The God with a Limp
I hope God is a crabby old bastard with smirking eyes, an untamed beard, permanent bed-head, and wide gaps between a few piss-yellow teeth. An imperfect, awkward, disheveled, broken variety. Unsafe, even. A description more befitting of the existential mess we know too well and at times can’t help but love. You will see mysteriously staggered sets of footprints in the sands of this particular journey you may or may not wish to call spiritual, because this God has a limp and will tell you to carry yourself, then later hope you forgot and ask for a piggyback ride even though your back went to hell years ago.
The pious might call this a perversion, without a hint of irony. Of their version, certainly. Not a full-blown, card-carrying asshole per se, though firmly opposite of the white-haired, tyrannical, bigot geezer in the clouds, so pleased with himself, demanding worship and threatening damnation. Much rather a questionably adorned yet unexpectedly warm weirdo in the dimly lit corner booth of a dive bar where he’s watching after the ones who think they’re lost and don’t realize that everyone is actually hitting their marks in perfect grace. There is no there there, as Gertrude said, after all.
He’s as kind and compassionate as you’d imagine, but with a much darker sense of humor than you might expect. He’s seen some shit. Wise doesn’t even begin to cover it. He’s holding all of the cards and isn’t the least bit worried about you. How could he ever be? Everything belongs to him, because everything is him, her, it, everything. Omnipotence cannot be splintered or diminished or delegated or bastardized. But, forget the philosophy and mental gymnastics, what we’re really talking about is the wildest ideal of an antihero to our flawed nature. The nothingness trembling around him, us, plotting against and harming itself in vain, comically and cosmically subscribing to its own grand delusions of separateness. All meaningless violence, lashing out at its alleged judge.
Yet nothing touches any of it, the curious bearded lady’s absurd collaboration with oneself. Not the weary birds, not the polluted water supply, not the trash in the street, not the bought and sold politicians, not the nefarious algorithms. It’s all just theater. A big show. The last dance before the lights come up. We’re terrified and she just keeps smiling, wondering when we’re going to get it. To just slow down and be in love. Let it all play out. Let it all go. He doesn’t want to save us. There’s nothing to save. She just wants to keep laughing a bit longer. That’s all any of us want.
