You know how news anchors have lots of sheets of paper scattered around on their desks that they shuffle periodically even though they read everything that they have to say off the Teleprompter? That’s like the Bible for those that talk to God direct. Not given this advantage, I’m left to look up through the black branches of the trees, the wrinkles and cracks on the face of the winter sky. Mind you, this is just my posture of boredom, since without the divine Teleprompter the Gospels for me is a book whose authors, after telling their story once, thought it was so good that they decided to tell it three more times. It’s a good thing writers of bloated biographies haven’t thought of this. Then again, the life of the Savior, even with being told four times, only gets 175 pages in the New Oxford Bible, whereas the life of Mahler apparently merits several thousand despite only being told once.

In any case, I ask spiritual questions not when looking up at the sky but when beating small children, since I feel the most kinship to God then. And I ask myself: when will the loan come due? Because in giving over the earth originally to a band of asset-less nomadic maniacs out of Africa God made a loan that was decidedly subprime. Fortunately a total lack of scruples can be just as good as solid equity and, after burning off all the other branches on the hominid family tree above the level of advanced ape, humanity was able to claim possession of every inch of earth not in the clutches of penguins and conceive itself a spiritual being, with even its most sordid rivalries mediated by language and governed by laws, since all the rivals now came from the same species. In any event, God, not having been born the day before, but rather the previous week at the very least, had already protected himself in this investment by collating all this accumulation of sin along with the original debt and off-loading it to a Special Purpose Entity of his own: Jesus.