2268. The questioner does not ask for example, “Father,
why is there so much suffering in Utah?” No, it is always about,
“Suffering in the world.” As if the troubled soul is actually concerned
about all those other people. These questions are always followed up
with illustrations of individual catastrophes and disasters, as if the
implication was that God, what ever he was like, took a droll pleasure
in famine, floods, and political terrorism.
2269. But Coromo did not wonder about the suffering of the rest of the inhabitants of the world, what he wanted to know was this, “Why on earth would I be special to God, and why does he concern himself about my affairs, and at the same time seems to be ignoring most everyone else.” Coromo was troubled by being especially singled out, unlike the pet Italian greyhound we mentioned in our previous story who, along with Ivan the Terrible, took their good fortune for granted as a matter of course.
2270. In short Coromo believed that God was watching over
all his affairs, guiding him and advising him at every turn just like
Odysseus was looked after and guided by Athena, and at the same time he
thought such ideas were silly nonsense and he was not only reluctant to
give voice to such ideas, but was embarrassed within himself, even to
think about it.
2271. Even as a child Coromo got into theological arguments with his Grandmother concerning this idea that God was pushing his nose into his personal affairs. Grandmother seemed to think that God existed as a kind of Google map application, although she would never have used that analogy, never having heard of Google maps, but God was like Google maps because all you had to do was ask the question about how to get from one place to another and...
2264. This is not the place to state the details of
Grandmother’s theology, and there would be no point to try to document
them because they were constantly changing. Take for example the idea of
Hell and eternal punishment. For Grandmother Hell might exist for fifty
years, and then one day cease to exist, and furthermore, she would say
with confidence that it never had existed. If you consider the source
of her theological notions, such ideas can not be considered unusual.
2265. For people like Coromo, and anyone else who has
been raised by a truly devout and truly religious person, life was a
perpetual conglomeration of impossible to answer questions. Like it or
not their minds have been branded from a time before they can remember
with a series of notions and ideas which are obviously absurd and
without foundation, and yet, regardless of the absurdity, they can’t
help but believe those ideas in there entirely.
2266. Thus we have a person like Coromo who felt that
everything he ever did was examined, considered and thought about by
some Divine personage of some sort, and at the same time he realized
that such an idea was silly as well as extremely egotistical. I use the
term “Divine personage” because in all the years Grandmother had been
indoctrinating Coromo and all her other children and grandchildren about
religious matters, she was never at all specific about it.
2267. The thought that troubled Coromo the most was the exact opposite of the question that shipwrecks everyone else's attempts to believe in God. Every priest and minister, monk and pastor is approached over and over again with the same question, which is, “Father, if God exists why is there so much suffering in the world.” This eternal question is put to some authority on such matters every day thousands of times.
2260. For Grandmother, therefore, faith was the currency
of the un-believer and of no interest to her. As I said when I first
mentioned her, she consulted her God about what to have for lunch, and
was happy to take His advice, and always consulted Him about matters
small and large. Here are her exact words about her ideas, as I can’t
say it any better.
2261. She summed it up in this way, “When I go to
sit in a chair, I do not pray that the chair be there, it’s there its
there. And if the chair not be there, I will be sure to fall on my
dairy-air.” For Grandmother, God was just as evident as her kitchen
table.
2262. Since Grandmother had direct access to her God by
way of conversation, just like Joan of Ark and other famous mystics and
visionaries, it meant that the various questions that arise in peoples
minds about God or the after life never bothered her because she was
able to find out answers to any questions of that sort by simply
consulting the voices in her head
2263. Needless to say this put her at odds with all of the Doctors of the church who have, from time immemorial, been spinning out their theories and assumptions about what this or that Bible passage really means. Grandmother had no such unanswered questions.
2256. He could just as well spell the words out for me if
He wanted to but He says, “Your spelling is never going to improve if I
always spell out everything for you a priori.” Then I would have to go
to the dictionary and look up what “a prior” means. Then she asked me if
I knew what a priori meant.
2257. So I said to Grandmother, “A prior is Latin, and it
means something like, ‘to go before,’ and it is used to indicate
something that is obviously true and therefore does not need to be
proved. It I say, ‘everyone knows that two plus two is four,’ that would
be an example of something which is a prori, because we are born
knowing it.”
2258. “Just so,” exclaimed Grandmother, “and for me God
is a thing which is a priori, in that I was born knowing all about it.”
“But for the rest of us Grandmother,” I said, “God is something ‘a
posteriori,’ because we have to find out about it later through
instruction.”
2259. “Let me tell you this,” said Grandmother, “It is a priori or nothing, everything else is pointless. What I have seen all my life is that everyone just pretends to believe, and they pretend to pray, and they also pretend to be everything that they think they are. But it isn’t their fault since they were not born with a voice in their heads correcting their spelling and punctuation. Why I was picked out I don’t know, and it can’t be helped.”
2252. As devout as she was she never went to church and
had a very antagonistic attitude toward churches in general. When she
was very young she went through a period where she would attend church
constantly, but at some point her attitude changed completely. She
became very agitated sitting in the congregation and would even mutter
to herself.
2253. She was only thirteen at the time, but she started
to have her own peculiar ideas about God, Jesus, the Saints, and church
doctrine. At first she kept her ideas to herself, but before her
fourteenth birthday she had an altercation with our preacher and he had
to expel her from the congregation.
2254. She told me once, although I am sure she never told
anyone else, that it was at that time she began to hear voices. She did
not phrase it in that exact way, but I suppose that is what it really
was. To her it was God speaking to her. This god of hers would interrupt
her about mundane things, correct her behavior, and even criticize her
spelling and punctuation when she was in school.
2255. When I asked her how she knew it was not her own voice she said disingenuously, “God is always using words I don’t understand, and I have to look them up in the dictionary. Sometimes I can’t spell the words, but he helps me by sounding them out phonetically, and making me guess at the spelling.”
2248. But Grandmother did not get to express this dubious
and sentimental idea of life and the world, and instead she managed to
convey the exact opposite by only giving expression to the first few
words of her lecture. What had happened was the return of some of the
symptoms of her stroke of two weeks previous.
2249. Grandmother, being the kind of person she was, took
her own advice and her own medicine and plunged into her Bible in
search of some quotation having to do with the deaf and dumb.
2250. Before we go on and recount the effect this
encounter with Grandmother had on Coromo I want to dispel any
misconceptions I may have inadvertently created about Grandmother’s
history and behavior. I am afraid I may have created the impression that
she was a fraud or a con-artist, abusing the simplicity of her
neighbors to make a few dollars with her displays of concern combined
with piety, but that would be incorrect.
2251. You may think to yourself, “Sure, she was an old woman who had a deep faith in her religion, whatever peculiar sect it was,” and there again you would be wrong. Grandmother did not simply believe in God and it had nothing to do with faith. Grandmother knew for a fact that God existed, and she had no truck with any talk about faith of the sort doled out constantly to unbelievers.
2244. What she wanted, although she knew it was unlikely,
was that Coromo should follow in her footsteps and take over her
practice when she died. She hoped that when Coromo saw how much money
she had made, and thought about how important her work in the community
was, he would mend his ways and give up the picture painting before it
was too late.
2245. With this in mind she began her lecture with the
words, “Coromo I want you to see the world...” You will notice that the
foregoing phrase ends with three periods, rather than the usual full
stop. It ends this way because her phrase was incomplete. If she had
been able, she wanted to say...
2246. She wanted to say, “Coromo I want you to see the
world the way I see the world. I want you to realize that the village
you were born in and in which you grew up is larger and grander that any
other place in the world. Our village is just as big as you are able to
make it in your own mind.”
2247. To find any fault with our village and to look elsewhere for fulfillment in your life is not any measure of the smallness of our village, but only an expression of the smallness of your own mind, and since your mind is not a small one, you will always find contentment right here at home.
