Two Masters

“Reason is the greatest enemy faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but, more often than not, struggles against the divine word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”

—Martin Luther

Two Masters

Sometime in the late aughts, a colleague abruptly quit watching Lost when the show’s outré premise, paired with its contempt for the laws governing time and space, sapped his suspension of disbelief. “The Island,” the show’s epicenter, was a paranormal enclave. John Locke, a messianic caricature, rose from the grave, for Christ’s sake. The shit some people will believe, amiright?! Then again, the colleague in question believed in Satan, a supernatural super-villain whose Achilles Heel is right-minded reflection regarding his existence. The Devil’s penance for plotting to dethrone the Most High was dominion over The Other Place. Inexplicably, Yahweh, sadistic enough to slay every living thing on Earth save for the ark’s souls upon experiencing creator’s remorse, chose to spare Satan and his minions post coup, despite his omniscience forewarning him that they aim to try again.

In 1996, Mother Mary’s visage begrimed a commercial building’s window in Clearwater, Florida. Rational adults suspected corroding metallic elements within the window’s coating; future “Trump supporters” promptly credited the supernatural.

By 2000, the curio had long been forgotten. Until, that is, a collegiate classroom discussion coaxed it out of obscurity. Its locale had always stoked my incredulity more than the phenomenon itself, and I said so. An irked classmate hissed, “Why couldn’t it happen in Clearwater?” Patronizingly, I replied, “Fine, it didn’t happen in nearby Saint Augustine, home to our nation’s oldest Catholic church, it happened in a Conservative jerkwater snowbird retreat.”

Either you’re a rationale adult, or you’re not. Either God lives in a realm inaccessible to science or he Kool-Aid Man crashes into ours at will. Either Yeshua, Abba, and Rukha are one supreme being, or they’re three distinct beings. Either you back the bleeding-heart liberal who preached “Turn the other cheek,” or you worship the Old Testament ogre who sanctioned Moses’s genocide of the Midianites, sparing only “the young girls who are virgins.” Either you’re a moral person, or you’re a person requiring religion to cow you into morality. To quote the book of Matthew, “No man can serve two masters.”