Miracles Creating Miracles

The following was written for the Harvest of Voices prose festival in Paonia, Colorado, and performed as a spoken-word piece. So try to imagine it being read, you know, dramatically. And humorously, with perfect timing. And pathos, don’t forget pathos…

Everything we see and even the thoughts that form in our brain are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of subatomic particles, and subatomic particles… well they’re made of nothing; what I’m trying to say is that everything comes from nothing and, therefore, everything is a miracle. To single out some things as being somehow more miraculous than other things is a mistake. A mistake I’m going to make now by telling you stories of three miraculous events: a visualization fulfilled, an answered prayer, and a direct, non-verbal communication from the Christian god, together with prologues and kickers, and an optional application to your very own life.

A Visualization Fulfilled:
Prologue: Finding myself jobless in Idaho, I talk myself into a position with a one-man software firm. I have a facility for the work, and prosper modestly, but there’s one problem: the owner, Gary, has always worked from his crowded basement office and sees no reason why I can’t do the same. Seeing no other recourse, and having just read a book on the subject, I decide to bring the perfect office into my life via visualization, which is a strange decision for me as the Christian fundamentalist cult to which I then adhered rather frowns on visualization, affirmation, meditation, positive thinking and… well, they frown on a lot of things.

The Event: I form a mental picture of the office I desire. It is to have four components: high ceilings, elaborate millwork, a downtown location, and some interesting architectural detail. Several times a day I hold a vision of this ideal office. That’s all I do. I take no other steps, I simply… think about what I want. Within three weeks, our little firm is located in a downtown Pocatello office. The ceilings are 12 feet high and the millwork is nearly a foot wide. Oh, and the unspecified architectural detail? Turns out this office comes complete with its own jail cell.

they frown on a lot of things

The Kicker: Shortly after moving into this office, Gary appears to lose his mind. He begins by diverting company funds amounting to $30,000 into the construction of a backyard shed, a shed built to resemble a Japanese teahouse, on a rock foundation, constructed of high grade redwood, and roofed with… copper shingles. He next manages to fall prey to a recently released scam artist, who talks Gary into supplying him with a desktop computer, two laptop computers, and some cash for ‘investment’, all while taking meetings in a Motel 6…

Shortly thereafter I quit in disgust.

An Answered Prayer:
Prologue: While taking a bath in Idaho, I receive a phone call from my mother in Kentucky who tells me that my father has just had a stroke. My family and I leave the next morning and arrive two days later. My father’s right side is paralyzed and he is unable to speak. Since my mother has just undergone double bypass surgery, the situation is serious and we decide to move to Kentucky to help them out. I have one day to secure a job before returning to Idaho to pack. Since I am still a member of the aforesaid wacko Christian cult, and since visualization didn’t seem to work out so well, I offer up a fervent prayer to God, asking for His divine assistance.

I have been working as a land surveyor, so I take the yellow pages and a map and head to Owensboro, determined to apply in person to every survey company listed. I begin by driving to a firm named McDonough-Brown. I know that I am in the right block and have the correct address, but for the life of me I cannot find it. I walk up and down the block a few times and ask the locals for assistance, but ultimately I leave in frustration.

I manage to speak to every other firm on my list, and none have any openings. It is a long, frustrating day and, frankly, I am a little disappointed with God’s effort.

The Event: I impulsively try one more time to find the mysterious McDonough-Brown. This time, when I pull up to the address, I immediately see a fairly prominent sign that says, “McDonough-Brown”. I walk in. I launch into my spiel, which by now is well-practiced. Everyone seems surprised, no, shocked to see me, and they fall all over themselves to show me the place, explain what they do, and persuade me to work for them. It was weird… but I leave with a job.

I later learn why everyone was so astonished to see me. Turns out, moments before I arrived, the owners were abruptly forced to fire a long time employee for failing a drug test. If I’d looked over my shoulder while walking in, I would have seen him driving away. Had I arrived earlier in the day, there would have been no opening. My arrival at that precise moment struck all of McDonough-Brown’s employees as an act of… God.

The Kicker: This is easily the worst job I have ever had. I am away from home for weeks at a time, working in swamps, nominally in charge of a crew of pistol-packing politically paranoid rednecks named Wayne. The work is brutal and degrading, and sometimes involves lugging sacks of cement hundreds of yards from a truck to a boat, a procedure that systematically lines all of my orifices with a thin layer of concrete. Though still a Christian, I can’t help but wonder if there might be something to reincarnation and if I was, perhaps, a really nasty person in a previous life.

A Direct Non-Verbal Communication from the Christian God:
Prologue: In the beginning of the summer of 1984, my life is, frankly, perfect. I am on my university’s honor roll, I have been training for a triathlon and am an Adonis, I am sharing a beach house with friends, and I am beginning to realize that girls, though puzzles, are solvable puzzles. Even my hair is looking good. Clearly, this is going to be the best summer ever and I kick it off with a trip to a Grateful Dead concert in Sacramento.

At that concert I have a bad acid trip, the most harrowing experience of my life. To tell the story of that bad trip properly would be a separate lecture, but for your entertainment I am going to attempt the impossible and condense it into one sentence.

{breath}

Arriving early at the concert I begin to take any and all drugs that are offered to me and wind up gobbling acid, shrooms and unidentified pills by the handful which gradually engender in me a paranoid conviction that the concert is in fact a ploy to attract and slaughter would be hippies like myself and so I escape from the stadium by jumping a fence and running across an eight lane freeway only to find myself in a field full of thorns, stickers and burrs, convincing me definitely that this is no ordinary would be hippie slaughtering conspiracy but that I am in fact in hell, and if I’m in hell, of course, I might as well take off all my clothes and surrender to the demons, which I do, but the demons don’t show up so I run back and forth across the freeway, naked, looking for them and then I run into an apartment complex, still naked, to make a phone call, and the police show up and I’m actually pretty happy to see them, so I surrender and am handcuffed and placed in a squad car only to realize, too late, that the police are in league with the demons and now I want to escape so I kick out the police car door window with my bare feet and, yes, still naked, wriggle out and almost make it until four of them land on me like, well, a ton of cops and I am placed in four point restraint and taken to a hospital where I suddenly realize that I’m not in hell but, rather, am in the midst of a millennium-long, life and death struggle between good and evil and it’s absolutely imperative that I take sides in this struggle and after thinking it over for a while, I choose… good.

{breath}

The Event: Two days later I am sitting in my living room, trying to figure out just how one signs up on the side of good. I hear a knock on the door. And then something happens that I can’t explain; sitting there in my living room I suddenly feel as if a non-verbal stream of information is being beamed directly into me, as if God himself has decided to reach out to me, and the message I am given is the absolute certainty that whoever is knocking is bringing the Truth. It is a profound, soul-shattering, supernatural event. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure I’ve just been born again.

So whatever the folks at the door are selling, I’m buying, and when I open the door I am not particularly surprised to see a pair of… Christian cultists. The next evening, I attend my first meeting and am a faithful, true believing cult member for the next 18 years.

The Kicker: Being in a cult really sucks. I quit school and never do get a degree. For 18 years I attend five meetings a week and go door-to-door as many as 100 hours a month. I read four church magazines, a book or two, and a couple of pamphlets each month. I see no R rated movies, smoke no tobacco, give and receive no oral sex, celebrate no holidays, take no blood transfusions though I need them, offer no toasts, salute no flag and am generally an insufferably self righteous son of a bitch. I drop my non-cult friends, refuse to attend my own brother’s wedding, and take Prozac to suppress obsessive suicidal ideation. When I finally leave the cult, more than a hundred close friends immediately stop talking to me for fear of offending God and I leave behind an ex-wife and two children one of whom, frankly, fears me to this day because she believes that a heretic like myself is a sinner worse than a murderer, rapist or child molester.

What I am trying to say is that the holy sense of rightness that I felt, the conviction that God himself was leading me to Truth… led directly to the most… fucked up mistake I’ve ever made.

An Optional Application to Your Own Life:
So what am I saying? That visualization is useless, that answered prayers come with dark strings attached, that divine revelations are from trickster gods who seek to mislead us? No, not at all. My point is more subtle than that.

I have a truth to share with you, and it’s an optional truth because it’s mine, not yours or, at least, not necessarily yours. But my truth is this: you are your own gods. You are miracles creating miracles, you are the weavers of reality. And that’s a heavy burden and it’s tempting to lay that burden down and turn it over to some God or prophet, but here’s the thing: you can never lay it down. Never. Never, never, never; never.

Follow this BS on Twitter.

Follow this BS on facebook.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

Tagged as: belief systems, drugs, philosophy, religion, weird beliefs