The existential pastor

[AbsurdRandomness]

The time, the time had come to wake. The dead slept still and waited peacefully to breathe again. The people, the crowd, they all gathered around. They waited for the bells to bring the church to life once again. Ding dong, sing song, it shouted through the fog, we all lifted our heads to nod at Pastor Tom. The crowd, the crowd entered the church. It was the small town's most celebrated hour in this peaceful time of ears.

The people, the people came to "hi". The priest read from the Gospel and sprayed the same message on each day. And he admitted on this day that he would retire from his post at last. "I am a man of faith, deep faith, but no more can my voice send through the dark these days."

Who then, who then shall run this church! Who then shall share with us the blessed words of Father God? Pastor Tom was ready to announce the new replacement. His name's Brandon, he moved here recently. Doesn't say a word, so contemplative, wondering what's on his mind.

"Morning everyone." Sunday's chapel, the first one with new man. The last priest wore black but this one chooses to wear white. The choir did its thing and the people clapped as they do. No one had expectations but all sat in vivid fascination.

"How lovely, how lovely, to speak the word of God to this wonderful crowd." They watched as he spoke of the treatise predestination. That a person is chosen before being born their final day. That with each breath some souls come close to hell and God allows and likes it.

"So there you have it. You're going to heaven or hell and it's already decided for you so you don't even get to make the choice. You can pretend to have made the choice, but if a divine being tells you you are to live it knows how you are to die and the fate of it all before time as we know it."

The crowd looked shocked. Surely this man spoke of less inflammatory matters? To say anyone is going to hell in this church takes balls.

The new priest held the Bible up on the podium. He looked straight at the cover page and held it just over his eyes. "This book is holy and it is whole, but we humans simply are not." He slammed the Bible down. The crowd watched disgraced.

When the sermon was over, the people were mad. This is the new priest? This negative young hooligan? Damning us? What rotten force does he think he is anyway?

The priest went to his home and took his Bible to his office. This book was all he had ever known once. These pages and lines of fine script. But once you've read every page and every line, there's still questions that don't have answers.

Why this complicated mess of an elongated metaphor? Why these strange scenes and all these mean screams? Why the wrath of God upon his own?

The waves. The waves. The empty words array. This opportunity to teach found him in deep despair. He sighs, he nods, he wonders what comes next. He wants to walk in there and teach a simple code to us.

A simple code? How strangely opportune? That he could not come up with one simple code from the book. This mass, this mass array of codes. It sends the rockets leeching through the stratosphere now.

And space. He sees it soar in space. The stars, the moon, the sun, they answer you are the key. The key. The key. Which he forgot to see. Is not to worship anyone but love yourself in whole, you know?

The people gathered again. The church bells rang. This gathering had fewer folks. No one wishing to receive the disappointment. He nods, he looks around and sighs. No one wants truth but now they'll get a dose of it.

"Only 30 of us here today. More quiet than the usual 60. We all are here to learn. We want the path to salvation already. Why must I wait till I die to go to heaven? Because suffering on earth isn't meant to be forever.

I think heaven exists in this realm. Once you find yourself. I know I preach for a Christian church, but I don't preach to love anyone but you. You find God's love when you find it for you. You find Jesus's love when you realize he probably should've loved himself more and maybe he wouldn't have enacted his own dramatic martyresque death and enslaved the minds of millions to a doctrine of forgiveness malnourished into a doctrine of fear and anger at what we assume to be God's wrath. I say God's wrath is the human self's choice to receive. You who call upon his wrath will have it, you who call upon his love will have it. Ask god what you want, and what you think you deserve you will have. What you think you deserve must come from a place of true self love to ever reach higher consciousness."

A man in the stands raised his hand to speak, but he seemed reluctant to argue at all. "If I may, I think you should stick to the scripture, it hasn't failed us yet and I don't see why you think it will."

The priest shook his head. These men, these fiends, these allies of decree, are stuck on code instead of living in simplicity. The holy book can't be correct if so many wear it to their hearts and still remain unable to find the goodness and clarity of freedom from suffering.

"No. You see, this book traps us. It keeps us caged inside -- it wants us all to study it as textbook universal morality. It's important to develop, you want your own values, you want your opinions not the masses of shared unitary blockages in dogma. You get stuck by the code that goes in circles, and get encircled by the code that wraps in a line. If you head straight, you will eventually arrive at your path to journey. And when you journey for your spirit, there is no holy scripture, just the wisdom of the heart protruding that which knows to be the good and truth."

Another person from the stands prepared to argue: "Listen sir, not to interrupt your sermon but I don't follow this new religion of yours."

"WHAT RELIGION! Have I even mentioned religion today? I am DONE with religion. The holy books from outside have NOT SERVED MY HAPPINESS." And the pastor walked off stage, with a loud crash he stormed from the church site, slamming behind him the door.

Never wanna spell it out.
I just wanna say that it's all my fault. I could never spell it out.
I don't wanna fix your tie.
NEVER WANT TO SAY WE'RE SAD
THANKFUL THAT WE GOT SOME CHANCE
I know you won't get back your time,
I wish that you could take it back.
Beyond all ideas of right and wrong there is a field,
I will be meeting you there.

[AbsurdRandomness]

The pastor resigned the next day. He had had it with the front row hecklers impeding his brooding speech that was supposed to grab and tear the hearts from the inside out, but loneliness cages his fire to fight in battle against a jungle so inept and candlelit and brutal that it forces a disconnection from the body, mind, and spirit altogether. The call of the wild was upon him to make plans that will send him on a real treasure hunt for untold gems even he had never heard of before.

That night he had a dream. In it, his ex-lover appeared and held out her hand and showed him three rocks, one Crystal blue clear and bright and cerulean, one red like a spaghetti meatball, one silver like the shape of a Stonehenge. These three rocks, she said, were signs of the three elements he and no man has yet discovered on Earth, that he can discover should he take his presence to the fields and dance with the grey moonlight like the wolf he always was inside his green stocked shell of war torn battered paper personalities combined in anger, fused in terror by the depth of the mind and self as a youth. He woke up in fear of the journey he may have to take, and soothed his fear in loving warmth of knowing that it's a journey all humans take either in a past, present, or future life-- but the spirit in journey will reach a culmination for all human souls inevitably, or else the shiny white diamond he worships above his head is not love at all, but he can't let that go, he can't remember the fear he once worshipped in the chilling black nights of trembling sweat foamed fear from his gurgling crying child self.

He fumbled to find his footing in the 3AM hallway of his big beautiful home he shared with himself and no one else in an attempt to find peace through isolation which justifies only that sadness is a self-created torture machine he can't stop munching on while friends stare at their wives beautiful bosoms content with marriage content with social media classroom rage social doctrine controlling empowering the ego with stone cold dramas to swallow as values that separate the soul from itself in a struggle to conform to the powerless primadonnas ruling the bimbo washed television hosts of modeling singing acting superstar teenage girls. He didn't ask for depth, he demanded that each person who qualifies themselves to converse with him on his soul journey be capable of unmasking the facade around them, not nearly ever mastering the facade they wear inside themselves.

When sunlight beamed through stabbing translucent knives onto his bed from his halfway emasculating bedroom curtains, the pastor had formed no semblance of a plan as to where he would take the adventurous joy of his soul calling youth for its personal advent through the dangerous limits balancing that achey wakey moment between living and the dead; beyond blackness and unconsciousness we settled as followers of the irrational and somewhat disquieting belief that unconsciousness is the unperceiving void of infinity to cease all joy from the heart of man, denying his spirit, taunting his soul journey, staring with indignant anger at the human folly of unknowing intuitive comprehension to the primeval source of consciousness and its unceasing godlike nature in every perceiving being.

The pastor poured himself a tingy glass of Red Wine. Here's a toast to the destruction of sea bodies in the poisoning drowning flesh of alcoholism, and here's the cynicism and negativity to smile at and know it's the directional whirlpooling trap of anger that surrounds the human heart as life after life resisted the equilibrium of a balanced being of bayhood bathos in nothing new nobody nodded politely pacing pretending to smile surrendering to shrouds of selfless seething emotion emanating effervescently entirely unperplexed, uninformed and uniformed uninformity. We'll gargle like gargoyles as we feast on the festivities, the lime tinted shots of vodka, gin, and tequila, celebrating like celebrities on a cellophane car crash of cylinders and squares piling on top of squares on top of triangles falling on pyramids inside pyramids, the scolding hot three dimensional wavelength of its volume fitting one infinite triangles piled one on top of another in an imaginary spellstorm of the atomless consciousness hologram.

Cherry's watering her plants in her backyard next door, carefully weaving its drops upon drops in a sea wave artist fashion, resembling the smooth painter who painted her skin so free of lesions and scars and depravity and paleness but still covered in eyeliner and lipstick echoing a loveless facade to wear towards women to hide their real color from the dark scheming jealous envious eyes of men who stop to notice only when a woman is behaving unwomanly and the man is behaving unmanly, tearing and yearning at each other's unbalanced feminine masculine energies projecting insecurities of self deserted lost portraits of what it means to be the Aphroditean spirit all humans source fully declayed in.

The pastor walked through his town nodding at nodders passing by the passer-byers, sucking his own pacifier, feeling like the defeated pacifist swimming across the Pacific Ocean at an ozone of Great White Sharks craving to color and carve his flesh with the freshly wooden banter of religious ceremony centering candid disapproving looks to shun and the shame the man who distanced from a book never promised to his crying newborn fetus at birth, never forced on fun but fueled by the fury of fear in its ferocious fangblade. To love is to accept all, except those who don't abide by my absurd aboriginean traditions of course, leave those sinners to meet their maker in the match made in hell.

Speaking of hell, old man Tom's house crept by the corner in a ceaselessly self cradling depository of cement and concrete walls to hide the waves of wonderless waiting for his wartime wooden ass to die and be found weeks later in the dungeon of his dining room with cardiac failure succeeding in its quest to disappoint the dastardly dying dwelling Devils dreamily inhabiting us in our indigo seeking lights like idiots intimately interested in finding the most stupid senseless seranades to sandalwood in a crowdy small potty business man bundle of breaking news and boiling hearts depending on the number line to rise and if not then to row into a suicide of rapid one by one financial and economic rape by one of the rad rule makers they screwed over or owed at the last octopus garden's silent sheet of sweat storms.

So as the businessmen bawl like babies building the Tower of Babel only to be banished by the breeze of their own blocked bodies, the pastor walked past the Diner where the kids went to talk about how their generation has been gifted the greens of a healthy gene pool with Internet connection to send them on a cosmic exploration of the universe around and inside them via their 4 inch monitored crystal balls they balefully take for granted as a single error page will grate their teeth in Anguish and despair that they must wait whole seconds longer than they densely half expected with the global consciousness handing them all wants on an invisible silver plate like characters of the Jetsons who for some reason feel like Flintstones.

[AbsurdRandomness]

A young girl stood outside the Diner, far off from the emotional calamity of dumb precocious flirtations in a state of tears, like the spawn of a tirade of tyrant bodied ape-like males dressed in jerseys and jewelry.
"Father, could you comfort me?" She said in bleeding tears from the nose mouth and eyes. "I could. But I would only be serving to victimize you further with words of preachy half-coughed sweetness to hot Caramel ice cream Sundaes. He broke your heart because you let him." She weeped again harder, this time making a fist, "He said he loved me!" Again the father retarded his sense of remorse. "He said she said they did they didn't who is who did who are where are what is what isn't, child, you need to stop listening to the words of these people as if they speak to you how you must feel towards your own heart. If he never could have made you cry then he never would have made you cry." The pastor walked away and the young girl continued to cry to herself for a moment, when to her hellish disgrace she felt sickened that this dick could dump and destroy her and how could she let his ego triumph when the treatise of wanting between lovers is that the least amount of love applied controls all aspects of commitment.

Across the street from the Diner he passed the outdoor shopping mall where materialistic money-mom hungry hungry hippos scattered their sacred sanctimonious souls into confetti discount prices, to their utmost PLEASURE the discount prices paraded the shoulder blade of each wanting woman of poorly invested wealth with the gift of eternal youth via the replacement of leather and silk and jeans and skirts and blouses because these finely braided pieces of lovingly stitched sweaters sometimes said "I love my daughter" which reminded the pastor not to look with cynical delight at all the things that derive from human passion, no matter how easily definable and repetitive the inventions of commerce seemed to him, still in the subtlest of stares and the strongest of subtle sympathies, he saw the sadness permeating them quickly bouncing into a neverland of blissful ignorance because if they invest on their mom or dad or husband or wife or daughter or son and sister or brother, the universe can't help but sing with joy still at the waves of gratitude we still see hurricaning the Black Friday stampedes; love creates the commotion always.

A tear rolled down his eye. How he missed to smile at banality. And how he missed what he once remembered to be the sweetness of reality. He begins now to forget. To forget the sweet soothing sadness of love lending itself undividedly. How could he forget what it means to be loved? This quest to be alone was part of his spiritual purity, but who is a man not to miss the sound of a woman's voice? Who is he not to miss the sweet tender face, the stares. The stares into their eyes. Eternal stares into their eyes they stared into each other's eyes. Her eyes. Her eyes. We whispered from the start. Her eyes could see that he loved her but what a fool she is to love when she does not yet know to live.