By Chris Barton, Co-Editor
On Monday night, at around 9 PM, I met God. He stood approximately 6 feet tall, had a short peppery beard, and looked a bit like an older Mos Def. He had on a worn blue baseball cap, a wool sweater and a navy rain slicker, grey trousers, and a pair of brown leather loafers. His nails were trimmed but dirty, and his eyes were wide, knowing, and candid.
God had wandered into the coffee shop where I was working on a case brief, looking to get his cup of coffee refilled. Since it didn’t look like he had the necessary 85 cents, I bought it for him, and a sandwich as well (he mentioned he was hungry). He thanked me, cordially greeted the girl behind the counter, chatted for a moment with the woman getting his coffee, and then introduced himself. I didn’t catch his name the first time.
He asked what I was working on, and I told him: a report on a case study of Enterprise Rent-A-Car for my strategy class. God proudly declared that he was an expert in strategy, and shared his insight into the way that Enterprise built an employee training program that helped the new employees adapt to the corporate culture – a disarmingly accurate summary of the case I had just read.
I sat down across from him as he waited for the sandwich, and listened as he began to espouse a lucid, if somewhat fragmented, cosmology. His eyes glowed with a restless compassion, and he earnestly told me about how he collected stones and brought them to the areas where he frequented, because the stones were us – people – solidified eons ago by what I gathered to be the collective non-human forces of the universe, which had it in for us Earthlings.
He informed me that Earth (AKA the fallen planet) is actually at the center of Hell, which may or may not be a physical place (everything exists in the spiritual realm, and only some of it has manifested physically). In this forgotten part of the underworld, God (the embodiment of all that is and has been) has managed to take form as this rather bewildered, albeit enthusiastic, fellow. He’s still trying to figure it out himself, but the core of the matter is that he’s pretty sure that we’ve got about 17 years before the various cosmological beings that somehow banished God the first time catch on and come back to finish the job. Around year 11 he hopes to have it under control, but at this point he’s just working on creating vectors in space – he’s got cubes and pentahedrons down though.
Jesus, it seems, is an ageless con artist, who, taking various forms, talked God up to all of humanity and then claimed to be the only one able to offer access to this exaggerated deity. Also, 1=1+1, as in all things are actually one, and it’s the misconception that 1+1 can only equal 2 that has introduced duality to the world and stopped us from being able to see things like the fact that 84% of Phoenix’s population are actually aliens (and they don’t even know it). Oh, and Hance Park is the Garden of Eden.
God was lucid, articulate, and thoughtful, with an honest desire to figure out what is going on and play his role in whatever it is. His claims, outlandish but coherent, were more philosophical than metaphysical, and he spoke with disarming candor and down-to-earth humility. God was intelligent and critical, his breath smelled of cigarettes, and he put cinnamon on his egg sandwich.
We talked for over an hour. I don’t know whether I learned anything about the universe, theology, or the fate of the planet, but I know that I had an interesting conversation with a compassionate human. I imagine that a lot of what he told me was factually incorrect. But I also imagine that the reasons behind his statements are authentic and valid, and that I probably don’t have the experiences necessary to understand.
But, I do know that if and when ectoplasm starts coming out of my hands, I’m heading to what God said was the one safe place in Phoenix – Mill Ave.
Feature Photo Courtesy of: TED.com