On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for May 29th
The Devil’s Letters
The Old Testament God is an angry and vengeful God who shows no mercy. He is so angry that he floods the earth to start over, and then immediately gets angry when his creations start making mistakes again! While he said he wouldn’t flood the earth again, he still scowls at his human creations with resentment and shame.
So then he decides to try his hand at this compassion shit that is popular out east and fucks some little girl who then gives birth to His son. His son then preaches love and compassion, and then gets himself crucified for questioning the temple’s financial habits and cooperating with the Roman occupiers. He dies and then doesn’t die, but goes up to the same place people go when they die after they are done living boring, no fun lives. He then chills on the god’s side, looking down on the humans in resentment and shame.
The Son of God should be the end-all and be-all of this religion, right? Shouldn’t this have gone away with the hundreds of other Jewish cults at the time? Wrong. We now have the story of a carpet salesman from Tarsus, which is in modern-day Turkey, who went from hating these Christian Jewish rabble-rousers to becoming one of them. Important note: Paul is not one of Christ’s disciples; Paul is a different guy.
The biblical story goes that Paul was walking from Jerusalem to Damacus (not the city in Oregon) when Jesus pops up and is all bright and shit which blinds Paul, who is going by Saul at that time, for three days before being healed by Ananias of Damascus (again, not the town in Oregon and she’s not the woman who dated Henry Miller). He then goes on to preach the good news of Jesus to Jews and Gentiles alike all over the Greek-Roman Empire and Europe.
In a letter to Rome about more rules he has come up with since he became the church maker, he denounces men on men sex, and assholes since then quote this book being in the softer, gentler New Testement how important it is for gays to not ever have a good time. It started with a small group of hippies healing and helping others, and moved to an organized pyramid scheme.
Here is where I’m going to blow your mind. There are two huge problems with Paul—actually three if you count the fact that he is not Jesus Christ, didn’t even know Jesus alive, and isn’t saying anything that Jesus said when Jesus was alive.
Firstly, Paul was a carpet salesman. You know those beautiful oriental rugs that sometimes fly? He sold them. He was having downtime in his sales when he came up with the idea of using this up-and-coming Jewish cult to become a fraternity to help sell his wares. By including non-Jews, he then vastly expanded his market.
He disguised his capitalistic greed with newfound religious fervor and walked between Rome and Jerusalem, spreading the gospels while asking if anyone needed a rug.
Other businessmen joined this Christian movement for the same purposes and spread the good news as far west as Britain, as far east as China, south to Ethiopia, and north to the frozen Scandinavian reindeer herders. Before being backed by the world’s biggest army, Christianity was spread by door-to-door salesmen.
The other problem is how he suddenly changed his mind about Jesus and his movement.
“Jesus himself fucking blinded him, Dave! Duh!”
The other story is more sinister than that. You see, Saul, who becomes Paul, was down on his luck with his carpet business. The devil, not Jesus, appears to him at the roadside, offering him financial, social, and fame success with a stroke of a pen. Saul goes blind, wakes up as Paul, and becomes the Devil’s corrupter.
Like the Satan’s Verses in the Quran, all the letters and books written by Paul were tainted by Satan’s mischievous malice. Steering away from the mystic gnostic beliefs of early Christianity to a mortar and brick-based church, Paul fell for what Jesus did not when Jesus spent 40 nights camping in the Judean Desert. The Devil needed to destroy the movement that was started by the man who rejected his temptations.
Paul begins what has become the modern church. It is a religion of bigotry, capitalism, and hate rather than the celebration of nature, love, and philosophical and spiritual growth that Jesus preached. It became the Devil’s religion.
What if Paul had not succumbed to Satan’s temptations? Would the Church of Jesus have survived? Would it have been, as Jesus intended, a spiritual path that required no organized Church? Would the church follow Jesus’ brother James, who continued Jesus’s teaching of love and vows of poverty? Would the modern person be so desperately hungry for some peace and comfort? Would the world be so full of hate and violence?
Who knows, Paul fucked everything up, and now the Devil’s religion that is called Christianity is backed by the world’s largest military protecting today’s rug salesmen who want to sell their wares all over the world.
Prayer
Jesus?
It may have helped to be clearer in your message to your disciples.
You wax poetic and talk in riddles and parables,
And because the book is written,
Everyone can have their interpretation, with no one there to defend it.
Since your dad is busy elsewhere,
Probably tucked in the fetal position, pretending to be a planet slowly orbiting through space while dreaming of being awake,
But you kinda left us with way more questions than answers.
I guess that’s where faith comes in, right?
But everyone will ignore your message for Paul’s
Because he was pretty straightforward in his postcards.
That’s why the organizations that represent your name is so shitty.
Come back and be a little more of a straight shooter than a mad desert poet.
Amen.
Craft
Wanna liven up your living room or dining room? Do you have lovely hardwood floors, but would you like to accent them?
You don’t have to buy a complete carpet or rug to enjoy a little flair.
Buy or get leftover squares of different kinds of carpets and arrange them in cool designs on your floor.
You can make little ‘paving stone’ paths or join them together to make a rug. You can use them in your apartment so the neighbors downstairs don’t get annoyed with your pooch’s clickity clacks.
Have fun!
Goal
The devil is in the details, but the particulars separate the sheep from the spiritual person.
God is Love.