the way kathy lee needed regis, that’s the way i need jesus.

“as men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so their creeds are a disease of the intellect.”

- Ralph-to-tha-Waldo Emerson

= I like this for so many reasons. and, as with any idea for which I can devise more than one reason, I shall eschew (it’s a vindictive avoidance, not a cocktail nut) the paragraph form in favor of a list =

a) the notion of creed as disease is fascinating to me. i mean, the bad creeds are obviously bad, but deigning the whole thing as systemic badness flies in the face of how I think about creed: a creed is a rallying cry (a gnarly mel gibson shouting “FREEDOM!” as he gets skewered) or it is a way to sum up an impractical ideology (by the people, for the people) . but when I stop, drop, and think, it occurs to me that Creed always seemed nice because Creed is always surrounded by more obviously disease-like clichés and sayisms. nobody will ever try and elevate when it rains it pours or apples and oranges or i’m only giving you this blowjob if you pay my rent to the level of creed because such sayings are too situational and too pesky; a creed must sound good ‘round the clock, not just when it’s sucky outside or is the first of the month. if I’m to think of creed as disease, cliché and truism must be less harmful, like pink eye. or a rash. crabs, at worst.

b) I don’t know about the rest of you, but I really believed them when they told me that if I persist in calling my fries french, then the terrorists win.

c) song as creed: jesus loves me is one of the v. first songs you learn in sunday school, and it is, along with amazing grace, the most persistent – the last to leave your mind as you walk away. (the melody has been pleasantly re-worked since my boyhood days, and even now, as a sunday school teacher myself, it is the praise song that gives me the most immediate access to my heart.) but it is more than just declaration. jesus loves me, this i know: these words are re-assurance, they are reminder; but also they are creed – they tell me what I already know full well. and I am glad to hear it.

d) I heard this quote in an interview with harold bloom, who followed it with the staunch qualification of emerson as his prophet. he’s not one of mine, but maybe he will become so someday. I’ve always liked him. but the idea of a prophet seems incongruous with the idea of prayer as disease, or at least as a disease that is separate from a need. a prophet speaks truths that are eternal, truths that dangle their feet in spacetime before going off for lunch and then setting down someplace else. like unnecessary personification, a prophet’ truth tells illustratively of what has yet to come while being evocative in the present. like emerson. and like prayer.

e) to be clear, when I say prayer I mean good prayer; a prayer that has its own life, in the sense that it is to somehow aware that its destination is the omni-auditory ear of a presence that is unknowable. I don’t think of “dear god! dear god please let there be an empty parking space right in front of the building” as a prayer so much as a flailing cry, a bladder-filled scream through the peephole of You Will Open This Door Right Now! those don’t count. only occasionally do I know what does count; and I’m crappy at keeping track of it, but I know it when I say it. and I just don’t think of it as a disease of the will. an offering of the will, perhaps.

f) but maybe offering, as it pertains to willful cessation, is not that different from disease. I mean it is, clearly, but equally clear is that when I string together words like “pertains to willful cessation,” I have almost no idea what I actually think. so I don’t think I have this figured out, yet. hm.