I was a hitchhiker on the side of a dark highway, looking for the road to God, not even knowing if there was such a road — the desperation of the bereaved.
The truck was an oil tanker. My shadowy figure must have spooked the driver. He swerved violently, delivering me a glancing blow and sending me spinning across the shoulder of the road. The truck slammed into the concrete pilon of an overpass. The tanker exploded. It was an inferno. The driver was incinerated.
First responders described the scene as “sheer hell.”
I was taken to a local hospital, and from my hospital bed I watched the horror replayed on the eleven o’clock news.
The truck driver was a young man with a wife and three kids in Memphis. I am an old man who was selfishly searching for an unknown and probably nonexistent entity just so I could possibly be with my wife again.
The tragedy that befell the young truck driver and his family was so grotesquely unfair and unjust that I vowed never to venture on that road again.
I will be haunted by the guilt of his death until I die, but there is nothing I can do to change the tragedy of that night. All I can do now is give up my selfish, and let’s face it, pointless search for God.
Now I stay inside the hallowed confines of my bungalow on County Road 9. Hallowed because it contains the memory of my wife, the photos on the mantel, her dresses still hanging in the closet, her writing materials undisturbed on the desk, all of her belongings still intact. Nothing has been changed or removed.
This is where I will live out my days. This is my life. And this is my death.
Not only are people on Earth looking for God. Even the Sun is searching for God.
The Sun is speeding through our galaxy the Milky Way at 500,000 miles per hour in its cosmic hunt for the elusive Creator.
And get this! Not only the Sun, but the Milky Way itself is looking for God — it’s barreling through 500 billion galaxies at 2.2 million miles per hour.
Man, my head is spinning. That is one hell of a galactic God-hunt to beat all God hunts.
And yet — wait for it now — God is nowhere to be the found.
Is this perhaps not a clue? That God is a figment of the imaginations of fearful, desperate, eternal-life-seeking human beings.
I’m not saying that’s the situation, I’m just sayin’.
Comments to the contrary would be most welcome. I’m not saying there is no God, I’m just looking for help in believing as I deal with (and I’ll try to say this with as little self-pity as possible, which is probably impossible) the recent death of my wife; and the past deaths of my brothers and my son.
God, I gotta tell ya, Dude — [this is me at the top of Beacon Hill talking to the sky] — you are one dubious entity, an invisible and unknown force in the mind-bucking infinity of 100 billion galaxies.
Everyone agrees that the universe is a miracle of unfathomable mystery, and has been, and will always be an enigma within 100 billion enigmas throughout all of history, the work of someone or something that many of us refer to as God, namely you, Holy Dude.
But what I want to know is: Why the big mystery, God? Why do you leave your “creations” in a quandary of questions? We mugs on earth spend half our lives asking, Who or what is God? Does God exist? Is God dead? And so on and so forth.
Hey, Man, all I’m asking is, why don’t you put all these pitiful questions to rest by coming out of the Cosmic Closet and just laying it out like it is, Man. [You will notice, Dear Reader, that I am capitalizing Dude and Man etc out of respect — that’s the kind of guy I am.]
So the next thing that happens — and I couldn’t believe it because I was sort of kidding around on top of that hill talking to the sky in a sort of irreverent way — but I hear this voice in my head — not an actual voice, more like a thought-stream in my head.
And here’s the truly amazing thing: God turns out to be a Cool Dude — the way he talked or thought-streamed, reminded me of Rainbow Johnson, a flashy dressing black dude from back in my Detroit days who had the coolest collection of hats — Panamas, fedoras, homburgs, skimmers trilbies, bowlers, derbies.
Anyway this what I hear in my head:
Okay, here’s the deal, crazy dude on the hill, there is a Heaven and if you don’t kill anyone or hurt an animal or treat anyone horribly, you will end up in Heaven, but if you really mess up in a murderous way or any other bad-shit way, or if you’re a politician, you ain’t gettin’ into Heaven, you on your way to hell, boy — although I’ll let you in on a God-only-knows secret, there ain’t really no hell. If you totally fuck up your lives in a bad-shit way, you end up in Oblivion — an eternity of blackness, an endless void of nothingness, no reunions with loved ones, no memory of your past life, no sensation, no feelings, no nothing, baby, just like before you were born — you didn’t exist then and when you die bad, you won’t exist forever.
So, how do you like them apples, baby? Pretty grim, huh? Better to live in world of God and Heaven — call it make-believe if you want. It’s not that difficult, babe, all you got to do is — what’s the phrase fiction writers use? O, yeah, suspension of disbelief.
So, have a good rest of your life, man — and hey, be careful walking back down that hill.
Man, that was such an amazing experience on top of that hill — God turning out to be a Cool Guy and all.
I’ll tell you something — I sure as hell made my way back down that hill real careful like.
After hearing from God, I didn’t want to slip and fall to Oblivion, because just between you and me, I’ve done some things I ain’t proud of — nothing like murder of course or any of that bad-shit stuff God was talking to me, or thinking to me about, but you know, shit I’m not proud of, so I walked down that hill real careful because I wanted to get back down and make amends and find my way back up to Cool Dude God, man.
