Easter Sunday and A Confession

It’s not that existence is prosaic, it’s that

we forgot what we are, got trapped in bodies 

in a confusing world. It’s what the Gnostics 

believed and practiced until they were genocided

by the Catholic Church that needed people to

believe in something so that they could maintain 

power and control.

You didn’t know?

Living your prosaic lives preferring entertainment 

over art, where the truth is revealed?

Don’t take it too hard…no one told you the truth

because they didn’t know either, so you “went on

in a fog thinking nothing had happened” until the

airplane you’re in suddenly crashes and you walk

away where others died in the wreckage, and you

think “ why me?” good question.

Without a question there can be no answer.

A Confession

I was in a play my senior year at Carleton College

in Northfield, Minnesota. I connected with a guy who

was also in the play. We decided to have an adventure 

together to solidify our friendship. A Saturday night after

the performance, we went out and started walking around 

Northfield. We were passing a Catholic Church, and we 

stopped. We had the bright idea that we would get into the

Church and steal the communion wine. We walked around 

the building and found an unlocked window. I crawled in 

and hung by my hands, my body stretched out, but my feet 

didn’t touch the floor. It was total darkness. I let go, and 

dropped to the floor only two feet below. I went upstairs 

and let my friend, Peter, in. We wen to the priest’s chambers

and looked through his robes. Then we found a refrigerator.

When we opened it, we discovered a gallon bottle of red 

wine, probably Gallo. We took the wine, left through the front

door, and went to the railroad tracks. Once we were settled, 

we proceeded to drink the wine and tell each other stories all

night.  The sun started to come up and the wine was gone, so

we walked back to the campus, arm in arm singing loudly.

As we walked down the sidewalk past some dorms, people

stuck their heads out of windows and yelled at us to be quiet,

but we kept on singing. As we past a girls dormitory, 

suddenly, the front door flung open and a naked man ran out

past us, down the sidewalk and disappeared. A girl in a robe 

came out a minute later, and we told her what we had seen.

She said the man had been hiding in her closet, and when she

opened the door, he dashed out and ran away.

That was a perfect coda to our adventure.

Post script:

I committed a crime against the Catholic Church

fifty years ago and never got caught. I’m very 

proud of that. I sometimes wonder what the priest

thought when he opened the refrigerator door that

Sunday morning.