Following that, people simply started their none meal sooner and sooner.

By the 12th century it was common for the word none to refer to noon.

A shift in spelling and pronunciation later, and "noon" means noon.

Ironically, I don't even get up most days until after noon and I take my breakfasts between 3 and 5 PM. My wake up times are post-industrial, depending on the availability of artificial light, but at least during Lent my breakfast times are right in step with the Middle Ages. Cool.

Substitute Puppies

Lono's involvement in my spiritual education was mixed, in motivation and outcome. To get at the difference I will try to get at the difference I see between what religion should be, and what it appears to me to be to most everybody else.

There is a distinction between psyche and pneuma that meant something to the ancient pre-Christian Greeks, less to the Christians, and maybe more to me. Generally people translate them as soul and spirit respectively.

Christians say Jesus is all about saving our souls. But when it comes down to practice, there's very little food for the soul, just some meager wafers of unleavened bread and sips of wine, compared to the massive airlift of supplies for the spirit that Christianity provides. You could really get the idea that Christians are using "soul" as a synonym for "spirit".

In fact, when I raise this point with individual Christians, the one response I get most often is that the point makes no sense, "of course they're the same," they say. They say soul is just another word for spirit.

So I say to them, "Why don't you say Jesus saves spirits?" And they answer by telling me that "Jesus saves souls" is just an old phrase that's become set in the language. They could say "Jesus saves spirits" and mean the same thing, but they don't, because there's no difference anyway.

Well, to me there's a huge difference. To me souls and spirits are two different things, and my chief complaint about Christianity is that rather than saving souls it mangles them and leaves them for dead, in order to save spirits.

To illustrate the distinction between soul and spirit, I will use a very familiar common scenario, the Substitute Puppy scenario.

We have all had this happen to us or known someone who has. Let's say a boy of six, I'll call him "Bean", is given a puppy, let's call it "Bottom". Bean immediately adores Bottom because Bottom is so cute and cuddly. Bean feeds and waters Bottom every day for a month, and takes Bottom for walks, and tries to run and play with Bottom, even though Bottom has such very short pudgy legs so Bottom doesn't run so very well. Bottom rolls and stumbles more than runs.

But one terrible day, Bottom rolls and stumbles clear to the edge of the avenue and over the curb and into the avenue, and a double semi sweeps by and rolls over Bottom and the driver doesn't even feel a bump, and he keeps on driving and doesn't even know he hit anything until he stops for coffee in North Bend, and then he thinks by the looks of it that it might have been a squirrel, because the stain is too little to be anything else.

Bean, who actually witnesses Bottom's demise, cries his brains out. Bean brains, Bean tears, everywhere you look.

You know what's coming. I didn't call it the Substitute Puppy scenario for nothing. Dad, probably a Christian, goes right out, that very afternoon, and obtains a substitute puppy. He brings home another cute puppy, and announces proudly that he has solved the problem, here's the solution. He even suggests a name. "Why don't you call it Bottom Too?"

Bean needs only a split second to observe that Bottom Too is NOT Bottom. Bean, having already cried his brains out, is now crying out sensory organs, trachea, esophagus, and getting ready to cry up lungs, stomach, and guts. Let's skip further discussion of that and leave Bean to it, while we instead get back to our point.

Our point is that the substitute puppy is a solution for the spirit, not the soul. I call Christianity the Substitute Puppy religion, because Christianity seems to encourage these kinds of "solutions" more even than other doctrinary religions.

When Bean starts crying at the loss of Bottom, he's grieving. He doesn't have a problem with his soul. His soul is working, doing something souls do well, albeit slowly. He doesn't need a fix, he has a soul that will do the fix. He doesn't even have a problem with his spirit. His spirit is just getting out of the way, to let the soul do the emotional mending that's called for. Dad, however, doesn't see Bean's soul work as Bean. He sees the crying as Bean not being himself. He thinks Bean has to get back into his former spirit.

That's Christianity all the way. It's all about trying to get people into the "right" spirit. Fixing the spirit when it doesn't need fixing. It's worse than totally neglecting the soul, which, to begin with, especially in unbroken children, is a far better emotional doctor than any that Christians can come up with. What they do is worse because it interferes with the soul in such a way as to damage it.

Far from saving souls, the religion that Christians blame Jesus for founding actually destroys souls, so that Christians lose the ability to grieve effectively, among other things. They are only able to find substitutes for grieving. Whole cultures that have had their soul-based religions crushed and replaced with Christianity are now all about finding substitutes for all their losses, which are enormous, beginning with their former traditions.

The Evangelical Christians will say that all that's a good thing, so long as the substitute chosen is Jesus Christ. I say that's sick, and it dishonors Christ Himself to make Him out to be only the best substitute puppy in the shop.

So, getting back to Lono. Lono and Lani both suffered the same family loss, before they met me. The "younger brother" who died would have been close to both of them, whether he was a brother in our sense or not. Lani took it hard, and Lono, the Christian, wanted to fix Lani's spirit. Lani wouldn't accept Jesus, the universal substitute, so Lono had to settle for an alternate substitute. I was to be Lani's substitute puppy.

So Lono colluded with Lani's spiritual (I should be saying soulful, but spiritual is the word set in the language) adoption of me and allowed his education of me in Kahiko to go forward, in order that I help in a grieving process that didn't really need me. But Lono was still a Christian, so all of this was done with misgivings.

Ironically, Lani began to take me as a substitute puppy in much the same way that he might have taken Christ if he had accepted him. As more and more of my previous troubles with my parents came out, as they learned of my eidetic memory and my conviction that I was a replacement of the original me, he entertained the idea that I might be a kind of Kahiko messiah.

In 1952 Hawaiian Kahiko was held in low-esteem even by most natives. The few that still wanted to preserve the old religion and traditional ways had to mostly keep company in secret. As often happens in such situations, many of those holdouts clung to a dream that there would one day come a savior who would be able to restore the old ways to common practice, and maybe even drive the haole out at the same time.

Lani told me at one point he thought I could be that Hawaiian messiah. The fact that I was the white son of a white Army officer only made it seem more believable that I might have eventually, when I grew up, the real-world power needed to pull off the revolution. The fact that I seemed to him to take to the Kahiko as if I were born to it made Lani believe my changeling idea. His version of it was, the gods saw that Kahiko needed a savior, so they put one of their children in the body of a dying white boy whom they took up to heaven when his parents didn't want him.

The child of the gods (me!) would not only bring justice to the evil white parents, but he would also set the Hawaiian world back in its upright position.

No Arguing Over Poi

Even though my English vocabulary must have been fairly large by the time I was speaking Hawaiian, I wasn't thinking in English. It's hard for me to believe that, but I know it's true because I have numerous memories from the next few months of trying to think in English and falling back on Hawaiian.

My Hawaiian friends didn't know that at first. They thought I was just holding back.

I started singing the songs Lani sang. I wouldn't sing when he did, because I thought that adding my voice would spoil it. But afterward I would repeat the songs. One day I surprised them by singing a song Lani had not sung for days, and which they hadn't heard me sing before. Lono asked how I could remember so well. I said, I didn't know, I just could. I told them I could remember every single one of the songs, by the sound of it, without always knowing what the words meant.

They asked me what was the first song I recalled. I said I remembered a song from before I met them. When I agreed to sing it for them I'm sure at that moment they were both thinking they were finally going to hear me speaking English. Instead I sang the entire 19 lines of the Kaulilua song that I had heard once when I was 5 or 6 months old, nearly two years earlier.

The Smithsonian Folkways series has a tape and a CD called Hawaiian Drum Dance Chants (at the link you can hear excerpts). It has archival recordings of numerous old performances. There are 25 tracks on the tape. Tracks 10, 11, 18, 20, and 22 (110, 111, 118, 120, and 122 on the CD) present different versions of the same Kaulilua song. The liner notes include the words and two translations one from 1935 and one from 1952, both by Mary Kawena Pukui (mistakenly called Pukai in several places on the CD information page). A version of this is what I had remembered phonetically:

1. Kaulīlua i ke anu Wai'ale'ale
2. O ka maka hālalo ka lehua makanoe
3. O ka lihilihi kukū iā no 'Aipō
4. O ka hulu a'a 'ia o Haua'iliki
5. A i pēhia e ua 'eha ka nahele
6. O māui e ka pua 'uwe 'eha i ke anu
7. O ke kūkuna wai lehua a'o Mokihana
8. Ua hana 'ia e ka pono a ua pololei
9. Ua hā'ina 'ia aku nō 'iā 'oe
10. O ke ola no 'ia o kia'i loko.
11. Ki'ei Ka'ula nānā i ka makani
12. Ho'olono ka halulu o ka Mālua Kele
13. Ki'ei hālō Maka'iki'ole
14. Kāmau ka 'ea i ka Hālauaola
15. He kula lima 'ia no Wāwaenoho
16. Ma ke pūko'a hakahaka iā i Wa'ahila
17. Ka momoku a ka unu Unulau o Lehua
18. A lehulehu ke ka pono le'a ka ha'awina
19. Ke ala mai nei o ka puka o ka hale.
[some versions have "Ka hauna" replacing "Ke ala"]

Here's the 1935 translation:

1. Doubly cold it is at Wai'ale'ale
2. Where the stunted lehua blossoms grow
3. They are the fringed flowers of 'Aipō
4. Like the bright feathers that cover Haua'iliki
5. Pelted by the rain, the forest is bruised
6. Crushed are the flowers, they weep with the cold
7. In the sunshine that shines on the waters of Mokihana
8. All things are done and done well
9. I have told you before
10. This is the way that the keeper of the pond made his livelihood.
11. Best watch within and toward Ka'ula
12. Question each breeze, note each rumor, even the whisper of Mālua Kele
13. Search high, search low, unobserved
14. Here is life, it is breath from the body
15. A fond caress by a hand most constant
16. Like fissured groves of coral
17. Stand the ragged clumps of lehua
18. Many are the houses, easy the life, you have your share of love
19. Humanity stands at your door, yes, indeed.

I can hardly quibble with Mary Kawena Pukui (she literally wrote the Hawaiian Dictionary, along with Samuel H. Elbert) but Lani and Lono would have. I know because when I asked them at lunch to explain what the song meant (it made no sense to me then, and very little now, even looking at two translations) they broke out into what bordered on a shouting match over the meaning of the key line, number 10.

When I embedded the excerpt of the song back at the Early Music Memories post, I ended with line 10. The song naturally falls into two halves and that middle line is the transition. It receives dramatic emphasis. It has to be important.

It was at this point that I learned that Lono was Christian and that he had a Christian interpretation for line 10. He said it was a reference to Jesus. That's who the keeper of the pond was, really.

Lani was not Christian. He was traditional. He said the song had an underground meaning. It was all about how the Hawaiian culture and the power of the people had been undermined, but would ultimately be restored. He interpreted 'pond' of the 10th line as being about the inner soul of the people, that still lives on, because it has a keeper, in the guardianship of those who are preserving it.

Mary Kawena Pukui said it's about a ruling-class love affair.

At each of Lani and Lono's lunches, held on the grass on Stoneman Field, there was always a covered pot of poi. When the argument between Lani and Lono got too much for me, I took the lid off the pot and waved my hand at it. They both quieted down, because when the poi is exposed you have to be civilized, the ancestors are listening. So I was told. Anyway, the argument stopped.

By the way, I had no idea at that time what a Christian, or a non-Christian, might be. Neither meant anything more to me than a lehua blossom, which so far as I knew then, I'd never seen.

Cindy Holly, Muse of Other

I was infused with some Hawaiian Kahiko and Huna (traditional Hawaiian religion and mysticism) before I knew anything at all about Christianity. Then I was bombarded with Christianity, of two kinds: Episcopalianism, overtly, and Southern Baptism, covertly. The result of this input and a whole lot of agonizing is what I am. I am religious. In some way. But I have no name for my religion. And, my religion is worlds away from any of the religions I see practiced around me.

One dictionary definition of "paganism" is any religion that's not a form of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, or a religion formed out of or in reaction to any of those religions. So, for example, a "Satanist" whose concept of Satan was based on the Biblical Satan could not be considered a pagan by that definition, because his religion would be a reaction to one of those three Abrahamic religions. But another person who called himself a Satanist, whose idea of Satan was based on a pre-Christian Celtic God, say, would be a pagan. Also, a traditional Hindu, or Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucianist, or combination thereof, would be pagan.

So in my 30s, when I finally realized that the Kahiko was more or less winning my soul, I tried calling myself pagan.

That didn't work out. Trouble was, other people who called themselves pagan read too much into it. Turns out, most self-described pagans aren't going by the above dictionary definition. They mostly have in mind European traditions, or (Continental) Native American. The dashed expectations became a big bother.

It wouldn't do to just retreat into calling myself Kahiko either. Kahiko really means Old Ways, and I was only educated in the Old Ways of Hawaii for less than a year as a two and three year old. I learned enough to keep Christianity from claiming me, but not enough for me to claim Kahiko as mine.

So the state of affairs I am reduced to is this: I have a religion that is unique in the world. It has no name. It is informed by an infusion of Kahiko, plus everything else I've absorbed since that was compatible with that infusion.

My religion isn't based on faith in any super-human person. It's based on poetry, drama, comedy, and art, respect of knowing and not knowing. I imagine a vast multitude of subjective realities, realized in human minds, many more than there are humans to house them, and by imagining them I make them as real as they need to be, for the purposes of my religion, a religion which I impose upon my reality, whether or not it likes it. My impositions are all powered by imagination, which is the real mana, the water of life. I know from personal experience that this mana can give rise to subjective realities independent of me, because I ho'omana: At first, mana goes where I dream it to go, then it goes wherever.

One of these independent impositions is very special to me. I have referred to her as Cindy Holly, not-her-real-name, Muse of Other, Muse of Few Words, Ageless, Timeless, Eternal, Beauty, currently brunette.

In fact, I say not-her-real-name, because her real name would be the name of THE Goddess, and I don't speak that.

But I can be a little more specific. She drives my feeble soul. She knows where the key to my existence is kept. I don't really mind when she visits me in my dreams and turns me into a horse. Her eyes never close. She gazes on life and death equally, and dances to the beat of both simultaneously.

Cindy Holly is her comic aspect. She is that powerful, that she has a comic aspect. Very few serious Gods or Goddesses can pull that off.

On Relaying Shock

Three posts ago, in the post I titled Rare Serious Poem, I depicted an act of child abuse, namely extended rape by enema. When the poem was printed in Real Change 12 years ago a reader wrote an angry letter that said that people like me are the reason we have child molesters. He said that I was wrong to write to shock in such a way, that in doing so I was giving the child abusers ideas.

His letter made me angry. I did not write that passage to shock. I wrote it to accuse. What I described happened to me. I wasn't making something up to shock prudes. I was telling the world what had been done to me and accusing it of doing nothing to stop it.

I am bringing this up now because we've turned a corner in my memoirs here and the accounts of abuse are going to involve sexual abuse. When I was a child and I told people about the sexual abuse that I'll be describing, in attempts to get help, I was told by many people that I WAS EVIL for accusing my parents.

No. THEY were evil. They were vicious evil immoral trash. As I was a child, they were free to threaten me then with violence, saying they'd wash my mouth out with soap, proving they were as evil as my parents. They could also turn me in to my parents, and at least two did. I hate those people for their cowardly vicious threats and betrayals, more than I hate my Mother for the original abuse. They represented the world. There were as many of them, at least a dozen, that I could bear to plea to for help, before the threats and betrayals became too much. Then I could no longer believe the risks of further betrayals were worth it, and I gave up. No one of them crushed my hope. It took all of them in succession. They were, as the Christians say, witnessing for their beliefs and values, and their witnessing showed their beliefs and values to be lacking.

The difference now is, I'm not a vulnerable child anymore, and I'm not a child you can threaten or betray anymore. This post will be a warning to anyone who doesn't like that my words shock. I'm not the one who committed the acts that words relate, which are the root and source of the shock. I was the one who endured them.

Ask yourself this. If as a child of 2 or 4 or 7 or 13 I could endure the kind of "shocking" abuse I'm going to be describing, how weak are the ones who can't even take the descriptions?

Some of the people I related these events to at the time said I was evil because I was violating a Biblical Commandment, in dishonoring my parents. I did not dishonor them. They dishonored themselves. They, in their turn, blasphemed their own God, by suggesting that He approved of silencing children pleading for relief from severe abuse. If that were true, if it were the true intent of that one of the Ten Commandments, then that would in itself be complete sufficient grounds for regarding the Christian God as unworthy of any reverence.

I would not go out of my way to make my own God look so bad.

Rare Serious Poem

[Real Change published this poem soon after I decided I had finished it in 1995. It was illustrated on my Speakeasy website until I cleaned that up recently, along with a Part II, which I might post here later on.]

My Childhood Study of Christianity
OR Gloria in Excelsis Deo Part I:
Why I'll Be a Pagan 'Til Kingdom Come

I'll begin with a little pre-history -
My mother called me wild sometimes, sometimes a freak.
She often raped and beat and tortured me.
While my father just got drunk and shrieked.

At six I came to understand
that my parents were Christian
and that Good Christians are persecuted, not persecuting.
I further learned at seven
that Christ would bless Good Christians
and support them in their suffering,
buffering them, so to speak,
presumably from the
persecutions of the BAD Christians.

I had questions to ask of suitable authority.
Christianity itself was promising.
Somewhere in Christ and Christianity
there should be answers! (There'd better be.)

I learned to read, to speed my way to the grace
by which I would escape my tormenters,
or at least to face their torment.

Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph.
Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Josiah.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
666, Whore of Babylon
Paul aka Saul and all and all...
Shadrach Meschach Abednego
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Plain of desolation
Mustard seed, Transfiguration
Michael, you row your boat ashore
Now Noah got no shore to row to.
Adam and Eve and Lilith makes three
days and three nights and the
burning lake was three times around
the walls of Jericho burning
incense, the Temple WAS rent
body and bread, blood and wine
Daniel in the den of lions
A generation of vipers
that gets only one sign
Captivity, Ecclesiastes
King Cyrus, Maccabes
Peter, get thee behind me
For it is right and meet
with all the angels to sing
Eli, Eli, lama Sabachtani
Melchizedek, priest-king
Kiss the ring! Kiss the ring!

Job was promising - you know the guy:

"Sorry Life! Woe and Strife! Teeth do Gnash!
Ain't got no Wife! Ain't got no Cash!
The Lord gave Ear
To Satan I Fear
So here I Stand, all covered in Rash."

But THEN God the Old-Testament-Lout steps out.
"I made Heaven and Earth," he says, "what are YOU worth?"
And Job shakes and quakes and begs for mercy, and just happens to get it.

None of which did anything for me, or managed to answer my questions -
- namely -
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEAL WITH THEM?

Then there were Psalms.
Psalms, Canaanite Songs
in the Court of King David

"O sing praise to the almighty deity
Who makes sky, pie, and hairy flies alike..."
No, they don't say He makes pie
Mother makes pie and I don't care
Mother makes me cry and I don't care
Mother wants me to die and I don't care
The Psalms say God made the sky so I should shout Hallelujah.
How about I fart at His sky and cry out what's it to ya?
He who hath created me hath in addition created TOO MUCH SHIT!

But THEN, Psalm 23 was promising.
"Verily, though I walk blah blah blah
I shall fear no evil".
How's that work?
"The Lord is my shepherd?"
Framed on my Aunt's dresser.
The Sunday School Teacher Aunt.
HEY, maybe SHE'S the GOOD CHRISTIAN.
An operator lets me make the long distance call.
And I beg her to take me away from them all.

Four hours later I'm tortured by mother more than ever before -
raped by enema and beat an hour and a half and "Clean up the mess,
YOU made it" and HOW could I have made anything I'm not the same person I
was two hours ago. THEN there were two of me now there's one, twice.
"One against you, one against Aunt Snitch."
The Aunt who would have been a Good German in '41,
the one who verily fears no evil because
she hands over to it whatever it wants.
She DOES need a shepherd for a Lord.

So I quit Psalms until the age of ten.
Then one Sunday almost asleep in my pew,
Ready to give up entirely on Christianity,
The Psalm reader began Psalm 22:
"Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Like it's a question? So I grabbed my Psalm book?
So I could look for myself and read along?
It's no question he read it wrong.
It's: LORD!
LORD!
WHY hast THOU FORSAKEN me?!
It's an accusation, backed up by the facts.
And it demands that THE Lord act NOW!

Why the reader couldn't read it right,
Why the Chaplain couldn't give it light,
No matter I knew it meant something
I'd find out for sure
I'd ask the Chaplain
on my way out the church -

Tell me what it means I said
It prefigures Christ he said
His words on the cross he said
The casting of lots he said
No,
Tell me what it means.
It's not just about
Christ,
It's about ALL people
What-does-it-mean!

After a wary glance at my parents
He bent down to whisper in my ear
"I believe you know too well what it means.
May God help you and forgive us all."

Yes, I did know what it meant -
I just wanted to know I wasn't alone
before my gods called me home
and stood the world upright again.