Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living Read online

  Somewhere around my twelfth or thirteenth year, Msgr. Seidl retired, and a new priest, Father Tony, came. Father Tony was a fashion plate, by comparison, whom I remember as seeming very “Rat Pack.” He was very Italian and an urbane city guy. He had cool horn-rims and a panache that was not of our small town. I was a fan, and I learned the feeling was mutual when he graduated me from altar boy to the role of the lector, a position usually assayed by an older person. I would recite the gospel readings before his sermon, and that was really where I commenced to having an effect on an audience for the first time. I did care about the quality of the storytelling in my readings, and I sincerely wanted to impart the day’s lesson and help get it across, but at the same time, I would maybe just stress certain words that I thought were interesting, such as “Jesus did come hard upon Lake Gennesaret.”

  I would linger ever so slightly upon words and phrases that I found humorous, so that my cousin Ryan and six other friends would crack up, but no one else had any idea I was being hilarious. As discussed, I believe it’s where I first learned to hone the art of dry humor.

  I became somewhat the hired hand of St. Mary’s. I was the go-to kid, hired to cut the grass and stock the shelves and wax the pews. My cousin Ryan played the trumpet and I played the saxophone, so we also started making some extra bread on the side by playing weddings and such. Again, church seemed pretty cool, with a couple of sweet Alexander Hamiltons in my pocket. The mystical conversion that occurs in every Catholic mass, in which the blood and body of Jesus Christ (our Lord) become wine and, inexplicably, little round white bread wafers, respectively, is known as transubstantiation. Turning my devotion to the church into cash seemed like a much more appealing transformation.

  I performed a lot of yard work for Father Tony. He had a house on the Kankakee River, an hour or so south, and he would take Ryan and me to the river to perform yard labor—split firewood and whatnot—and then take us waterskiing behind his boat (not a euphemism). I am sincerely grateful for that time, in which our priest appeared “onstage,” as it were, perhaps as one of the more exciting characters in our community, what with a speedboat and fancy eyeglasses.

  We had our version of Sunday school, called catechism. It was terrible, just the worst. By the time you’re seven or eight years old, you get it. I understood the stories of Jesus and his disciples and the values I was expected to glean thereof. Now, there are things I like just fine about church, and I don’t just mean making money. The notion of getting together as a community to remind ourselves why we shouldn’t behave like animals is a fucking great idea. Church was also the place to get a look at all of the young ladies in the other families, the better to determine whose young chests you’d like to target with your clumsy fumbling. It’s all the other shitty parts—like when priests tell you who to vote for in a presidential race, because they’re personally opposed to a woman’s right to choose—that irk me. That’s where church crosses my line. When the clergy get too big for their britches, they take these wonderfully benevolent writings from the Bible and crumble their intended integrity by slathering them with human nature.

  I remember sitting in my seat at the far stage-right side of the altar while the congregation would slog through group recitations like the Nicene Creed (“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .”) in the most Pavlovian way. The cultish, soulless tone in which this group of two hundred people would repeat this creed of purpose, meant to resonate like a mission statement, lent no fervor to, nor even indicated any apparent awareness of, what they were saying. “Now we say this part . . . We get the talking over with so I can get home to the football game.”

  One Sunday in my midteens, I really heard them droning on, and I found it quite upsetting. I thought, “Listen to what you’re saying—you’re repeating this supposed profession of your faith and I’ll wager you literally couldn’t tell me what the fuck you’re talking about right now. The words of the creed, as well as this whole notion, are so profound, to re-up your faith week in and week out, but the meaning is utterly lost on you. This is not working. This mass is not working for these people. I’m not interested in taking part in this, because it doesn’t seem to be working.”

  * * *

  In eighth grade, the church community was all abuzz because they were bringing in this hotshot nun, Sister Gesuina, to teach our catechism class. It was very exciting and potentially scandalous because the word was she had unorthodox teaching methods, which included playing us the Billy Joel song “Only the Good Die Young” and explaining that while this popular music was catchy, sure, it disguised a nefarious, satanic message. “You might think he sounds logical and modern, but, Virginia, he’s just trying to get in your pants and knock you up.”

  And a hundred times better than even Billy Joel, she also brought in Playboy and Penthouse magazines! What? Penthouse shows pink, in the vernacular of porn mags. Playboy, by comparison, does not show pink. Penthouse will teach you much more about the biology of a lady’s privates. But believe it or not, she brought in porn magazines. To church class. And she passed them around.

  All of us boys thought, “You are easily the fucking greatest nun I have ever even remotely encountered, but you’re also a complete moron if you think you’re going to turn us teenage boys in the throes of puberty off to porn by showing us this nice lady’s utterly amazing bush. Holy Lamb of God, I’ll stay at this church class all day long.”

  It just dawned on me as I wrote this that all of these people simply didn’t have their shit together, which is understandable, since their task was not (and is not) easy: trying to keep this eldritch, tired dogma relevant for the youth of modern society. All things considered, I really had an amazing time at St. Mary’s, despite the religious parts. The good part about the church, for me, was the people. And the Playboys. Father Tony gave me the opportunity to get up in front of people to begin to fine-tune my subliminal messaging, and he nurtured (even unwittingly) my need to perform. In high school, when I figured out that I would be attending theater school to pursue stage acting, he said to me, “I understand this decision and I think it’s something you might have a shot at. I just want you to be careful, because in the world of show business there’s going to be a lot of drugs and a lot of sex. There’s going to be a lot of temptation.”

  And I said, “Yes, thank you!”

  Horse Sense & The Bible

  The holy Bible. This “good book” is a book of fairy tales. What? Yes, folks, for a fairy tale, by definition, is a fictional story that contains some sort of supernatural creature or occurrence. The Bible is chock-full of both. I don’t feel the need to quibble about Old Testament or New, the Gnostics, or any of that crap. My issue is with the exploitation of the entire Bible.

  Now, some of the more prevalent supernatural elements in the Bible we are all pretty familiar with: an all-powerful deity called “God” and his charismatic boy, “Jesus” (who has some superpowers like self-resurrection and some cool action like the Wonder Twins, turning sticks into snakes and greatly multiplying bread loaves and fish sticks until history’s first all-you-can-eat experience was invented), plus a burning bush, a cool sea that has a secret hallway that opens and closes for you depending on your race/religion, and your usual mountebank sleights of hand in revival settings. Healings, etc. MAGICKS.

  This book of fairy tales has proven to yield a wealth of lessons for people who study it. You know the form; it’s old-school cautionary tale: “Jahedickus did walk him to the woodpile after dark to fetch some wood so that the women about the place could cook for him and the men some whey-cakes, so long as the women be clean and their flowers be not upon them, which would be super gross. Because of the darkness, Jahedickus did notice not the woodchuck resting on the woodpile, until it did bite of his hand flesh. When Jesus heard tell of this in the marketplace, he did laugh his ass off, and then Jesus spake unto the peoples, ‘Gather ye not your fire from the darkness, but in
stead seek it in the light of day.’ Then Jesus said to his apostle Steve, ‘Steve,’ he said, ‘go thee to the woodpile and put the woodchuck to death, taking care that it not nibble at thy hand.’”

  There are at least twenty-seven good metaphorical ways to interpret this famous scripture from the book of Nick, and they’re all sound. Father, by all means, teach me philosophical methods based upon them. I love philosophy; I love to learn creative ways of viewing the world and mankind’s various dilemmas and triumphs. Just don’t fucking tell me we should kill all the woodchucks because the Bible says so. That’s it. That’s all I’m driving at. It’s a book of stories that should be treated as suggestions. It is not a book of rules for the citizens of the United States of America. Do me a favor and read that last sentence again.

  A step further. Creationism. If you want to go in so deep as to ignore all of the advances and hard facts that SCIENCE and LEARNING have provided us in the field of biological evolution and instead profess that the creation story, written by men from their holy visions, about how the Christian deity spinning the world together out of the void in the magic of Genesis describes the true origin of the universe, that is your business. Terrific. It’s a cool story, don’t get me wrong; I love magic. Check out Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which won a Newbery Medal. For the record, I don’t believe the book of Genesis ever won one of those.

  You and your fellow creationists profess belief in a magical story. You are welcome to do so. Sing and chant, and eat crackers and drink wine that you claim are magically infused with the blood and flesh of your church’s original grand wizard, the Prince of Peace. I personally think that’s just a touch squirrelly, but that’s your business, not mine. You will not be punished for those beliefs in our nation of individual freedoms. But I do think the vast majority of your fellow Americans would appreciate it, kind creationists, if you silly motherfuckers would keep that bullshit out of our schools. Your preferred fairy tales have no place in a children’s classroom or textbook that professes to be teaching our youngsters what is REAL. Jesus Christ, it’s irrefutably un-American, people!

  Let’s take a brief glance at Thomas Jefferson’s letter of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association. In his letter, making reference to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Jefferson writes: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Okay. All right then, I thought I had coined the phrase “separation of church and state,” but apparently this periwigged joker, this “Jefferson,” got there before I did. Why haven’t “we, the people” remembered it? It seems like a cool idea.

  The First Amendment, by the way, states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

  What does all of this terribly written gobbledygook mean? I’m glad you asked. The first thing I’ll point out is Jefferson’s correct assertion that “the legitimate powers of government reach ACTIONS ONLY, & NOT OPINIONS” (emphasis mine). Check it: If you subscribe to a group that worships a piece of fictional writing—say, I don’t know, the holy Bible—then that is your business. Go for it. Create ceremonies full of symbolic magic tricks involving the transformation of a long-dead spirit’s body and blood into a cracker and a sip of wine. Sing songs about it. Rejoice at the magic. In America, you may do so, with absolute impunity. However, should you try to bring your beliefs into a public argument of any sort, those beliefs can hold no water. Here’s why—as discussed earlier in this book, the stories of the Christian “God” and all of his purported works are merely a collection of stories, and if you choose to have “faith” in the truth of those stories, regardless of right or wrong, your belief that they are true is your OPINION. You are welcome to it.

  Secondly, the First Amendment is telling us that there shall be no laws favoring any churches and also no laws prohibiting whatever you might want to think about or preach in your respective churches. Change the cracker to a pickle! You can! It’s a First Amendment right!

  I love my country. Holy shit, do I love America. In many ways, it is the glorious result of some very open-minded thinking on the parts of our forefathers (and the ladies advising them) a couple of centuries ago. But that right there’s the rub, y’all. We’re a group of human beings, which means we can never be done trying to improve ourselves, and by default, our systems, including our government. Now, here’s the deal: Invoking the Bible in any public school or at any government function? Un-American. Making a witness in a court of law place his or her hand on the Bible? Un-American. Disputing legislation based upon what it says in your holy book? NOT PATRIOTIC.

  Where does this holy book come from, after all? Let’s imagine a conversation. . . .

  Me: So, Father Mark, why should we do what the Bible says?

  Him: Well, that’s easy: because it’s the word of God.

  Me: God?

  Him: Yes, God the Father. The creator of heaven and earth. Of all that is seen and unseen.

  Me: That’s trippy.

  Him: It is.

  Me: So God wrote the Bible?

  Him: Well, in a manner of speaking. God spoke to the men who wrote the Bible and told them what to write, and so I guess—

  Me: The Bible was ghostwritten?

  Him: Well, it’s a little more sacred than that.

  Me: How so? All dudes, right?

  Him: Excuse me?

  Me: Only men, no female ghost-scribes, correct?

  Him: Well, yes, that is so.

  Me: Okay. Does God prefer men to women? Are men smarter at Bible stuff?

  Him: No, no, it’s just, well, there weren’t really even women who could write in the time of the scribes. It was a different time.

  Me: Hm. Okay. Seems a little thin. Anyway, so, here’s what I can’t seem to puzzle out—if these guys wrote the Bible chapters, based on their divine visions, or what have you, what evidence can you show me that they didn’t just make it up? I’ll be honest: When you invite me to your church and gently suggest that I “tithe” ten percent of my income to this sort of “Bible club,” it makes me wonder a bit. Was ten percent the number God suggested? Is there a religion wherein gratuity is included?

  Him: I’m glad you asked me that, because that question is really the lynchpin of our faith. There is absolutely no proof—how could there be—that these scribes were given supernatural messages from a power greater than anything they could know. . . . It actually sounds pretty crazy when I say it like that.

  Me: You see?

  Him: No, but that’s what I was saying—it is because we believe in this truth that we can build our entire church upon faith.

  Me: Given that statement, isn’t it a little generous to refer to that information as the “truth”?

  Him: Not to us. We are believers. In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

  Me: Again, the proof you’re citing is that a man spoke this to another guy, who then reported it. You really trust the reporter? Have you seen TMZ?

  Him: The Bible, as a collection of holy texts handed down directly as the word of God, has to be considered above the uncertain scrutiny of we mortals.

  Me: Wow. Okay, I get that. But to the rest of us Americans, who aren’t “believers” in your ambitious claim that these writings are actually true using the definition of true that involves factual reality, can you see how it would seem inappropriate to us for followers of your book of stories to attempt to bring their faithful opinions to bear on real-world is
sues like legal policy and public programs and school curricula?

  Him: [chuckle] You sound like you’re writing a book.

  Me: It’s a “humorous” book, which is sweet; it means no research. Are you avoiding my question?

  Him: No, I’m sorry. The answer to your question can be found in the Bible—

  Me: But that’s what I’m saying. For all of us who don’t want to adhere to the stories upon which your religion is founded, isn’t it fair to ask you to leave it at church? How would you feel if all the Buddhists began insisting that some Zen koans were recited every morning before class in our public schools [not a bad idea]? I think what the First Amendment is driving at is simply that our American policy ensures a fair shake to all citizens, to consider and choose whatever religion, if any, they wish to take part in. If we pray to the Christian God in schools, we offend the Muslims and the Buddhists and the Hindus, and certainly the SubGeniuses and countless others. If we sing our fealty to Krishna before major league baseball games, then the Hindus might be tickled, but again, everybody else will get their panties in a bundle. Ostensibly, the goal of any religion is to improve the character, the moral fiber, of its adherents. We are all just seeking to become more decent, right? Why not, then, engage in these improvements whilst in private, at home or at the denominational gathering place of our choosing, bolstering our individual virtues with solid consistency, then simply bring that improved character to bear upon public issues? As in, “Wow, Senator Torgelman, you make really honorable decisions. How do you do it?” Senator Torgelman may then pound his heart twice with his fist, kiss two fingers, and point to the heavens, or he may just as likely press his palms together and bow, uttering, “Namaste,” or even lightly caress the war hammer hanging from his belt and declare clearly, “Praise Odin.”

  Him: It smells bad in this truck.