I remember feeling the sticky on the bottom of my feet with each step as I left our city’s stadium with my parents explaining (again) that every culture across time has included people shouting that God’s judgment is coming, just like the man yelling at us. The people they claim to be doomed are not bad, but it means they disagree on how we are each to live this human life. Again, the people who shout judgments always have absolute certainty of precisely who God’s bad people are and who God prefers. My parents understood that this city element was around before Socrates, and rational people ignored them and kept moving. My life experience proves that this lesson is true. There is never a shortage of people who demand their opinions of unknowable topics be universally accepted. Still, my ear itches when I hear of some new cult leader who claims to be god’s “chosen one.” It might be instinctual. I kept track of them for a while, but it got boring! Like one holy man wrote, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants have been, how gloriously different the saints.”
This story is about one such uprising. At first, it was just another group of immigrants claiming special status. Initially, a holy man claimed to be the new national leader. Then, it turned into an atheistic, incestual freakshow that threatened to take down everything I, and my fathers and father’s fathers, have devoted our blood, sweat, and lives to build. Everyone wants a handout, and there’s only so much to go around. We are apex predators, and this life is a zero-sum game. I’m as much a fan of giving people a shot as the next person, but I cannot in good conscience allow myself to pretend we can give all these immigrants handouts; the only thing that will happen is that they will take over and make us slaves. This is an eat-or-be-eaten world. Wake up, snowflake!
Unsurprisingly, some backwoods third-world foreign land tells of religious wild men who “heard from God” while they lived a solitary life. To become a holy person, it seems, I start with some person who has visions because they take drugs or starve themselves long enough to have the same effect. They’re probably doing this out of tremendous ascetic character, but they are disruptive and never seem to help with the dishes. As this most recent profit-priest-shouter wasn’t living on a bug diet, he tells people to “wash themselves with change, to clean off guilt and shame?!?” Like all religious leaders, he never seemed to give a straight answer when recognized authorities dared to ask a straight question. His cult members only reference a 700-year-old book in which another sweaty-toothed madman prophesied a future crazy wilderness-dweller would announce God showing up as a human. I guess ignorant foreigners will fall for any witch doctor who claims to be their new leader. People are so thirsty that they will crawl across the desert to a leadership mirage and drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
I’m a person of faith. I believe in God. I know God can show up at any time, in whatever form God wants, and likely does all the time. If I knew it was something more than a bunch of uneducated hicks, I’d be willing to travel wherever if God did show up as a human. It’s not impossible, but it’s implausible.
This is where a novelty turns into a nuisance. This group is not only socialist, but they are as anti-capitalist as any in history. Their desert message directs that none of them get two outfits or meals if everyone doesn’t have at least one. That mad talk could take down an empire if it caught on. I shudder to think. What else can the poor expect besides wanting everyone to be poor alongside them? That’s not my style, and I’m not willing to pretend that my hard work isn’t what provides this good life for my family and children. I didn’t choose the life I was born into, but I won’t be ashamed of it either!! That 700-year-old “seer” wrote that their tribe would know God was about to show up when someone announced it from rural places. I’m sure that plenty of politicians have quoted that verse when running for office over the last 700 years. Savages are so blind to how the real world works! Some need to be saved, and those who are saved. How could every human being treated equally help anyone?
This seer, this prophet, hurled his thoughts centuries into the future, writing, “God’s people experience comfort. Speak tenderly to my city. Tell her that her struggle is over, and she’s released from prison – that she’s paid double for whatever wrongs she committed.” Initially, it sounds like he’s talking about me, but then there is a bend as it continues, “Set up a direct path to ‘I am.’” I should have noted that this tribe’s god is named “I am” (the present progressive form of the verb ‘to be’). The holy man wrote, “Clear the path to (God). Level a highway through the desert because I am. Every valley will be elevated, and every mountain and hill will be humbled.” This is the type of rhetoric that can only come out of a troubled youth finding a cult leader who gives the needy an unhealthy amount of personal attention.
He concludes the quote I read by assuring, “…all who are crooked will be straightened out, and systematic injustices will become equitable?!?” This is where it gets personal. I’m a good person, and I sometimes give to the needy. I defend those who depend on me, and anyone claiming I should be poor simply because some lazy bug-eater quoted an old book …has got another thing coming! I will fight for what’s my own!! That old man claimed that “God will save all flesh?” Some need to be saved, and those who are saved from. I will defend what God has given me to defend. Be careful not to let me mistake you for a thief or an immigrant at my doorstep. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of this mama bear protecting her cubs and home. How could God punish me for that? I can only thank God I was not born one of them.
He calls his followers names like “snakes” and calls society a “bundle of enemies”! He seems unpleasant and angry and needs to get laid. Even so, some of his words catch my ear and carry me through my day. “Who convinced you,” he teaches, “…that you have suffering coming after death? Then, grow fruit that proves that you’re different, and don’t think you’re God’s special people on your claim to the right mythology or book. The universe creates “Chosen ones” out of rocks on the side of the road with a whirlwind kicking up. With every moment, death’s chainsaw is leaning next to the tree of our lives, greased and gassed. Every tree that grows with no interest or effort in the common good will be cut down and recycled back into our source and origin – the one whose substance we all manage.” I admit that some of that may technically be heresy. Yet, some pieces taste like pastry on my tongue when I talk about them, while the reasoning leads to fears that make me feel like I will be sick. I get so angry at that man; I want to squish him like one of the bugs he had for lunch.
When he paused, I heard someone holler, “I get it. We’re all hopelessly broken! I will try and do what you say, but how can I make any difference?” That teacher’s eye contact fixed as his breathing steadied, and with the tone of a loving parent explaining that it’s bedtime to their children, he answered, “The person with two coats shares with whoever has none. Also, do the same with food.” I can taste the river mist in my nose from standing there in silence with his simple direction hanging in the air. He looks each of us in the eye and, with a twinkle, lifts an eyebrow that flirtingly fires off the unspoken follow-up question, “Can you think of any other option for world peace?!?”
Rich people who profit off the misery of the weak asked, “What about us?” He answered, “Charge a fair price and don’t take advantage of people who don’t understand how power and money work as well as you do.” Military and law enforcement, who make their living using death as a tool, asked for direction, and he answered, “Don’t use threats or lies to do your job and be content with being paid a fair wage.”
The whole time, when people asked if he was the “Chosen One,” he explained that he uses water to wash people, but the one arriving next would wash people with fire! The chosen one brings a pitchfork to collect the grain while the hard outer shells are recycled with fire. This obsession with fire is explained a little by understanding that the God, named I am, is said to be made entirely of fire, with fire flowing out of the front of him into a lake of fire in front of him, and when this god has previously shown up, it is usually in the form of fire. Their history even claims that God fire-bombed their enemy with literal fireballs falling from the sky. Some mythologies are more accessible to track than others. It seems every people group claims ancestry of a particular god-favored individual. It also seems every person who has waited on a coming “Chosen One” has died still expecting or in disappointment.
My favorite waitress told me that “the bug-eating preacher” identified someone as the chosen one about a month and a half ago, but then the guy up and disappeared. Between his announcement and this Independence Day, it’s all anyone is talking about, but no one can remember his appearance. Every time the bug guy points him out, he goes into hiding.
That was up until this last Independence Day. He went into the main building and destroyed everything, sent people and stuff running, and cost everyone a lot of money and time. There was a leader who is said to have visited him, but he didn’t return with anything that made sense. This chosen one was down by the river with the bug man but took off just before the authorities moved in to arrest the bug guy for all the havoc the chosen one created on Independence Day. Life’s not fair, and it’s hard to know who needs to be saved from whom.