I wagged my finger at Ginger. “Thou shall not take the name of the Lord in vain.”
“Piss off, Tummy.”
I opened me rucksack and grabbed a bag of crisps and a bottle of Coke. I have this condition, you see. Low blood pressure. It has to do with me glands. I’m lacking some hormone that helps me body conserve sodium, so I have low blood pressure and I sometimes pass out in the middle of the day, just like that. The doctor told me to eat lots of salt to increase me blood pressure so I wouldn’t pass out all the time. People always think I eat crisps all the time because I have no self restraint, and that’s what makes me fat, but that’s not true, is it? It’s just because of me glands.
“Why?” Julian asked.
I opened me bag of crisps. “Why what?”
“Why shall thou not take the name of the Lord in vain?”
I looked around nervously, making sure that God wasn’t listening in before I whispered, “Because it makes Him angry.”
“Who?”
“The Lord!” I said. “Jesus Christ, Julian, pay attention, will you?”
Ginger looked at me. “Thou shall not take the name ...”
“Oh shut up!”
Julian smiled. “So how do you know that?”
“It’s in his holy book.”
I ignored Ginger’s trolling comment and said, “Me mum told me.”
“And how does she know?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “We’re Christians; we just know these things.”
“And do you believe everything your mum tells you?”
Oh well, me mum.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always been more scared of me mum than of God. You may or may not believe that God is real, but I sure as hell knew that me mum was real. And she was one fierce woman, I have to tell you. She was a control freak, and you wouldn’t want to be around when things weren’t going her way. Things weren’t going her way very often. They never have, and you’d think that sooner or later a person would get used to it and loosen up a bit. But not me mum. She just kept freaking out at everything. Me mum was a bloody lunatic.
“Of course I believe everything me mum tells me,” I said. “She’s me mum!”
“Did your mum tell you about Santa Claus when you were little?” Julian asked.
“Yes.”
“And do you still believe in Santa?”
“What a silly question,” I said. “Of course I do!”
Ginger giggled, and Julian looked at me with a mixture of bemusement and curiosity.
“Have you ever thought about how fast he would have to travel to deliver all those Christmas presents to all the good little boys and girls in the world?” he asked.
“Well, have you ever thought about why they invented different time zones? It’s so that Santa doesn’t have to be all over the place at the same time.”
Julian raised an eyebrow. I don’t know how he did that or how anybody did that, raising just one eyebrow. I’ve tried it in front of the mirror. I can only raise both me eyebrows together.
“They invented time zones just to accommodate Santa’s busy schedule?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
He shook his head slowly, full of unconcealed admiration. “That is bloody brilliant, Tummy.”
“I know, right? Also, in some countries Santa comes on Christmas Eve, in others he comes on Christmas Day. In some places he even comes on the 6th of December, and in some places he doesn’t show up until the 7th of January. He’s got a whole month to deliver all his presents. Plenty of time.”
“Speaking of time,” Ginger said, “are we getting anywhere yet, Michael?”
“Bloody hell, Ginger, I’m working on it!”
“Do you also believe in Godzilla?” Julian asked me.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Godzilla is just a film.”
“Well, the Bible is just a book,” Ginger chimed in.
“Actually, the Bible is not just any old book,” Julian said.
“Exactly! You the man, Jules!” I raised my hand, waiting for him to high-five me, but to no avail. He didn’t like touching other people either.
“Excuse me!”
Julian and I both lifted our legs to make room for Michael who came crawling through the small space between the sofa and the coffee table in front of it, still following his bloody cables.
“The Bible,” Julian continued, “is a great book that reflects on a great number of human conditions; all our questions, insecurities, hopes, fears, and dreams. But of course that doesn’t make it infallible or, indeed, the word of God. I mean, look at all my song lyrics. Everything I write is inspired by the reality I happen to experience. I have to assume that the same is true for the Bronze Age peasants who wrote the Bible. I have to assume that the same is true for the Brothers Grimm, but just because I may find some truths about the human condition in Grimm’s Fairy Tales doesn’t mean I believe in cannibalistic witches or talking frogs that turn into beautiful princes when you kiss them. The purpose of the Bible, like that of any other book, is not to give you a pre-packaged, ready-to-use worldview. The Bible is not supposed to give you all the answers. It’s supposed to inspire you to ask the questions that you need to find the answers to in order to become the person you are meant to be.”
“Amen to that,” Ginger said.
I grabbed another handful of crisps and stuffed them in me mouth. “Sorry, but you lost me at the Brothers Grimm.”
Julian stared at me for a second, and I could see how he was tempted to start over. Fortunately, the Pope came to the rescue.
“Here he comes now,” Ginger said, and Julian leaned forward to stare at the TV. We were looking at a long shot of the runway of the airport in Tenochtitlan, or whatever the bloody capital of Honduras was called, and a small dot in the sky—the airplane carrying the Pope—that was slowly descending.
I made a mental note to mention at me next confession that I had lied. Julian hadn’t lost me at the Brothers Grimm. People tend to think I’m a bit daft, but I’m not. I was perfectly able to follow Julian’s sermon, but I didn’t want to encourage him. You see, Julian had a tendency to preach if he could get away with it, at least when he was with us. When there were strangers around he usually was very quiet, and many people actually thought he was rather a shy person. But we weren’t strangers. We had known each other since forever, and when we were amongst ourselves Julian would often preach himself into some sort of ecstasy at which point it became almost impossible to stop him. That could be proper annoying, because one of his favourite topics to preach about was God, or rather the non-existence of God. For someone who supposedly didn’t believe in God, he talked an awful lot about Him, which always struck me as rather odd. I think deep down inside Julian actually wanted to believe. If you ask me, all his questioning and criticizing religion was really just a cry for help and enlightenment directed at those who did believe. Humble people such as meself.
Of course I believe in God.
I mean, what else is there to believe in?
Me parents were Catholics. That made me a Catholic, too. I’ve been brought up to believe in God and in our saviour Jesus Christ. I’ve been taught that the Holy Bible was the word of God, and the word of God could be proper scary. I’ve believed in God all me life, because for some reason the scariness of scary things makes them not only scary but also very easy to believe.
I don’t know. I just need to make sense of the world, and a world without God would be a lot scarier than God Himself. I mean, if there was no design to the universe, no purpose to life, and no one to look after us, wouldn’t that be incredibly depressing? Also, everything had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?
In school they taught us about the Big Bang and about evolution. Some people thought that these were proof that everything we see around us may have come about without a God. Julian taught me even more about the Big Bang and about evolution than school did, and even though I was just an aver
age student and nowhere near as smart and intelligent as Julian was, I was able to grasp the basics of those theories with a little help.
“If people came from apes,” I asked him one day, “then why are there still apes?”
He just smiled at me and said, “If Americans came from the British, then why are there still Britons?”
That seemed to make sense. I could see how the universe could have come from the Big Bang, and I could see how all life on Earth could have come from evolution. Fine. But nobody I ever talked to could tell me who made the Big Bang go bang or who invented evolution. I could see how once the universe was there, even if it was incredibly small, it could have evolved into what it is today. But how did the universe start in the first place? How could something, everything, anything, have come from nothing? Julian told me that even the best physicists in the world didn’t know the answer to that yet, but they were working on it. That made me mighty proud; to think that a simple guy like me would think about the same deep questions that kept the best scientists in the world up at night. But even most physicists said that something cannot come out of nothing. They said that all the matter and all the energy in the universe were already there, squeezed into an infinitely small point at the beginning of time. I found it difficult to wrap me head around that. I once asked Julian what was before the Big Bang and suggested to him that God was there and that he sat down, cracked his knuckles and made the Big Bang. But Julian threw the question right back at me.
“And what did God create the heavens and the Earth from?” he asked.
“From nothing,” I said. “He’s God, he can do that.”
“Well there you go then. You just admitted that it’s possible to create something from nothing. Whether it’s done by natural forces or a supernatural entity may be debatable, but if you say God did it, you open another line of questioning: who or what created God, what did they create Him from, and how did they do it? You’re just shifting the problem.”
Julian also said that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Time itself was created in the Big Bang, and there was no before. I found it difficult to wrap me head around that as well. I didn’t understand how time could not have been there forever. A word like ‘forever’ didn’t even make any sense to me if time was not eternal. The Bible talked a lot about eternity. But if there was a beginning of time, wouldn’t there also have to be an end of time? The thought of that proper scared me, and that’s why I believed it. That the end of time would come before eternity is up.
But I was just a guy, just an average student. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to understand such things. Maybe none of us were. Maybe God didn’t want us to understand them, and maybe that’s why it would have been better to just leave them be.
In the beginning, God created the universe and time and space. The end.
As I was sitting there, munching on me salt and vinegar crisps and pondering these imponderable questions, I suddenly realized that although I had been staring at the TV screen the whole time, me brain had completely failed to register all the things I had been watching; how the Pope’s airplane had touched down and come to a halt, how they had rolled out a red carpet for His Holiness, how thousands of people were cheering and chanting in excitement and waving little paper flags of Honduras and of the Vatican, and how the ground crew had moved the boarding stairs in place at the front door of the aircraft.
It was Julian who ultimately forced my attention back onto the scene at Tenochtitlan. As I already said, Julian was a very quiet person and very soft-spoken, which is why I was all the more startled when he suddenly shouted out at the top of his lungs, “Holy shit!” before he burst out laughing, shrill and eerily like a madman.
The Gospel According to Michael – 1
A perfectly reliable way to get on my tits is to constantly ask me what the problem is while I’m on my knees, crawling across the floor and trying to figure out what the bloody problem is. Just being good with computers doesn’t make me a bloody electrician. Some people seemed to think that if I was able to hack into the school computer network to cause a bit of good-humoured mayhem by rearranging everyone’s schedules, then I must also have been able to use my x-ray vision to detect a broken audio cable when we were supposed to rehearse our songs for the big school anniversary gala evening. Well, this is not how it works. In order to solve a complex problem one has to apply the scientific method. First you have to carefully observe the situation; then you develop one or several hypotheses that would explain the situation; and finally you test your hypotheses against the actual evidence and come to a conclusion. All this takes time and patience, and for me it usually takes more time with people constantly peeking over my shoulder and asking me how it’s going.
We were down in my room in the basement, the place the others insisted on referring to as Underground Zero. One day Julian had plucked the expression out of thin air, and Tummy and Ginger had eagerly adopted it as an oh-so-clever name for our totally not secret headquarters as if we were the bloody Famous Five or something.
I will readily admit that Underground Zero was a bit of a mess. It wasn’t dirty or anything. I actually kept the place rather tidy, getting rid of pizza boxes, candy wrappers, and empty bottles every night after the others had gone home, and I vacuumed it at least once a week. But it was crowded with equipment. There was the TV and the stereo, my three computers—two desktops and a laptop—there were three different games consoles, there was my drum kit in the corner, and the guitar racks and the microphone stands, and of course the PA system and the loudspeakers. And there were 124 metres of cable to connect it all. If the PA didn’t make a sound, it could be due to a multitude of reasons. It would take me a while to sort it all out, so I was sort of glad that the others had found ways to entertain themselves while I was plugging and unplugging cables.
I wasn’t in a hurry. As long as Julian was waiting for the Pope to arrive in Tegucigalpa, no band rehearsal was going to happen anyway. Julian had this very strange fascination with all sorts of rituals, religious or otherwise, from royal weddings to common funerals to Olympic opening ceremonies to general elections to the State Opening of Parliament by Her Majesty the Queen. I once made the mistake to let him walk me past Buckingham Palace at 11 a.m. on a weekday, and he had to stop and watch the bloody Changing of the Guard, even though he had seen it a million times before and it was exactly the same every single time. But he couldn’t help it. All you had to do was to give him a bunch of people in uniforms, walking and talking in funny, idiosyncratic ways, and he was mesmerized like a five-year-old in front of a lit Christmas tree.
Now he was having one of his little discussions with Tummy about God and the Bible. While it was always entertaining to see Julian quip about anything, and Tummy excelled in his role as prime example of what years of religious indoctrination could do to the mind of an innocent but impressionable child, I usually zoned out pretty quickly whenever they had their conversations about religion. I neither had the time to deal with God, nor had I any interest. God had abandoned me when my mum had died of cancer, and I hadn’t missed him ever since.
Julian had never abandoned me.
He had always been kind of weird, though. A psychiatrist probably would have described him as a bipolar obsessive-compulsive hyperactive autistic genius. He was shy and timid around strangers, and socially awkward, but always kind and friendly. I had never seen him get angry at anyone or anything. I don’t know if he wasn’t capable of anger, or if he was just good at hiding it. Either way, he would have made a perfect Jedi knight. He’d never let his emotions get in the way of his reasoning. Nor had I ever seen him raise his voice at anyone or for any reason. He was always so calm, so quiet; his voice smooth and soothing. I had never heard him shout out loud until that evening when we were at Underground Zero for a band rehearsal that wasn’t meant to happen due to a broken audio cable and an event that would shake the world to its foundations.
I was on the floor under my desk and just about to locate
the reason for the dead silent PA, when all of a sudden the sound of Julian’s voice made me jump. It’s obviously not recommendable to jump while kneeling under a desk, but I couldn’t help it. I always have to jump at loud or unexpected noises. This one was as unexpected as it was loud, and it was followed by Julian’s roaring laughter. Julian wasn’t exactly the LOL type. A subtle smile, maybe a little chuckle, usually marked the height of his amusement. If he was literally laughing out loud, it could only mean that something very extraordinary must have happened.
Rubbing the bruise on my head, I crawled out from under my desk and went over to the TV where Julian was still laughing like a Tickle Me Elmo, while Tummy was staring at the TV with crisp crumbs falling out of his wide open mouth, and Ginger took the name of the Lord in vain.
“Oh my God!”
I was about to ask what had happened, but the answer to my question was already right there on the TV screen, a ten-second video clip being replayed over and over again and commented on by a stunned, aghast, and somewhat inappropriately excited news reporter.
The Pope, as he was disembarking his aircraft at Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa, had stumbled, fallen down the boarding stairs, and cracked his skull on the tarmac.
He was dead.
The Gospel According to Ginger – 2
Does God exist?
Why, of course He does.
God is real. He created the heavens and the Earth, and He’s all knowing, all powerful, kind and gentle and loving. As long as you don’t piss him off, because then He can get very angry to the point where He’s ready to destroy the whole of His creation like a sulky little child and kill everyone, even those who never sinned, who never did anything wrong. I wonder what the Pope must have done to piss off God so much that He would push him down the stairs, live in front of millions people.
God is very real.
In the minds of some people.
Idolism Page 2
