ESSAY
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
Mark 8:36
“The one who gets wisdom loves life; the one who cherishes understanding will soon prosper.”
Proverbs 19:8
What is religion? Is it an open conversation into the unknown, is it a riveting allegory of existentialism, the battle between good and evil or is just wishful thinking? I don’t know, if I did, I would give up this writing stuff and open a theological bookstore, preferably across the street from the Vatican, that way I would have the market cornered, nobody is going to think to open a store there!
I don’t know what religion is, everybody you ask, you get a different answer, to some it’s hope, a belief in the never ending good existing in the universe, outside of humanity, to others it’s just a lousy excuse to get up on a Sunday. To others, it means you can’t eat bacon, seriously there are people out there that are forbidden by religious law to eat sweet-delicious, tasty bacon sizzling slowly off the grill being sauteed expertly until it puffs up perfectly and is placed directly in your mouth where it melts at the touch of your tongue, I mean what’s immoral about that, I don’t know!
Some people can’t eat bacon, others can’t even eat humans, where is a cannibal supposed to find the lord? Religion tells us how to live our lives and sometimes that means not drinking alcohol to celebrate God, unless we’re talking communion wine, then God is okay with it, believe me I checked, I couldn’t believe it either.
Sometimes I feel that my entire life has been a battle between good and evil, to be honest, sometimes I don’t know which one is more present in my mind. Good is righteous, it is the light, it is warm and all encompassing, a man who is good always finds a road to travel down. But hey evil has it’s perks too, forget walking, they got a superhighway, lots of accidents, most of them on purpose.
Evil is sinister but it’s also kind of cool, evil is bad, but hey bad boys are what the ladies want, am I right? At least with evil you know exactly where you stand, everybody there is terrible, but with good, well you get a lot of imposters.
I grew up Catholic, so I think I know a little bit about the devil. From what I was told, he is a very old woman that lives in shoe, but I might have gotten that mixed up with something else, I’m not sure.
I got kicked out of catholic school because a boy in front of me farted during church and I started to laugh. I was eleven years old and even then, I knew that farts were the height of comedy. I know it was crude and the timing wasn’t right, but the fart, well it was a fart and like all farts, it’s funny. I don’t know why I like farts, matter of fact, I wish to God I didn’t, but he told me that it’s not in his jurisdiction, flatulence is strictly controlled by the devil. It was part of the deal they made for the soul of pop singer Michael Jackson. Apparently, the devil is really into thriller for some reason.
I thought I was possessed by the devil, it turns out it was just puberty, what I thought was an uncontrollable urge to touch myself, turned out to just be an uncontrollable urge to touch myself. No mystery, just good old teenage misery.
I stopped going to church after I was 13 or 14. Not because I really stopped believing but because I got bored of all the stories, I really think they should bring in some new writers, spice it for next season, they wonder why nobody goes to church anymore? I think we need some new characters in the mix, what if Jesus has a brother? A lame brother that always borrows his car without asking and uses his credit card to buy things on the internet. I mean the whole son of god thing; I’m just saying it needs an angle.
Why would God create us in his image and then send his only begotten son to help us, have you meet human beings? We’re selfish, I don’t think anybody would do that. No, best case, we’ll give you our son, but you can’t keep him, and you must pay union wages. No savior of ours is going to work to free the world of sin for free, that’s for communists, and communists don’t even believe in God, so why would they do it?
I stopped going to church and I guess I’ve used other things to plug that hole in why life. Alcohol, drugs, writing and now comedy. I don’t know if I was really meant to be a religious being. It needs equal parts faith and charm. I was born with the charm but not so much the faith. I believe in my charm if that helps. I know I’m an extremely flawed human being and maybe by exposing my own flaws, I can help other people heal. This is what comedy, performance, writing and all other art forms are about. I want to help people heal because I know the darkness that eats away at all of us. But hey, darkness isn’t so bad if you got a flashlight, unless your batteries run out, then you’re really screwed!
My sister is religious, she’s one on the smartest people I know and a devout Catholic. She said that you should have a dialogue with god, unfortunately for me, the conversation is pretty one sided, more of a monologue really. It’s weird growing up in a religious family, it’s kind of like living in a cartoon. Except cartoons usually make sense.
One Christmas, when I was around eight or nine, I got a bicycle, best Christmas ever, but my parents told me that Jesus brought the bicycle, not Santa Claus. And I asked them if Jesus rode it here from Nazareth. And they nervously looked at each other and said yes. And that image has stayed with me, of Jesus riding my bicycle over the clouds, above the Atlantic-Ocean all the way to my house, like some weird scene out of E.T. I knew then that the bike was beyond reproach. A year later, I lost it outside a church, Jesus probably took it out for another spin, if only he would bring it back?
What I’m trying to say, I have a lot of experience with religion. Thoughts of God and how precisely I belong in his kingdom/plan have followed me my entire life. And I don’t know the right answer and maybe quite frankly this entire funny spiel could be a deflection, an admission that I don’t know. I must make fun, because if I try to think about it too much, I’ll lose my mind. I don’t think we’re supposed to really know if God is out there or not, I think it maybe defeats its own purpose. We all want to know the truth, but maybe it’s something out of Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men”, “you can’t handle the truth”. Yea, Jack, maybe you’re right, maybe our tiny gerbil brains can’t handle the truth. And who can blame us? I almost lose my mind if someone creeps up behind me, how do you think I would fare, if the clouds parted and a giant glowing hand reached down to grab me?
The last time I went to church, I went for love. Not love of God, unfortunately, but I met this cute girl. She asked me out, and I asked her, where are we going? And she said, we’re going to church. And I said, “church that’s like my favorite place in the whole wide world.”
So, we go to church, right? Preacher starts talking, she pulls out a notebook, starts taking notes. I look at her, “baby, why are you taking notes?” She says, “Because there’s going to be a test.” A test, I never heard of that, I said, “I thought morality tests were more of a psychological construct, I don’t think God is actually going to make you take a test.” She said, “no, you’re wrong, it’s a test, you need to be prepared.”
And this blew my mind, you know, because it changed everything I knew about the afterlife, it’s a lot easier to get into heaven than people make it out to be, they don’t count your sins anymore, you can rob, cheat and steal but if you bring a number two pencil, you’ll be alright! Now, that is what I call spiritual preparation.
No, that’s not how it works, I don’t think it’s that easy to get into heaven. Listen, if it were that easy to get into heaven, any idiot could do it. I don’t think it’s that easy. But I also don’t think we should make it that hard for ourselves on earth. We spend so much time hating ourselves and God because we really don’t know, we lose so many hours from our day, years from our lives and I think that sometimes you just must let it go. I can’t control the future and I don’t know the past that well, all I have is the moment. And maybe God, is up there and he’s smiling down on all of us, but maybe he’s up there taking a piss at us, and maybe that’s why the sunshine is yellow, it’s just God’s way of raining down his love.
I don’t why the sky is blue. I know there’s a scientific answer and a religious one. But all I know is that I don’t have to blue, I can be as happy and as free as I want to be and maybe, just maybe, that’s God’s ultimate gift.