Let Us Blush and The Gaza Strip

Stephen Sangirardi  Let Us Blush and The Gaza Strip  Bard715@aolcom
 
    I was in a Connecticut bookstore last summer balancing on my cane and browsing through some anthologies. About twenty feet to my left and too clearly within earshot, four people—two white and two black—stood by the Religion section and were loudly proclaiming their beliefs. It was obvious they were born-again Christians; every other phrase out of their collectively branded mouth was “Praise the Lord.” They didn’t seem to be listening to each other, though. No sooner had one cited Deuteronomy than the other countered with Corinthians, as if they were competing on some Southern Baptist quiz show or rehearsing a poorly written script that planned to abandon all preparation and glide into Tongues when the moment of stage was at hand. ‘Twas strange. All four seemed to be talking at once, anxious to prove they were not ashamed of professing their beliefs in public…although displaying might be the more apt verbal. For while I admit that it was nice to see interracial harmony and Biblical discussion, the Second Coming could have stared them in the face, and they would not recognize him. I also couldn’t help but wonder what God Himself thought of their impromptu conference. All of these Scriptural quotes and compounds must have reeked of the Tower of Babel. He would have commended their sincerity, I suppose, and when they happened to be on the same page, He—God, I mean—may have even been amused by their hearty and conspicuous laughter, but I think that He would have been rolling His eyes and hoping they’d change the subject, maybe something about their George Forman grills or the grout between their tiles. I think He would have felt terribly embarrassed, especially since nearby cynics in peripheral aisles were rolling their eyes as well and snickering as the four souls went on and on. The quartet was giving Christianity a bad name, confirming what so many cynics already think of us. I was embarrassed myself, and for some reason I was afraid that they were going to approach me and try to sell a product I had already purchased long ago. That would have been uncanny. I resented the arrogance of their convictions. I might have even caused a scene had they tried their pitch on one who knew that the infinite paid his dues through the farrow and loam, and by having acne at fifteen, and by making errors at second base, Christ paradigmatized the human. These people had obviously forgotten their Hegel and the other mavens of German Romanticism who knew that the Absolute could accomplish nothing without the intervention of the lowly, Beetle-Bailey finite. I even saw myself playing the Devil’s Advocate and purposely baiting them for their overdone zeal! (But who knows? Maybe one of them would have placed his hands on my head and vanquished my MS.) The reader will forgive my comparison in ascribing so human an emotion to so divine a figure, but God too must have blushed that afternoon having heard their loud lack of restraint. Didactic, he’d have thought. Preachy. Even worse—defiant aggression in the name of the Holy Ghost. A punch in the jaw for Jesus. A shot in the solar plexus for apostolic supremacy, and woe to the Jew or Muslim who crossed their path. Let us all blush and stare in the convex mirror. I don’t believe that this God of ours would have recognized himself in their portrait; he would not have seen the remnants of Leda on his brow or any other residuals of his incarnation. He might have said, had he at the moment possessed the power of speech, that they knew as much about God as they did their grandmothers’ opinion of protoplasm. That all religion, if it is to be taught, must be approached with wink and understatement, instead of the sledgehammer wielded in the bookstore that afternoon and every day around the world, as Palestinian boys pelt Israeli tanks with rocks somewhere in the Gaza strip instead of playing stickball against the Wailing Wall. Yes, a stickball game! Some sacred, Kafkaesque strike zone chalked upon the Wailing Wall. Some impromptu game strangely reminiscent of The Chosen…and the winner of that game would get the Gaza Strip. There it is! We’d have to find a good umpire, though. Somebody neutral. Rush Limbaugh.
    Finally, patting their ample stomachs, the Defenders of the Faith decided it was time to leave, time for lunch. God’s Will had once again been fulfilled, etc., and everyone knew that stomachs didn’t live on parables alone. Eh? Ha ha. The four of them shook hands with each other and introduced themselves only when they were about to leave, but I was sure that if they were asked to recall each other’s name in the next five minutes, not one of them would have been able to do so. (Why were they even there together, at that particular time?) Here was self-righteous egocentricity at its best, sincere and wonderfully harmless and childishly adorable though it be. They must have been loads of fun around the water cooler at work.
   “Yes, Sir,” the loudest of the quartet smugly said, “God sure knows what He’s doing. There’s no doubt about that. Praise the Lord!”
   “Amen!”
   “Alleluia!”
   “Long live His Holy Name!”
   As they exited the store, smiling like saints, and silence remained in the spot where moments ago their words had defied all comers, I feared that they were headed for severe disappointment in the short future. The word ‘refundable’ kept flashing through my mind. They were headed, in the words of Billy Graham himself, for a satanic backlash when the bonfire of their velleities didn’t go their way or their sworn team had fluffed the big game. Had anyone bothered to tell them that all authentic believers were perfected through suffering, and that everything Christ taught he first had to learn himself the hard way through trial and error, and the egregiously effective scientific method? Did they have any conception of the ever popular Queen Mary, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” and that God was motherless in heaven until he became an infant in that bread and breakfast manger? And speaking of heaven, I wondered if the quartet realized that no matter how much they rhapsodized about it, any notion of paradise was a scant menu to the meal, as the handbook never tires of saying. I wondered how they would react when the New Year struck twelve or their arbitrary date for the end of the world had arrived, and the Apocalypse still hadn’t come. How badly would their helium crafts explode into untenable air? I hoped they had no intention of liquidating their assets and banking on a more profitable pasture where Monday and Tuesday didn’t exist. I wondered how long before their excitement peeled off and their cynicism stayed, like a complexion too long under the tanning bulb.