Patron Saints of Slow Learners

Just a passing thought that washed ashore to the beach of my mind this morning, from an alter ego inside me that I choose to address as Captain Snark - body surfer of chaos extraordinaire and the first nominee for COTY/"Cynic Of The Year" - who, knowing the COTY election process to be flawed if not ouright rigged or up for sale to highest bidder, refused the nomination and swore to have nothing to do with the contest. The podium is yours, Captain Snark

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Back at my beginnings I felt lost and sought to be found. Now I find myself caught in loops and wish to be flung free. My taste in spiritual matters I suspect changed over time, as my attention wanders to alight on different topics. I no longer sweat with concern for immortality at any low Wal Mart level of brand product quality - not if I see living eternally as running around in the same uninteresting circles; not if immortality means seeing myself coming up to a fixed choice before I get to it. Not if means an eternal life that I would rather bring back to Heaven's Customer Service desk for a refund or credit for replacement.

When I was young and my odometer was barely budged I encouraged myself to admire lives of Early Church heroes - apostles, martyrs and saints. Feeling back then quite damned I was, and strongly in need of redemption. I suspect I am still not done with the need for redemption. Not nearly, by a long shot. But a touch older now with a few more turns on my wheels of being, I find myself curious about Bhuddist Bhodisattvas. I regard these as patron saints of slow learners. You know, champions for folks who ain't got a snowball in hell's chance of learning a new thing or making a needed good change in this life if they applied the rest of their whole dang life to it.

That includes the likes of me and my prospects for learning how to play slide guitar and blues harmonica - not likely in this lifetime. And not even if my life depended on it.

Well maybe somewhat likely to learn some little thing more if my life really did depend on it. I mean could learn enough to fake some Texas Juke Joint blues on an open mic night at a college town coffeehouse. Easy to do for broke audiences with low standards. And too much empathy because everybody there is either up next or just was up.

All of us coffehouse followers are devotees of the Cult of Mediocrity, there at open mic night hoping for Redemption via Art, with each attendee a member of the Supreme College of Electing Cardinals. At least for that one night we are electors. And if there is a merciful God in Heaven, you could do worse than to look there, at coffehouse open mic night, for proof of Heaven's Mercy - given how wretched are some performances, truly worthy of damnation, but no lightning bolts of Judgement coming down to smoke the would be rockers, folk singers, poets, bluesmen and blueswomen. 'Scuse me, wanna bees not wood bees; a different kind of winged insect here.

But I digress. Again. Back to Bhodisattvas.

See, if some burly Bhodhisattvas were on your team, that game time clock of one life to go won't matter (or won't matter so much). You will never run out of time with Bhoddies like you do hanging with the skinny saints of Christendom. Saints and Bhoddisatvas.

Why all the extra rounds with Bhoddies? Easy that one - reincarnation. Another dealt hand of poker, another spin of the roulette wheel. Only trouble is all the forgetting you do between rounds. You are supposed to be wiped clean of everything you've learned except for some vauge kind of karmic score that promotes or demotes you. Sorta like moving up from AA football league to AAA league. Eventually you go overthe top, pro and all that - and you get to retire in Nirvanna, if you wanna (your option though, or you can choose come back as a Bhodhisattva - a spiritual sportscasting commentator for the unwashed masses).

Two very different kinds of spiritual heroes here. One kind of these spiritual heroes if he retires and to stay busy opens a Texas watering hole (beer joint) he calls it "The Next Chance Saloon". The other champion of a competing brand of spirit goods decides to run something he calls "The Last Chance Saloon". Can you guess which of these joints is St Peter's; and on which side of the street is Siddhartha Gautama's watering hole?

Old hell fire is getting little mind share nowadays except in niche markets long committed to the product brand. Comes across a little musty to public tastes, what us all having growed up in an America soaked in splendors of post Depression material comfort. Spoiled people like product brands planned with more adaptation to the constant drift of their tastes, more novelty; fickle is what they are, the spoilt demographic.

The smell of brimstone frightens few nowadays. Me it frightens less than before even though by time's passage I s/b closer to its source - or it portal of entry, if not its sulfur delivery dock - to catch a wary down wind whiff. If I were to engage a Transworld Lucid Dreaming Show (a Consciousness Cable Channel spirit service not soon to be offered by HBO) I would expect to soon see some of Hell's red workmen bursting open palletized yellow stacks of sulfur, sacks who too must suffer an entropic fate - be burst asunder and fed into the fiery furnaces of Hell, where they can see to it by golly that Human Souls too can know just what that feels like, to be neatly and impersonally palletized just to be undone and burst and burned up as fuel in the engine of some obscure machine of Hellish bureaucratic purposes.

Again all this is to say that by now, perhaps I s/b catching a wary down wind whiff of Hell's docks. I would expect folks really coming near to the shores of brimstone lakes to experience something like the smell you get when you are nearing a prosperous Jack in the Box franchise. Think of those always busily filled baskets of french fries nestling down into the brown foaming froth, strips of potato starch efficiently processed within Cartesian squared corner stainless steel pots of crackling oil. So might be the roiling scent of souls boiled in the brimstone pits of Judgment, were you close enough to tell by the smell.

My stomach gets to turning once I got within sniff range of those fast food fry joints whose grease traps don't quite conceal the true nature of how their processed fare ends up at the store's glittery front. And seeing my life's midlife crisis point recede over the horizon (in my rearview mirror) you'd think I'd be closer in for a sniff of the brimstone lakes by now; screams from sulfurous torture have a way of echoing across dimensions, I'd think.

If you don't think that is so my friend, try an East Texas oldtime hellfire and brimstone revival meeting. You have to find one run by a really gifted evangelist, one really seasoned by a turnaround from authentic hard living. On the right suggestive summer's eve, he can have you thinking you really are downwind of Hell's Gates. And - if in the End he is right, well then.... you were given the overlook tour via his preaching brochure, and that well ahead of Your Time; so "Man Up" on it, walk through the Gates of Hell upright to your fate, and don't act so surprised come That Later Time.

But no such gut revulsions do I sense. Not lately at least.

This begs a question: am I being awakened in a new stage of life, wiping sleep from my eyes to see something from a better prespective? Or am I just drifted towards the in fashion flavor of spirituality, a noncomitting perspective on pseudo-suffering?

Maybe I am just caught between being up wind of a real Hell and down wind of an imagined Jack Kerouac's Burger Joint and Sports Bar. Or vice versa inside out. That too. A lot may or may not be riding on the answer to this question.

I want and choose to have fun with such questions as I turn up the heat on a whole basket of them. Onion Rings of Ontology, Curly Twists of Jesuitical Casuistry, Time Temporal Tempura, Corn Dog Causality Bites - all served up with the condiments of Curiosity and Metaphysical Mirth. For dessert, I'll veer away from the somber and serious sauces, indulge myself in chocolate dipped jokes and riddles.

I'll be checking in at the Next Chance Saloon after sundown, and then later at the Last Chance Saloon. That I think is the most logically sequenced itinerary for this soul's weekend getaway.

See you there, maybe - if so I'll buy us a round of drinks to lubricate the discussion and how about some fried appetizers, too?