May I Speak With God, Please?

Mike Tyson, Jim Bakker, Charles Colson, and lots of less famous people have all met him—God, that is. In a church, mosque, or synagogue? While communing with nature? At the scene of some holocaustic disaster? During an operating room out-of-body experience? Of course not. They met God while serving time for willful, malicious crimes against society.

Sounds logical, of course. Just about every human being since the beginning of recorded history has shared the single, archetypal goal of obtaining an audience with the Divine One, so out of all these scantillions of lurching, stumbling, George Romerian souls, which ones are awarded the eternal—not to mention pre-terminal—grand prize? Criminals?

We who have struggled bravely in an unincarcerated condition—and I include myself, since holding cells don’t count—to maintain virtuous, unselfish lives, can only hope to meet our maker after our life-sapped bodies have collapsed and our frantic spirits await their summoning. But there’s no guarantee. We may end up toiling next to Richard Nixon in a subterranean tape restoration lab or seated behind a dozing Jack Kennedy at an infernally eternal lecture on marital infidelity.

And these fiery scenarios give painful rise to the question of why these people are being contacted by God rather than by the Evil One? And, furthermore, if jailed malefactors are conversing with the Heavenly Father, does this mean that those who aspire to magnanimity can expect to be schmoozing with Satan? Will a leering Lucifer start accompanying Mother Teresa on her leper colony tours? Will there be a Black Knight riding in the Billy Graham crusade? And most unthinkable of all, will the name B. Elzebub show up on a mailbox in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood? Could this pattern of spiritual intervention for the iniquitous simply be a celestially sponsored part of the prison rehabilitation process? And does this imply that God is, indeed, a Liberal? I mean, he is reputed to be extremely tolerant and very heavily into saving people from themselves. Then, of course, there are the long hair, beard and sandals. So what does this make the Conservatives? Children of a lesser God? And Newt, the anti-Christ (literary suspension of disbelief optional here)?

And if there is accuracy in my assertion, is it fair to continue to reward these terrorizing transgressors with this consecrated treatment? Is there no limit to the depths of disgusting human seepage who would merit this theistic therapy? Is Charlie Manson a good candidate? Had he been caught and locked away, would Hitler have qualified? Dr. Mengele? Well, then, to raise the stakes of turpitude a litter higher, how about Nazi mimes? Child-molesting used car salesmen? Puppy-pummeling attorneys? Leona Helmsley? Axe-murdering cloggers? Don King? Accordion-playing rapists? Kathie Lee Gifford? And Cody? Where will it all end?

Perhaps, the most disturbing premonitive thought that I have is that since more and more politicians are serving time, that they will now be eligible for these heavenly encounters, resulting in the eventual release upon a helpless populace of individuals with an even more exaggerated sense of megalomania than they had before.

Campaign commercial: “George Graft for Senator—the Chosen One. What more do you need to know?”

And on a more grass-roots level, will ordinary citizens now start committing crimes because incarceration is possibly the only guarantee of salvation? Will lawyers immediately capitalize—as they are generally predisposed to do—by offering advice on which crimes will assure the greatest likelihood of Godly interdiction with the least punishment?

Will O.J. deliver a bombshell when he reveals that he was visited by God in jail? His claim that God is a soft-spoken, 300-pound black man will result in Mark Fuhrman’s attempted suicide. Geraldo Rivera will counter that in O.J.’s obviously confused state, he mistook former football player turned minister, Rosie Greer, for the Holy One.

Larry King will announce he will have both God and O.J. on the show together. Both will later be bumped for Tom Hanks, although Johnny Cochran will insist he was going to cancel the interview anyway because God’s P.R. people wouldn’t give him a list of questions he might pose to his client.

It’s quite obvious that we have not only a very inequitable situation on our hands, but one that may portend the direst consequences. It’s also painfully obvious that we cannot prevent God from communing with people of this ilk. No doubt, he has some long range ideas that he doesn’t plan to share with us. Banking on the “lick ‘em, join ‘em” theory, our only option is to do whatever we can to enhance our odds of communicating with him ourselves.

I am, therefore, asking you, law-abiding readers of Charleston’s Free Time to join me in demanding the legalization of all hallucinogenic drugs for religious purposes (the Indians knew what they were doing). And in the meantime, all they can do is arrest us and put us in jail—we can’t lose! Let us inhale.

(Originally published October 1995)