Talking With God

Endothermic Energy Levels of Prayer

I am an early riser. Up and at 'em before sunrise. I throw on my clothes laid out the night before; I actually do put my pants on two legs at a time - or simultaneously, leg-wise - contrary to the popular maxim that we all put our pants on one leg at a time. Contrarian. I sort of slide them on while sitting on the side of the bed and jump, leap - sometimes somersault - into them, both legs pipe-stemming their way inside. Of course, now I'm wearing shorts first crack out of the box, so the process is a lot smoother and less prone to error.

Thus nattily attired for someone fresh from six hours of the dreamy solitude of Morpheus, I stumble to the door, muttering my morning prayers, "Our Father... and the rest of it...", followed by a "Hail Mary... and you know the drill...", and climaxed by "God's nightshirt!" as I stub my toe against the jamb.

So today I did not get away with it as I usually do. While I was reading the BBC and drinking coffee, God stuck his head around the corner...
[ note: when I write about God, I no longer capitalize pronouns, like "He". I just write "he". I do rely upon a transcendental editing device which, when I have finished, will magically change all lower case pronouns to upper case by wafting an angel's wing over the composition. It was fairly expensive. I also have trouble with people who spell "God" as "G-d" or some other such stuff, pretending they are students in a Yeshiva saying "Adonai" instead of...well, that other word... or Word...or W-rd !?

My biggest problem is that everytime I come across "G-d" I read it as "goddam!!" which usually throws quite a monkey wrench into the process of reading things with a theological bent to them. It is a shocking experience, and I never seem to get used to it. ]

Anyway - a longish note there - God sticks his head around the corner... and this may surprise a lot of you, but the divine head is not some sort of monstrously large thing, bigger than all other heads, real or imagined in the history of the universe. It is a bit largish, but not so large as to be a topic for the SciFi Channel. He may have to have his hats custom made.

So, having stuck said head around the corner, he asks "Any breakfast for you? "

"Breakfast?" I murmur.

"E & B" he says.

"E & B this early?" I ask.

"Got to get to work." he says. "I have things to do, physical things..."

"Physical things?" I ask.

"Well, difficult things." he says. "Things that a man needs a good breakfast..."

"Man?" I ask.

"Well, "entity", if you will. Entity. And I will mention that bit of Monophysitism to my son. A day filled with things that require an en-ti-ty have a good breakfast under said entity's belt."

He held the big, black iron skillet in his H-nd, smiling.

So I said, yeah. Why not? Sure. Eggs and bacon.

"Bacon?" I asked as he went towards the kitchen, thinking kashrut and animals whose blood might have been spilled in anger.

He paused. "Yeah. I see... O.K. No B. Ummm, toast?"

I agreed without speaking. I sort of did a closed lipped yum-yum type thingy that I immediately regretted.

He turned around. He did a sort of Captain Kirk gesture from Star Trek Generations as he dropped the bread into the toaster...from afar. Action at a distance, the sort of quantum stuff Einstein had such a bugaboo about. Anyway, bread tossed into toaster and it swished right in, nothing but net, or - rather - nothing but wirey supports, and he smiled at me briefly as if I were Jean-Luc Picard... in S.T. Generations, needless to say.

As we sat down to eat, he asked "What's all this with the prayers?"

I was mopping my plate with a piece of bread, thinking mop-type things, humming the Swifter ad to myself: who's that lady? who's that laaay-deee? "Huh?" I said.
"The prayers. The abridged versions."
I tried to remember. I couldn't. Fried eggs over-easy are pretty much an exothermic process, and the whole art involves breaking, spilling,  and mopping as fast as one can before the ultimate heat-death of the universe.

[I remember July 4th past when everyone was at my parents, and they all have spirituous drinks, and tend to have a dolce far niente approach to the dinner hour - which I don't. When I'm hungry, I eat. Ditto sleep and other bodily prox ( note to self: "prox" for "processes" has been tried out and it works.). The time-honoured cocktail hour to me is nothing but filler material in novels about the English Catholic gentry in the period between World Wars; filler for that chiaroscuro time between tea and the evening repast.
So I grilled the food and grabbed the odd family member who stumbled by to toss the salad, to set the table, and to bun the burgers. I set my hot dogs at my place and did a final check, making sure the food was out and the gaping maws were sitting about the familial table. By the time I sat down to eat, the wretched fan nearby - it was 94 degrees Fahrenheit that day - had turned the hot dogs into a state of cool, cool entropy. I ate.]

I took it that he did not care for "Our Father, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth..." .
I tried to explain. "Well, we all know the words, and words are just a way to induce a transcendent state or meditation; it just "shines" after that. I just "shine" the rest of the prayer. You know, like Stephen King's The Shining."
I paused. "Shine." I said again.
He ate his breakfast.
"It's not Me..." he said, and he said it with a capital M. " I can dig the 'shining' business." he said.
I smiled, relieved.
He continued, "However, it sets a bad example for the rest of creation. Creation doesn't see much difference between a yawning gap of destruction and...well, an unexpected lacuna in a prayer."
"Lacuna ?" I said, with a very small "?".
"Lacuna. Gaps. Missing sections." He repeated, then corrected. "Lacunae, I should say; plural. Many lacuna make lacunae."
I nodded. He was acting very much like Atticus Finch all of a sudden.
"I did not mean to cut it short." I had the sudden image of a director in a radio studio making the "speed-it-up" sign with his hand, followed by a "stretch-it-out" sign, ending in a "finger-across-the-throat" sign.
"I mean, well, words don't really do you justice...so I just sort of run out of words and just let the silence continue the prayer."
He brooded over this, almost as intensely as he did over the Deep.
Breakfast continued to its pre-ordained end in silence, and I cleared the table, and rinsed the dishes, leaving them in the sink. I sincerely hoped he would do a finger-snap and finesse them through wash and dry cycles and into cabinets.
Finally, he spoke. "I see what you mean. A lot of people refer to me as "a higher power". Pastor Haggee says I'm the highest, the greatest, the absolutest all-time smartest... All those superlatives. It makes me feel like I'm surrounded by obese guys gobbling pies in the last 2 gut-busting minutes of the closest, hardest-fought, and nastiest pie eating contest  at the sleaziest county fair ever imagined."
"Words sometimes don't do it; sometimes words turn into an idolatry of words themselves. W-rds, as you say."
He smiled and left. Quite abruptly. I felt pretty good. I looked at the dishes still in the sink.