from
Another Roadside Attraction
by
Tom Robbins

(continued)

The history of the Catholic Church is written on charred pages splashed with gore. It is a history of inquisitions and genocides, of purges and perversions, of ravings and razings. Yes, but through those same bloody pages walk parades of saints playing their celestial radios and sowing their sparkles of love. What of the great enlightened souls zonked out on the Infinite, what of the saints so high on Divine Energy that they kissed those who censured them and blessed those who put them to death? What of the Catholic Christian Buddhas and Roman Hindu Vishnus whose melted hearts are the true gold of Rome? It occurred to me that Catholicism is a duality of good and evil, that it is a microcosm of secular society. One cannot hate society, because within society there are loving and lovable individuals. Similarly, it wasn’t the Church I hated, because the Church contained the bravery and enlightenment of many individual priests and nuns and saints.

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living—busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing—they are busy taking over. [...] They are the most frightened and most frightening mammals who prowl the planet; loveless, anal-compulsive control-freak authoritarians, and they are destroying everything that is wise and beautiful and free. And the most enormous ironic perversion is how they destroy in the name of Christ who is peace and God who is love.

Authority is the most damaging trauma to which the psyche is subjected between birth and death. Isn’t that true, Amanda? Nobody likes authority. You might object that authoritarians must like it, but they don’t, they merely resort to it in order to avenge themselves on those who have imposed it on them. From the first moment a fresh new human hears the command, “Stop that or Daddy spank,” his outraged subconscious begins to plot revenge. Often, his revenge is misdirected and merely perpetuates the sad old cycle of authority-rebellion; sometimes it leads to activity that is characterized as criminal or insane. It was leading me to destructive behavior, I could see that. It’s reactions like mine that give anarchy a bad name.

“He considers it man’s evolutionary duty to devour other species. My husband will never kill anything he is not prepared to eat.”

“That’s a pretty good practice,” admitted Marx Marvelous. “If everyone cultivated that habit there would be fewer murders and no war.”

“Or a boom in cannibals,” said Amanda.

[...] he was soon the recipient of what might be called

AMANDA’S UNIVERSAL ADVICE FOR PARANOICS

“About those men who are following you around and watching your house at nights: don’t be alarmed. Try to think of them as talent scouts from Hollywood.”

With his understanding of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, he began to realize that every system that science proposed was a product of human imagination and had to be accepted with a faith nearly as blind as the religious beliefs which he had jettisoned. Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationship of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the Fish or the Lamb.

[...] Paradoxically, his investigations in pure science, in abstract mathematics and theoretical physics, frequently led him into areas of thought which he could only describe as . . . well, say it, Marx: metaphysical. How could that be? The mental processes of religion and pure science may be similar, but the ends are different. It is not the purpose of science to make a man feel whole, to produce a kind of exalted happiness.

Why not?

Autumn does not come to the Skagit Valley in sweet-apple chomps, in blasts of blue sky and painted leaves, with crisp football afternoons and squirrel chatter and bourbon and lap robes under a harvest moon. The East and Midwest have their autumns, and the Skagit Valley has another.

October lies on the Skagit like a wet rag on a salad. Trapped beneath low clouds, the valley is damp and green and full of sad memories. The people of the valley have far less to be unhappy about than many who live elsewhere in America, but, still, an aboriginal sadness clings like the dew to their region; their land has a blurry beauty (as if the Creator started to erase it but had second thoughts), it has dignity, fertility and hints of inner meaning—but nothing can seem to make it laugh.

Have you ever tried to undress a nun when you were in a hurry?

“Ours is a government of laws, not of men,” the agent proclaimed.

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“What do you mean, problem? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our laws are sacred.”

“Aren’t our people sacred?”

“Until a law is removed legally from the statute books, it must be obeyed blindly by everybody if we want to continue to live in a democratic society and not slide back into anarchy. We’ve got to have laws and retribution. Ever since we crawled out of caves, retribution has followed wrongdoing as the night the day. When retribution ceases to follow evil, then the fabric of civilization begins to unravel.”

Amanda stirred the custard. “If we’ve always had retribution, how do you know what happens when we don’t have it?” she asked.

“The only authority I respect is that one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.”

“You mean God?”

“Not necessarily.”

My mother herself had told me that Einstein was the smartest man in the world, and now, sitting in my tiny alcove room overlooking the evening streets of Baltimore, I read in a magazine that Einstein not only had not been “saved,” but he didn’t even believe in God. [...]

From that day on, each little intellectual step I took was a giant stride away from Christian dogma. Yet, stretch and pull as I might, I couldn’t snap the emotional bonds. Intellectually, I soared high and free, but my emotions remained anchored in Baptist bedrock. [...] Is that man’s fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?

Eventually, he said, “I’ve got nothing against Jesus. It wasn’t his fault that all this killing and cheating has been done in his name. He was one of the greatest dudes who ever was. You know what I dig about him? He lived what he preached. He taught by example. He went all the way and there was no compromise and no hypocrisy. And he not only was against authority, he was against private property, too. Anybody who opposes authority and property is sweet in my heart. Jesus? Hell, I love the cat.”

“Yes, Pluck,” I said, “we know that. We realize it isn’t Christ or his original teachings that have you riled.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s what he’s come to stand for that pisses me. It’s the perversions and the tyranny and the lies.”

“Judaism was a father religion. Christianity also grew into a father religion. But the old religion was a mother religion. We’ve had two thousand years of penis power.”

“Is that bad?”

“It isn’t a question of bad or good. It never is. But when the phallus is separated from the womb, when the father is separated from the mother, when culture is separated from nature, when the spirit is separated from the flesh . . . then life is out of balance and the people become frustrated and violent.”

“Well, the past two thousand years have been frustrated and violent, all right. What you’re saying is that Jesus came into a naturally balanced world and threw it out of line.”

“All I’m saying is, tomorrow when you are alone thinking about Jesus, open your window. Don’t sit there in your stuffy room, all full of books and no air.”

When Jesus overturned the bankers’ tables and kicked the capitalists out of the temple, he momentarily succumbed to the temptation to indulge in violent revolution in the cause of freedom. He did not persist in this behavior. Although he remained a rebel, Jesus was to support a revolution in consciousness rather than a violent overthrow of corrupt establishment. For his trouble, he was hung up on spikes. Would his fate have been different had he persisted in militant opposition? For his refusal to pursue political goals, Jesus lost popular support—and gained a legacy.

“The world is perpetually changing,” he roared. “It doesn’t do much else but change. It changes from season to season, from night to day, from ice to tropics. It changed from a pocketful of cosmic dust into the complicated ball of goof and glory it is today. It’s changing every celestial second with no help whatsoever. Why do you want to stick your nose into it?”

“The peoples of the world have become wicked and evil,” Jesus said gravely. “I believe, in all modesty, that I can eradicate their evil.”

“Evil is what makes good possible,” said Tarzan, hoping that he didn’t sound too trite. “Good and evil have to coexist in order for the world to survive. The peoples haven’t become evil, they’ve lost their balance and become confused about what they really are.”

He jumped on the back of his goat and gave it a smack. “I’m afraid, Jesus baby, that you’re gonna confuse them all the more.”

“The last time I was on a Mexican beach, some guy stole my transistor radio,” sighed Amanda.

“Why, that’s a dirty shame,” I sympathized.

“Oh, it was all right,” she said. “He took the radio but he left the music.”

“But seriously, if life has no meaning—”

“To say it has no meaning is not to say it has no value.”

“But to say it’s all meaningless. Isn’t that a cop-out?”

“Maybe. But it seems to me that the real cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning but that we ‘mere mortals’ are incapable of ever knowing that meaning. Mystery is part of nature’s style, that’s all. It’s the Infinite Goof. It’s meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.”