Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

The Almighty just took a massive dump on the Bahamas, and Christian prophetess Kat Kerr knows why—He was ticked off at all the underground sex trafficking going on in Bahamian tunnels.
 
No one says sex traffickers are smart, but digging tunnels in the Bahamas is problematic because they sit about three feet above sea level, meaning sex tunnels have to be pretty shallow or else they fill up quickly with the ocean. Remember, though, when Hillary was operating a sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza joint that had no basement? Sex traffickers find a way.
 
The problem with Kerr’s hypothesis is that God is basically cool with sex traffickers. In the Bible, you could buy yourself a hot slave and make her your concubine if you wanted to. See illustration. If that’s not sex trafficking, what is?
 
No, there has to be a different reason God blew up the Bahamas. Here are a couple of different scenarios in which the Bahamas could have attracted the wrath of the Deity.
 
1.He went on one of those three-day cruises to Freeport and got sick after eating at the shipboard buffet. Have you checked out the prices on one of those trips? I mean, it’s cheaper than staying in Heaven. You can eat, drink and gamble all you want, but when your Filipino egg cook, who is working his 43rd day in a row, accidentally slips a little salmonella into your Benedict, you can pay a gastrointestinal price for your little vacay.

2.God hates black people living in low--lying areas. One word—Katrina

3.He meant to destroy Epstein’s Pedophile Island, but sliced his shot right. The problem with this theory is that having sex with teenage girls is also pretty Biblical, so what was His beef with Epstein? Was He just mad about never being invited on Epstein’s private jet? And Epstein’s dead now anyway, so He can take up His issues with Epstein eternally. No need to bash up a bunch of resorts to make His point.

4.Spent a week at a Sandals in Nassau after watching one of their sexy TV commercials, but the pool was nothing but kids and the waiters were rude. 
 
So, there you have it. God likes to keep us on our toes with his special mix of hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, plagues and earthquakes, but it’s never about the sex trafficking. Most likely it’s the gay. Or abortions—don’t interfere with His plan for your unborn child, which is to kill it eventually some other way.

In the meantime, desperate Bahamians are pouring into the United States as storm refugees. Trump’s been too busy playing with Sharpies to notice that much, but wait until he finds out they’re mostly not white, and start questioning why hurricanes never hit Norway.
​
Let’s see if God has an answer for that.

​One of the items my Facebook feed has been trying to sell me recently is a book called Dark Agenda, which subtitles itself as The War to Destroy Christian America, which, briefly, caused me to wonder: Hot damn! Where do I sign up?
 
And, moreover, the author of the book, David Horowitz, is dead, a casualty of the war. His lifeless corpse was found floating in the Hudson river, bound head and foot with NPR bumper stickers…
 
No. He’s dead, all right, but he died of being 80 years old. In truth, the war against Christianity couldn’t be going much worse. Prayer wizards and prayer warriors pop out of the woodwork at every national tragedy, reminding us that hurricanes and school shootings happen because we’re not beseeching Jesus enough to stop them, plus, you know, the gays. Several states have mandated that “In God We Trust,” be painted on the halls of every school within their boundaries, thinking that looking at this prayerful phrase will keep their state’s children from being a grubby lot of unpleasant teenage wankers whose only real interest in their squirmy little lives is sending each other amateur porn on their cell phones.
 
The Catholic Church has been exposed as a pedophile ring the likes of which Epstein could only dream of, but it still has enough real estate and a sweet old Pope that everybody loves, so it will probably survive indefinitely. Meanwhile, the nouveau riche of Christianity, the preachers of the Prosperity Gospel, are rolling in it, thanks to the number of people who believe that giving other people all their money will make them rich, which is as easy to believe in as the Virgin Birth, which these people also believe in. I mean, could finding your target audience be easier? And it’s all tax-free.
 
Rationalism is as taxable as ever, and we get no holidays, despite this column constantly campaigning for Darwin Day, a day on which a kindly old man with a beard flies around the world in a magical sailing ship, giving science toys and puzzles to the clever children of the world, after which families decorate the Evolutionary Tree and eat dinner off the Table of Elements.
 
Even if we get out of bed determined to throw off Christian hegemony every day, how do we do it? Pray for it? Even if, by some miracle, which we don’t believe in, Christianity vanished tomorrow, we would still have every other religion, plus karma, crystals, astrology and lucky rabbit’s feet for people to put their faith in, because nothing is ever going to convince most human beings that there is absolutely no way to influence their unknowable futures, other than taking care of themselves and putting the maximum amount possible in their 401(k)’s. And that only works sometimes.
 
We’re not going to organize rationalist protests, where we carry signs saying SHIT JUST HAPPENS, DEAL WITH IT and RANDOM CHANCE WEARS THE PANTS, because we don’t have a deity commanding us to do useless, pointless things. This is our key flaw. So, Horowitz has conveniently died before his prediction could be proven false, which most prophets, theirs being the most cowardly of professions, conveniently do.
 
Might as well go back to bed.

Waskom, Texas, population 2,200, has declared itself a “sanctuary city for the unborn,” and banned abortions within its city limits, despite having no abortion clinics or plans to open one.
 
“We just felt it necessary to impose a gratuitous tax burden on our citizens by making it dollars-to-donuts certain we would be sued by the ACLU,” said Waskom mayor Jesse Moore. “We’re basing our case on Constitutional grounds that are shakier than those earthquakes that God uses to remind Californians that they are all going to Hell—that any churchy little town in bumfuck can overturn a decision of the United States Supreme Court.
 
“The fact that our all-male city council passed the law unanimously is also pleasing in the sight of Our Lord, because He calls us to instruct women on what they can do with their vajayjays, which is only to use them for reproduction, unless we’ve seen something on Pornhub that we really need to try. Also, if something happens that is manifestly the work of Satan, like my daughter getting pregnant after attending a rap concert, it’s only 800 miles to Austin, where there are plenty of abortion clinics from which we could send that little rap fetus to embrace Jesus in Heaven.”
 
When asked if pregnant immigrants could take advantage of Waskom’s sanctuary city status, the mayor replied, “Are you high? God is only calling us to protect American fetuses, and them unborn Hispanicals ain’t American unless they get themselves birthed here. They get plenty of Jesus where they came from, and they get it in Spanish. If God wanted them in Waskom, He would not have already translated the Bible from English into Spanish so they could read it back home.”
 
Fetal Americans are said to have mixed feelings about the law. Embryos already planning a career in the arts (read--gay embryos) are especially not happy about getting stuck in Waskom instead of a thriving urban sanctuary city like illegal Salvadorans get. “They get San Francisco, and we get Waskom?” one preborn was heard to say, rolling his little proto-eyes. “Even when you’re barely bigger than Trump’s penis, which most of us have achieved by the sixth week, you don’t want to spend the weekend in Waskom.”

Paula White, often described as Trump’s spiritual advisor, was in the news the other day for praying that Trump be protected from the “demonic networks” that threaten his Presidency, and she didn’t just mean CNN. She has also claimed that anywhere she stands is “holy ground,” because of the constant radiating of Jesus through her augmented breasts, which has kind of a spiritual bubble-boy effect and also keeps her from ever getting a jaywalking ticket.
 
Paula preaches the “Prosperity Gospel,” which means that she goes on TV, proclaims the Gospel says that you should send her money and she gets prosperous. She has even "laid hands" on Trump, even though most women say they would rather lay their hands on a freshly removed tumor than on the current President.
 
From this, it is obvious that Trump gets top-rate spiritual advice. Just being in the presence of Paula means that the frying pan of your soul is constantly being scrubbed clean of sin by the Brillo pad of God’s love. Therefore, it seems puzzling that Trump apparently keeps committing the sin of racism, by implying that non-white people should go back to the shithole countries they came from, and stirring up his followers against them, until one or two of them start driving cars into crowds or making pipe bombs in the garage.
 
Myself and my crack research team tracked Paula down and asked her a few questions concerning Trump’s spiritual state, to which she was happy to reply:
 
“President Trump cannot be a racist, because in Heaven, everyone is white, like Jesus and the angels,” she replied crisply. “The first thing people of color realize when they go to Heaven is that they are now white. Naturally, they are extremely thankful about that, not like here on Earth where they constantly bitched about being discriminated against. When they become white, of course, they realize they were the ones discriminating against white people all along, by having rap music and food stamps, and they are ashamed and grateful to whites like they should have been when they were alive.”
 
So, everyone is transformed into Caucasianess at the start of their eternal bliss?
 
“Naturally. How could it be Heaven if you were still a person of color? And conversely, if you were white here, how could you enjoy Heaven if you knew that people with accents, clothes and politics you found disturbing on Earth were also there?
 
Politics? Is everyone in Heaven a Republican?
​
“There are no politics in Heaven, although the answer to your question is probably yes. When I pray to God, I think of Him as a male, gun-owning American from a Southern or Midwestern state, so He’s a Republican for sure. But He probably lets Democrats who vote for Trump in, especially the ones who avoid the temptation of the accursed Biden, the former Vice Antichrist. But no socialists. Everyone in Heaven is equal and all its glories are shared together. A socialist wouldn’t understand that, so they all go to Hell.”
 
What about foreigners? Does God admit them?
 
“Yes, but He probably puts them in special foreign sections, so American saints don’t have to think about how they beat us in the trade wars or spend eternity trying to learn to speak other languages.”
 
So, each country has its own Heaven? What about those shithole countries?
 
“Don’t be silly. There’s no such thing as shithole Heaven. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

Trump’s trade war with China may claim more Trumpanzee victims than the broke soybean farmers of Iowa soon, as tariffs are bound to raise the price of Bibles imported from China, which is, surprisingly, just about all of them.
 
Yes, the busy Chinese, apart from stealing intellectual property, spying on us through Huawei, building extra islands in the Pacific and making everything in Walmart, also find time to print most of the planet’s Bibles. God-fearing Bible-printing companies outsourced most of the Bible market out to this nation of industrious atheists long ago, and they can’t take it back—it has to be printed on especially thin Chinese paper because of the big-ass nature of the Holy Word. The Bible is nearly 800,000 words in English. The Quran is a mere pamphlet next to it, at 77,000 words, and Muhammed managed to wad in the whole of Sharia law and the prohibition against bacon-wrapped shrimp in it besides. The guy was terse, if not much more interesting, than the Bible’s authors.
 
But replacing the nation’s Bibles with Qurans is not likely to sit well with Trump’s base, and they are soon going to have to pay more for a book nobody actually reads. “BFD,” I can hear you saying. “Everybody who wants to own a Bible in the US probably already has one. And they hardly ever need replacing, because if you scroll down on Facebook enough, you’ll find plenty of stories about how multiple generations of a family were burned to death in a house fire and first responders picking their way among the charred corpses found a Bible in the cellar still miraculously whole, which proves that God is merciful.”
 
That’s probably true, except for the part about God being merciful—it’s merely apparent He doesn’t like to see His word toasted up, just His followers--but estimated Bible sales in this country are at twenty million or so a year, which means twenty million Americans annually are gifted with a book they don’t want to read. “So what?” I hear you saying again. “Almost all books are given as gifts to people who don’t want to read them.”
 
But the Bible is a special gift. It may be given to elderly religious relatives—“Just give Grandma a Bible for her birthday—she won’t be able to bitch about that”—or teenage boys caught spanking their noodles in front of the computer—“Next time you’re tempted to open that Pornhub tab, you open this instead, son.” It is often inflicted on hungover hedonists being visited by Christian missionaries on Sundays. Bibles have even been air-dropped on illiterate tribes isolated in the jungles of South America, where they probably use them for poison-arrow practice.
 
The cost of all these Bibles is going up, though, inevitably. They may have to be more carefully parceled out temporarily—you may have to chose between a hotel room with a Bible in the drawer or one that just has hotel porn, instead of both, in the future. Politicians may have to be sworn in on stacks of National Geographics, which will remain abundant.
 
Or Trump can just stop the trade war, and the Chinese will continue to supply us with cheap Bibles so the Bible-believing masses can continue to search its pages for reasons to hate gays, abortions and China. But he probably won’t.
 
It’s not like they’re Ivanka’s handbags.

Last month, pop icon Madonna announced she wanted to have a conversation with the current Pope about abortion, which she said Jesus was in favor of. The Pope ignored her, so she is now raising the stakes by challenging Francis to a dance-off.
 
“And he can pick the music,” Madonna offered. “I mean, Like a Virgin is obviously appropriate for him, but I’ve danced to that before, surrounded by hunky gay men, so it wouldn’t be fair to him. When he wants to be surrounded by gay men, he has to call up the College of Cardinals, and they can’t dance worth squat. But I mean really dance, though—not hum along to some Gregorian chant.
 
“He can also pick the outfits as well, although I reserve the right to wear fishnets underneath whatever dress he selects. I propose a maximum size for crucifixes as well—you can’t really hoof it with a gigantic cross hanging from your neck, although, frankly, he has a slight advantage in his collection of crucifixes. Mine will be swinging in front of my still-tempting breasts, though, and he’d be wise to keep his old gray man-boobs underneath his cassock. And if he wants to twerk, I'm down with that.
 
“St. Peter’s Square is the obvious venue for the Pope and I to cut the rug competitively, but if he wants a more intimate venue, I know any number of clubs that would kill to host it. A Vegas residency isn’t out of the question. Eurovision, anyone? I don’t expect Jesus to return to judge it, but wouldn’t that be a show-stopper? And for Him, great practice for the Apocalypse.
 
“Afterwards, when I’ve danced him into the dirt, Pope Francis will admit that abortion is cool with God, especially in cases of rape, incest and when the baby-daddy situation is complicated. He’ll join me for a rousing finale—oh, yeah, for sure it’s gonna be Papa Don’t Preach—and I’ll be back on top of the pop music, and also Catholic worlds.
 
“And that bitch Gaga can kiss my ass.” 

The relationship of Trump with the Judeo-Christian Almighty is a fraught one; reports of Trump’s beginnings as a bogus billionaire playboy have him smushing the Ten Commandments repeatedly into little flecks of gravel, whereas lately he hugs Christianity like he hugs the flag, not even bothering to conceal the insincere smirk on his face.
 
Yet the similarity in style between Trump and God grows ever stronger. They both only demand one thing, really—worship. If you don’t give them that, you get screwed. The list of God’s victims is well-documented. The Philistines, the first-born Egyptians, everybody inside the walls of Jericho, and, near the beginning, everybody on Earth except Noah. For Trump, Sean Spicer, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Muslims, Mexicans and CNN.
 
Both God (the Bible) and Trump (Art of the Deal) get credit for a best-selling book they didn’t actually write themselves.

For everything good that happens to you, you should thank God. For everything bad, you should blame yourself. Or Satan. Or yourself for listening to Satan. For everything good that happens to the United States, you should thank Trump, even if you only have his word that it's good. For everything bad that happens to the USA, you should blame Obama. Or yourself, for being a Democrat.
 
God had the Prodigal Son, a disobedient fuckup that He forgave over and over. Trump has Kim Jong Un.
 
God had a bearded Son who got crucified on Golgotha. Trump has a bearded son who regularly gets crucified on Twitter.
 
God supposedly came upon a virgin and impregnated her. Trump supposedly raped a 13-year-old girl.
 
God’s ways—mysterious, but said to be influenced by prayer. Trump’s ways—well, you could say mysterious, but incoherent might be a better word. Said to be influenced by FOX News.

God has the Heavenly Host, a bunch of Cherubims and Seraphims that always have His back. Trump has the Republican Senate.
 
God—eager to help you find your car keys if you ask Him, but ignored the Holocaust. Trump—eager to keep a black woman’s face off the $20 bill, but ignores Putin’s hand up his hiney.
 
All right, that’s not exactly the same, so we’re going to close out here. Just remember, Trump always acts like a huge narcissistic bastard.
 
You can have your own opinion on whether God does, too.

Greedball mega-preacher Franklin Graham has proclaimed Sunday a National Day of Prayer for Donald Trump, ignoring the recent example of the three flyover Republican governors who called for a Day of Prayer for drier weather over the prairie, only to have their states buried under about six feet of fresh snow within 48 hours of imploring the Lord for less precipitation. God does not hear the prayers of people who ignore the long-range weather forecast is the Biblical lesson here.
 
Some of us are hoping for the same sort of result—that a multitude of prayers ascending to the heavens on behalf of Trump will result in him finally choking to death on his final cheeseburger before Monday morning. But you can’t count on prayer for much, as we’ve noted here before, and even if all of Evangelical America hosannas to the Almighty on Trump’s behalf on Sunday, he’s still going to do things like inspire his toadies to cover up the name of the USS John McCain so he won't go off-script and start berating a dead hero while he's on a diplomatic mission, accept North Korea’s endorsement for President in 2020 and try to fill senior Administration positions from Craigslist.
 
Sunday was already National Bubba Day, so Graham risks alienating the entire Bubba demographic, which tilts heavily towards Trump, by ignoring them on their special day.
 
But Bubbas be damned, Graham wants us all to pray for Trump on Sunday. The utility of praying for anything has been examined in this column before, many times, but the usefulness of praying for Trump, even for those who believe in its power, can be confidently compared to trying to teach a clam to yodel.
 
Plus, I’ve been down this road before. Here were my thoughts back in December 2016:

God appeared to me again, as He sometimes does. Usually He has a message for me, and this time it was no different.

​"I am He Who Am, and I'm here to talk about Franklin Graham."

“Billy Graham's heir? The preacher who said You personally selected Trump to be President?"

“That peckerhead. I had nothing to do with Trump getting elected. It’s caused Me all kinds of grief already. With Trump’s finger on the nuclear button, I have to really get serious about motivating Jesus to get back here and judge the living and the dead before Trump blows the place up, and that’s causing discord Up There. My Kid has been putting off His return for 20 centuries now. He has bad memories of the place. Claims He has PTSD from getting crucified.”

“Could be, huh?”

“Slacker. Whenever I mention the fact that there’s currently 7 billion plus souls to be judged nowadays, and the number ain’t getting smaller, He mutters ‘Intercourse those feces,’ and goes back to drinking wine and playing poker with the Apostles, using the souls of the faithful departed as chips. I need you to tell everybody that Franklin Graham is full of crap.”

“Why me, oh Lord? You know everything, so You must know that most of my readers are elderly alcoholics. From a demographic point of view, they suck. Why don’t you appear to Franklin Graham Yourself?”

“Because he would have a heart attack and die. I don’t need him up here, fawning all over Me. It’s creepy enough getting worshipped by him from afar.”

“You could send him to the Other Place.”

"Nope. Satan has evoked a clause in our contract to keep the Pit of Darkness free of any more money-grubbing American preacher types until at least 2020. He’s sick of them, too. Why do you think Pat Robertson is still alive? What is he, 99?”

“Aren’t You supposed to know that?”

“I’m not a detail Guy, which should be plenty obvious to anyone who’s taken a careful look at My work. That’s how Trump slipped in. I was tinkering with a couple of quasars, you know, routine Supreme Being stuff, during the election year, and the polls all had Hillary winning, so I just back-burnered the whole Trump question. I was as surprised as anyone else.”

‘It’s not too late to fix it, My Lord. He’s a seventy-year old guy living on cheeseburgers and Viagra. You could call his number and nobody would be surprised. Grant him eternal peace before the Inauguration. I hear he even went to church on Christmas Eve.”

“Yeah, but all he prayed for was the chance to have sex with Ivanka without anybody finding out, including Ivanka. It's his usual prayer. I whispered in his ear, ‘Why ask Me? You already know Bill Cosby."

“Trump in Heaven? NO, and I mean one of My great big I’m-going-to-kill-all-your-firstborn sons NO'S! You think I want to issue chastity belts to all the Cherubim to keep Trump’s fingers off of them? And Satan’s already put the kibosh on letting Trump into Hell. No, he’s going to live until we’ve constructed a special eternal existence for him. We’ve already broken the ground for it. We’re calling it the Trump Towering Inferno.”

A Dallas evangelist told his followers that an "anointed cake" baked by "hookers" turned a gay man straight. News item.
 
The importance of cake in establishing sexual orientation is brought home, and I mean brought home with a police escort, by this story straight out of the Dallas Morning News.
 
Those who have decried the sincere efforts of Christian bakers not to make cakes for same-sex weddings will have to shut up, as it is now apparent that the Lord works in two ways: 1. Mysteriously. 2. Through cake.
 
The parable, in which none of the actors are mentioned by name, possibly for legal reasons and also possibly because the speaker of the parable does not wish any of them to dispute the tale, goes as follows: Once there was a bar owned by an anti-Christian gay man. (An ACGM, as he will be referred to in this account from now on, because one thing we can all agree on is that the world needs more acronyms). The bar nonetheless had a Christian regular, and he converted a few of the hookers that hung out at the bar to Christianity.
 
I hear you skeptics clucking with doubt. Well, bars where hookers hang out with Christians are more common than the naïve among you might think, especially around Republican national conventions.
 
To celebrate their acceptance of Jesus, the hookers promptly baked a cake, and then “anointed” it. What they anointed it with is not made clear. Whether they prayed over the icing or just dabbed it with a little of the spermicidal jelly they happened to have in their purses will never be known. Whatever they did, the power of Jesus moved through the baked goods, and when the ACGM ate of the cake, he promptly became a straight Christian man, and banged one of the hookers on the bar for her customary rate to celebrate, and in lieu of a tip, gave her free drinks for the weekend.
 
All right, I made that last part up. Whether the Godly hooker certified the ACGM’s conversion to heterosexuality personally is not made clear by the Morning News account. But it could have happened that way, and how else could we be sure of the truth of this story?
 
What is important to note is that just as Jesus can make miracles through the sacred sugar and Godly gluten of a hooker cake, so can Satan move through the hot fudge icing of a gay wedding cake. Tales of resolutely Christian men  who arrive at a gay wedding in a Dodge Durango extended cab pickup with a gun rack and a hound dog in the bed, take one bite of a gay wedding cake, and then leave in a Mini Cooper convertible with a Bichon Frise next to them in the passenger seat, are no longer to be regarded as merely apocryphal.
 
And let us hold in our disdain for those good Christian bakers who have forsworn baking cakes that celebrate sodomy. Let us not refer to them as “homophobic, and probably racist and misogynist, too, cracker hypocrites.” Nor shall we call them “hate-filled, Bible-thumping, low-IQ yick-a-doos,” for they are doing God’s work, preventing Lucifer from infesting the flour of Christian cake with his Weevils from Hell.
 
Also, there are Christian hookers that will bake you a cake. But it still costs 500 bucks an hour.

Family tragedy led me once again to my ancestral shores, the green (for now) woods of suburban Philadelphia, so once again I found myself at the feet of Our Lady of the Overturned Boat, a two-and-a-half foot plaster representation of the Mother of God that has sat in the mother of me's yard since the last century.
 
OLOTOB has fallen upon hard times. No longer does she rest in a shaded grove by my brother's upside-down and slowly rusting watercraft, alongside a stone bench which only lacks a cupholder to make it a perfect spot to enjoy an adult beverage. My mother has sold an acre of her backyard to a developer, and will soon have two new neighbors. The grove where Our Lady sat is no longer on her property, and She has been transferred to a green spot by the back door. 
 
That brother now lives in the house permanently, keeping an eye on Mom, who is frail at 89, and he sleeps in the guest bedroom, where the other icon of Catholicism in my mother's house dwells. I speak of Hot Mother Cabrini in the Closet, a statue my mother and another elderly Catholic woman purloined from a rectory in another Philly suburb for their own reasons, and is still in transit to its rightful owner, my mother's favorite priest, who hasn't quite enough closet space for it himself, apparently.
 
Thus, I no longer sleep with Hot Mother Cabrini. My brother does. I don't resent her transfer of affections. Long distance relationships are so difficult to maintain.
 
My brother Matt's memorial service was not religious, because he wasn't. Mom has set up her own formal funeral Mass in a few weeks, because no one should be laid to rest without a Catholic service, in her opinion. Fine with me, because I wasn't about to fly back and forth to Philly twice in two months, and thought I had escaped another Mass.
 
Not so. Mom made it plain that I was taking her to Mass the following day, and furthermore she was exercising her powers as a bereaved mother to make sure I attended the Mass, instead of just driving her to church, having a cup of coffee at a local Dunkin’ Donuts, and picking her up when the service was over—my preferred method of assisting her at worship.
 
I am ecumenical in my dread of religious rites. Any ceremony that does not involve human sacrifice or, at the very least, snake handling, I find intensely boring. The only advantage of a Catholic Mass over the others, in my case, is that, having been shepherded to a thousand of them in my youth by my above-mentioned mother, I know when it’s going to end. I was stuck at a friend’s kid's bar mitzvah a few years back and nearly suffered a public panic attack when I realized I had no idea how long it was going to last.
 
My mother’s favorite priest has been transferred from a regular Catholic parish to a Catholic nursing home, where people who have lived Catholic can waste away and die Catholic for $6,000 a month. This made the Mass even less inspiring than most to me. There were no striking Catholic women in tight skirts to admire. Most of the faithful were in wheelchairs and even hospital beds. My mother is not that feeble—she picked a pew for us to sit in. The orderlies promptly blocked us in there with two wheelchairs, one on either end. If a fire had broken out, we would have had to hurdle cripples in order to save ourselves.
 
The lady in the wheelchair to our right kept trying to get out of her seat to participate in the usual Catholic gymnastics, and had to be restrained by two orderlies so she wouldn’t go face-first on the floor trying to get closer to God. Apart from that and two Alzheimer’s victims in the back having a completely demented but loud conversation about only what they knew for sure, the Mass proceeded ponderously along.
 
There is a point in the Mass where it is considered proper to leave, if you are unworthy of receiving Communion, which is me for sure, and I mean unworthy squared, and it is right before the hosts are distributed. Unfortunately, I was blocked from bugging out at this juncture by those wheelchairs. I had to sit through the distribution of the hosts. Ordinarily, Catholics line up and approach the altar where the priest and his assistants wait with golden cups full of the Eucharist. Due to the nature of the congregants at this service, though, the priest and his helpers had to scatter through the room to serve Communion. Inevitably, one made the mistake of drifting towards me, host in fingers.
 
“Body of Christ,” he said.
 
Then I panicked. I had forgotten the response. In retrospect, I think it is a simple “Amen,” although there are other standard Catholic phrases which might apply, like, “And also with you,” and “Blessed be the Father,” etc.
 
Couldn’t come up with it though, so I settled for looking him prayerfully in the eye and replying, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”