Back in the Saddle and the God Question. Again

I’m chugging along, doing the bare minimum to stay alive and I’m not liking this new me that can’t sleep at night but who falls asleep during the day, whenever the drone of voices are around me. But I may have turned a corner. Tuesday I had to go to the doctor’s office, then since it was near-by I went to the grocery store. When I got back home again I sat in my La-Z-Boy at five and slept until 10:30 when I got up and went to bed and slept until almost nine. No sleeping pill, no Tylenol 500s, no Lidocaine patch and best of all no rib or shoulder pain to wake me back up. I don’t think I even heard five minutes of my sleep meditation app that was playing on my Kindle.

The next day I managed to stay awake long enough at lunch to eat my beef and barley soup and chocolate pudding. I was so encouraged by that and my marathon sleep episode that I accepted a dinner invitation for that night, even though I had some precooked barbecued spare ribs in the refrigerator. You’d think ribs would be the last thing I’d wanted to eat considering what all I’ve been through after breaking a couple of mine. When I do get around to eating them, I’ll give an extra thanks to the Spirit of the Pig who gave them up. Poor pigs, cows and chickens. I wish I could be a vegetarian but I just can’t bring myself to give up my childhood training--that dinner plates should be divided up into three sections for meat, starches and veggies. Whenever I have a choice, though, I buy the free-range and the certified organic and humanely treated farm stock and produce plus I feel sufficiently guilty while licking my fingers. 

At the creative writing group I started and the others seems to enjoy they got into a discussion about how their churches are each handling the “gay issue” and that alphabet of other rainbow communities I can never get right. Their church’s mucky mucks are rewriting their stand on the issues and breaking up and making up as they come to a decision on how much acceptance they can show or not show and still believe in the Bible. Some noted scholar is going back to review all the Biblical translations to see if they were accurate and unduly influenced by the men who did them over the centuries. Duh. That was one discussion I would have liked to have slept through but it was too small of a group to get away with doing so. 

But in general I’m always been fascinated with how deeply involved in church doctrine some people get. It’s almost as if they don’t have a moral compass of their own to guide them without the scriptures to tell them not to screw their neighbor's wife or to steal a wheelbarrow from a guy down the street who accidentally left his outside overnight. To me, all you need to know is the Ten Commandments. Yet even those have been deluded and nuanced by the church: It was okay to murder others during the Crusades and wars since then if you are on the ‘right’ side and the sin of adultery can be forgiven if you ask nicely and mean it. Even the sin of sexual misconduct with children within the ranks of the Catholic Church leaders wasn’t/isn’t enough to persuade many true believers that the Men of the Cloth are first of all, just men capable of all the same sins and evils as any other. 

Near the end of our creative writing session, someone stated that we’ve all been called to serve God and I blurred out, “Not me.” Just then someone wandered into our room, changing the energy and discussion so thankfully I didn’t have to explain myself. I’m not sure but I might have told them about an uncle I had who I like to say could have been the prototype for the door-to-door Bible salesman in the movie Paper Moon. He swindled hundreds of dollars from most of his brother-in-laws including my dad and he got away with it because he was “a Man of God” and God would see that they got repaid someday which, of course, never came. 

My uncle lived in a travel trailer and would spend a week living in our driveway a couple of times a year while he restocked his supply of Bibles and other stuff he sold to churches on his southern route or his northern route. Never paid a penny towards the electricity and water he used or the food he and his wife ate. She did, however, help my mom deep clean the house during those weeks. My mom and her sister were close and maybe this was part of a barter they worked out, I can’t say.  But my dad just tolerated my uncle and his nightly, long winded prayers at the dinner table while my brother and did our share of snickering during those prayers only to feel my mom’s kicks under the table. 

Oh, yes, I’ve known plenty of people who’ve “been called to God” many of them served themselves but at least one aunt on my Dad's side actually did serve her God her entire adult life, scrubbing floors on her hands and knees for the Catholic Church.  ©