[NOTE: On Garrison Keillor’s Substack, there’s a feature called the Back Room, on which he posts odds and ends from his decades of work. Yesterday the following popped up.]
“Just In terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
–William H. Gates III
[In 1999] Bill Gates was the richest man in America [he was #4 in 2022] , and after he had gained a good deal of the world, God sent him an e-mail:
Beloved Bill:
I saw how you allocated your time resources last Sunday moming and was not impressed. Riding a stationary bike? Watching guys on the Men’s Channel talk about triglycerides and P.S.A. counts? Three words of advice: Love thy neighbor. Ever hear what happened to the rich man who stiff-armed the beggar Lazarus? I caused a general protection fault, and he has been off-line for centuries.
Anything you’d like to talk about? I’m here.
Your Creator,
God
Bill Gates typed out a reply:
Dear God:
Wow. Omniscience. Cool. But how do I know you’re omnipotent too?
Gates
B. G.
The moment he clicked on Send, the entire Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., went dark. And the darkness was very great. The a.c. shuddered to a halt. He heard his emplovees keening and wailing over lost data. His office was filled with creeping things and birds of the air. Beads of sweat dripped from his nose. Acrid smells drifted in, the website buming after a multitude of hits by Hittites, and he heard the clatter of hooves: a herd of crazed swine trotted down the hall, little pink eyes aglow, pagers clipped to their ears.
On his way out, he touched his nose and found a boil. A leper lay in the lobby begging alms, and when Bill Gates dropped in a nickel, the power went on.
Back in his office, a message was on his screen:
B. G.: That was only the screensaver. There is more where that came from. Obey my commandments or a virus could come to pass that would bring the information age to a shuddering halt. I did a flood once, and behold, I can do viruses. Once men tried to reach heaven by building a tower, and I made their formats incompatible. I could do this again. Or I can do love and redemption. I am, after all,
God. P.S. Your move.
The websites were restored. The leper was promoted to general manager and put in charge of the crazed swine, who, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, had to be kept in their current positions. Most of them were vice presidents, though, so it didn’t affect the value of Microsoft stock.
Bill Gates ran the word commandment through a database search and found that God had dumped a whole bunch of them on his Designated Population Group–no graven images, no stealing or coveting, keep the Seventh Day holy, and also what to eat and stuff–and then, later, to love God and love thy neighbor.
Gates wrote:
Dear God:
Do I need to be thinking ark at this point? Can we talk?
-and suddenly found himself in a chat room.
LUCI: I see that Bill Gates, that bug-eyed little weasel, is acting like you don’t exist. Want me to deal with him? I know people in the Justice Department.
THE LORD GOD: No. It takes longer to get smart guys up to speed. But I shall strive with him, and eventually he may get it.
LUCI: The guy is a closed circuit. Let me at him.
THE LORD GOD: Let’s see how it goeth.
BILL GATES: Hey, guys. It’s me. The aforementioned weasel.
But God had signed off.
LUCI: Hey, Pearly. How’d you like to own the phone company? I can get it for you wholesale.
BILL GATES: Who in hell is this?
The next day Microsoft developed Stained-Glass Windows, the most advanced spiritual software ever. The user could download a worship experience, including Scripture, Webpastor’s sermon and Holy Sacraments, in 10 minutes flat. You knelt at the keyboard and hit alt/f7, and out the disk drive came a tiny white wafer.
Bill Gates e-mailed God a copy of Windows and a note:
You want to reach people? Here’s how. Forget the stone tablets with the dandruffy guys in suede shoes droning on about transcendence.
BTW, I am giving a billion shekels for good works.
B.G.
But he got no reply.
The next Sunday morning, Bill Gates went into Stained-Glass Windows, and the Scripture reading was a screechy passage from Jeremiah, and the sermon was very antimoney, antigrowth, antientrepreneurship, and it scrolled on for hours; and when the Confession window opened, Bill clicked twice on the Pride icon and then Continue and saw
“This program has performed an immoral function and will be shut down,”
and in that moment he went blind.
He was on his stationary bike, the keyboard on his lap. He did not cry out. He took a dozen deep, cleansing breaths and dismounted and set the keyboard on the floor. He sat down in front of his computer and switched on Audio and said, “Voice activation.”
There were two confirming beeps.
“God,” he said. “It’s Gates. Make that 5 billion.”
[NOTE: Many supporters of the 1960s civil rights struggles in Alabama long referred to Birmingham, its largest city, as “Bombingham,” because of a long string (as many as fifty) of racist bombings and other attacks of homes and churches associated with the movement. Most remain unsolved. The most notorious of these attacks was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in which four young Black girls (Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair) were killed on their way to a Sunday School class, and more than a dozen others seriously injured.
The bombing happened on September 15, 1963. It was a Sunday morning, only eighteen days after the mammoth civil rights march in Washington, at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
The March on Washington, while marked by electrifying rhetoric, was peaceful from start to finish –confounding many segregationist predictions that any large black-organized assembly would necessarily degenerate into a riot. This triumph of nonviolence added to its aura of success.
The Birmingham church bombing came on September 16, 1963, just over two weeks later, and shattered the euphoria as well as its direct victims. It was an outrageous reminder that the struggle for equality was a matter of life and death.
The FBI had reportedly identified identified the bombers, four members of a Ku Klux Klan terror band, by 1965, But there was no prosecution until 1977, when one of the bombers was convicted of first degree murder. Two others were not tried until 2001, thirty-eight years later. (The fourth died in 1994.)
The indifference of most authorities extended beyond those who were killed. The survivor story below describes how the personal impact of the time of terror in “Bombingham” –and the cry for justice, though fainter with age– continues after nearly six decades.]
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Sarah Collins Rudolph lost an eye and still has pieces of glass inside her body from a Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed her sister and three other Black girls at an Alabama church 59 years ago, and she’s still waiting on the state to compensate her for those injuries.
Gov. Kay Ivey sidestepped the question of financial compensation two years ago in apologizing to Rudolph for her “untold pain and suffering,” saying legislative involvement was needed. But nothing has been done despite the efforts of attorneys representing Rudolph, leaving unresolved the question of payment even though victims of other attacks, including 9/11, were compensated.
Rudolph, known as the “Fifth Little Girl” for surviving the infamous attack on 16th Street Baptist Church, which was depicted in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary “4 Little Girls,” has been rankled by the state’s inaction.
Speaking in an interview with The Associated Press, Rudolph said then–Gov. George C. Wallace helped lay the groundwork for the Klan attack with his segregationist rhetoric, and the state bears some responsibility for the bombing, which wasn’t prosecuted for years.
“If they hadn’t stirred up all that racist hate that was going on at the time I don’t believe that church would have been bombed,” said Rudolph.
Rudolph attended a White House summit yesterday [Sept. 15] about combatting hate–fueled violence, the anniversary of the church bombing, and was recognized by President Joe Biden:
Ms. Sarah Collins Rudolph is also here today. On this day in 1963, her sister Addie Mae was one of four little girls preparing for Sunday school who were murdered by white supremacists in the 16th [Street] Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, which I visited. Ms. Collins Rudolph survived the bombing but still carries the scars of that blast.
Ms. Collins Rudolph, I’m honored to see you here again. Thank you for being here. I visited the church on this day in 2019. And I’ll visit with you and always remember what happened.
All these years later, Ms. Rudolph [and these others are] providing the evidence that we need, proving that grief is universal, but so is hope and so is love.
In Birmingham, hundreds gathered at the church for a commemorative service and wreath–laying at the spot where the bomb went off.
Rudolph said she still incurs medical expenses from the explosion, including a $90 bill she gets every few months for work on the prosthetic she wears in place of the right eye that was destroyed by shrapnel on Sept. 15, 1963. Anything would help, but Rudolph believes she’s due millions.
Ishan Bhabha, an attorney representing Rudolph, said the state’s apology — made at Rudolph’s request along with a plea for restitution — was only meant as a first step.
“She deserves justice in the form of compensation for the grievous injuries, and costs, she has had to bear for almost 60 years,” he said. “We will continue to pursue any available avenues to get Sarah the assistance she needs and deserves.”
Five girls were gathered in a downstairs bathroom at 16th Street Baptist Church when a bomb planted by KKK members went off outside, blowing a huge hole in the thick, brick wall. The blast killed Denise McNair, 11, and three 14–year–olds: Carole Robertson, Cynthia Morris, also referred to as Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins, who was Rudolph’s sister.
Three Klan members convicted of murder in the bombing years later died in prison, and a fourth suspect died without ever being charged.
The bombing occurred eight months after Wallace proclaimed “segregation forever” in his inaugural speech and during the time when Birmingham schools were being racially integrated for the first time.
The church itself has gotten government money for renovations, as has the surrounding Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, formed by President Barack Obama in 2017 in one of his last acts in office. “But not me,” Rudolph said.
Ivey, at the time of the apology, said in a letter to Rudolph’s lawyer that any possible compensation would require legislative approval, said press secretary Gina Maiola.
“Additionally, in attorney–to–attorney conversations that ensued soon after, that same point was reiterated,” she said.
No bill has been introduced to compensate Rudolph, legislative records show, and it’s unclear whether such legislation could win passage anyway since conservative Republicans hold an overwhelming majority and have made an issue of reeling in history lessons that could make white people feel bad about the past.
While the Alabama Crime Victims’ Compensation Commission helps victims and families with expenses linked to a crime, state law doesn’t allow it to address offenses that occurred before the agency was created in 1984.
Rudolph has spent a lifetime dealing with physical and mental pain from the bombing. Despite her injuries and lingering stress disorders, Rudolph provided testimony that helped lead to the convictions of the men accused of planting the bomb, and she’s published a book about her life, titled “The 5th Little Girl.”
Rudolph’s husband, George Rudolph, said he’s frustrated and mad over the way his wife has been treated. Victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were compensated, he said, as were victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
“Why can’t they do something for Sarah?” he said.
___
Reeves is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity Team.
My friend Patrick O’Neill is serving a year in a federal prison, for attacking a replica of a nuclear missile at a south Georgia navy base in April of 2018. (A post with more about that protest is here.) It’s part of his peace witness as a member of the Catholic Worker movement.
Most of us don’t think about the missiles a lot. But there are enough just at that one Georgia base to kill pretty much everyone in the world, on fifteen minutes’ notice.
Yeah, the risk of nuclear Armageddon did not disappear with the fall of Soviet communism.
Patrick and several others did think about the missiles, tho, and it led to Patrick reporting to the federal prison in Elkton, Ohio just about when Joe Biden was being inaugurated.
Doing time is tough. And nobody can do it for him. Patrick has a good deal of jail experience; and one lesson is that it doesn’t get much easier. There are a few ways to be supportive from outside. Mine is to send Patrick reading matter. Reading can dull some moments in the overwhelming tedium of confinement. So I have sent him a few of my books. (Hey — a captive audience; the best kind.)
Patrick’s solitary note.
It can help a little. Patrick said so, in a note that arrived this week:
‘Let all you do be done in love’— St. Paul
Good Friday [04/02/2021] Day 18 in the SHU (solitary)
Hi Chuck— My Lenten Journey will take me past Easter — I’ve done a lot of time (20+ jails, 6 prisons), but this has been the worst. Before the SHU [NOTE: SHU = Special Housing Unit] I spent 4 days in a hospital with 2 armed guards with me at all times who kept me in leg irons, and my left hand attached by chains to the bed, one chain attaching my leg irons to the bed . . . . I had to pee in a plastic bottle while chained.
When I asked one guard to use the bathroom he said, “Do you have to do Number Two?” He would not have unchained me otherwise. And the leg irons never came off except for 15 minutes when I took a stress test on a treadmill. And now I’m in the hole for Covid quarantine.
[Note: It’s no surprise that Patrick came down with Covid. Since March 2020, The New York Times has tracked every known coronavirus case in every correctional setting in the United States. . . .
A year later, reporters found that one in three inmates in state prisons are known to have had the virus. In federal facilities, at least 39 percent of prisoners are known to have been infected. The true count is most likely higher because of a dearth of testing, but the findings align with reports from The Marshall Project, The Associated Press, U.C.L.A. Law and The Covid Prison Project that track Covid-19 in prisons.
The virus has killed prisoners at higher rates than the general population, the data shows, and at least 2,700 people have died in custody, where access to quality health care is poor.
The deaths, and many of the more than 525,000 reported infections so far among the incarcerated, could have been prevented, public health and criminal justice experts say.] Back to Patrick:
“One of the world’s greatest masterpieces, and surely the most stolen piece of art of all time, Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also known as the Ghent Altarpiece, has a new €30m (£26m) glass-case home.
While remaining within St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, for which it was painted in 1432 by the Van Eyck brothers, the 12-panelled polyptych will be located in the Sacrament chapel, the cathedral’s largest and most easterly chapel, within a bullet-proof display case that is 6-metres high with an interior of 100 cubic metres. . . .
The oft-stolen Altarpiece in its new ultra-secure display case, which cost somewhat north of $35 million dollars.
. . . somewhat understandably, a top priority for those involved in the project has been the masterpiece’s security. During its 588-year history, the Ghent Altarpiece has been nearly burned by rioting Calvinists, stolen by Napoleon for the Louvre in Paris, cut in half after falling into the hands of the King of Prussia, coveted by Hermann Göring and taken by Adolf Hitler before being rescued by a team of commando double-agents from an Austrian salt mine where it was destined to be blown apart with dynamite.
It has not survived entirely unscathed. One of its 12 panels remains missing after a daring heist on the evening of 10 April 1934, which has since baffled police detectives, bemused amateur sleuths and driven to despair the Nazi agents ordered by Goebbels to find it as a gift for the German Führer .
[Yes, of course they made a movie about it: The Monuments Men (2014), directed by and starring George Clooney and a cast guaranteed to set middle-aged hearts aflutter.
But it was a dud. One typical commenter in the Washington Post called it “a very bad version of Hogan’s Heroes meets The Sound of Music. I kept waiting for someone to break out into song. Pathetic and embarrassing would be a compliment. . . .”
He walked out. Left just in time, too, because, someone in the movie soon did break out into song . . . .]
My friend Douglas Gwyn, a distinguished Quaker theologian, included the Ghent Altarpiece in his new book, Into The Common.
For him, the Ghent altarpiece
. . . is both an astonishing work of art and a panoply for contemplation by the eye of faith. Its vast scope is balanced by its minute detail, down to identifiable species of vegetation: a mind-reeling combination of macrocosmic and microcosmic perspectives. The van Eycks were famed miniaturists and the altarpiece constitutes miniaturization on a grand scale. Contemplating it, one intuits the beauty of one’s own obscure place in the epic of divine providence.
The central panel of the Altarpiece, “The Lamb of God”
[The centerpiece features the Lamb of God; from the] wound in its side pours blood into a golden chalice. On the altar are the words of John the Baptist in John 1:29: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Above the Lamb hovers a dove, the Holy Spirit. And above that, the central upper panel depicts God the Father enthroned.
In front of the altar is a fountain flowing with the water of life. Paradoxically, this water is the blood of the Lamb. All these elements form a central vertical axis. In the background of this park-like scene, a skyline of buildings suggests the new Jerusalem (Revelation 20) as the setting. The scene extends into two panels on either side of the central one, forming an earthly, horizontal axis.
. . . Fourteen angels kneel in worship closest to the altar. Behind them stand an array of Hebrew prophets, Christian apostles, and pagan philosophers, some with oriental faces. And from the four comers of the panel a multitude of peoples are advancing toward the Lamb, balancing the static sense of an eternal, heavenly ecstasy with a moment of historic, earthly fulfillment.
The composition of this panel derives from the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of John, in particular the seventh chapter. Revelation’s exotic flood of visions and voices from heaven has fascinated, tantalized, or alienated readers for two thousand years.
Well, put me down somewhere between tantalized and alienated. John’s Book of Revelation has continually left me puzzled and unenlightened; and I make corny apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.
But no question, the Ghent altar piece is best in class of its kind of art. (In its shadow our recent apocalyptic behemoth, the Left Behind series, is left utterly behind.) So in the abstract, I can appreciate Doug Gwyn’s swoon over it.
However, while it’s at the pinnacle, there are many other cathedrals in Europe with relics. How many such churches I don’t know, but it’s probably in the hundreds. And many —I’d guess most — of them have their own art pieces and relics; especially relics, including objects, preserved corpses and even detached body parts of saints and other churchly eminences.
In 2008 I spent several weeks in France. While there, I toured a few cathedrals, in Toulouse & Arles. In one of them, the interior was quite dimly lit, yet I walked along the nave, noting various niches & mini-chapels on either side.
One such niche had a black wrought iron gate across its entrance, with a chain and lock. I paused and peered between the bars. Behind them was thick glass, maybe doors, on which was a film of dust and smoke, indicating years of quietude (aka neglect).
I paused, leaned into the gate and squinted. Behind the glass were reliquaries, their shapes unmistakable and their intricate, dull gilt decoration just detectable.
Not one, or a few; dozens. And not on shelves or in alcoves, nooks or crannies.
In fact, a heap. A jumbled pile. Yes, I’ll go there — A junk pile; sacred maybe, but junk. The cathedral’s essentially clandestine dustbin of (holy?) history.
I stood for a few minutes, continuing to squint, sorry my pocket camera wouldn’t work in that half-light. There was no signage, not even in French, to advise about what mix of once-revered clerics, third-tier saints, obscure visionaries and supernumerary martyrs had been downsized into consecrated cathedral detritus.
Protect us?? Who protected him?
I came out blinking and musing into the afternoon light. I recalled that some prominent names from my Catholic boyhood (looking at you, St. Christopher) had been officially debunked and declared pious myths as part of the updating (repackaging?) by the 1960s Second Vatican Council.
But I hadn’t thought that others, evidently many more, had more quietly but likewise been, to filch a more tasteful British phrase, made redundant. How many miracles had thus been consigned to the church’s version of internal dumpsters? There had to be truckloads.
Some weighty sociologists of religion have written of the “routinization of charisma” in religion. This notion could arguably be corroborated by the fact that, just in this one cathedral, Catholic masses had been performed, probably daily, for near a millennium.
At the center of each performance, doctrine says, a miracle is not only evoked, but in fact repeated. As this ritual goes on in Catholic churches worldwide, the miracle recurs at all hours, seven days a week, century after century, more like clockwork than clocks.
Miracle it might be, the sociologists argue, but how could it not thereby become also routine? And how could the associated paraphernalia not fall prey to the changes of fortune and fashion?
One rebuttal to such questioning is to point to masterpieces like that in Ghent. The Van Eycks’ achievement leaps beyond superb technique, they say, to become a renewer of the divine mysteries that doctrine says underlie the ritual.
The defenders may have something there. Yet masterpieces are rare. There are so many churches to fill; hence much art and relics, religious and secular alike, is imitative, and over time slides down a slope through kitsch, into self-parody, gift shop trinkets, and ends up, no doubt deservedly, as — well, trash.
The doctrinal mysteries, being invisible, may endure; but can the same be predicted for the remnants of obscure holiness? The chained up, abandoned storage bin of outdated sanctity in Arles seemed to whisper a faint but unmistakably negative verdict.
For my part, in years as a Quaker, I have absorbed much of the early Friends’ iconoclastic attitudes: I prefer my cathedral to be a plain meetinghouse, unadorned but by the Light Within. The “historic” Quaker burial ground on Nantucket Island holds the remains of several thousand Friends, rich and poor, proud and modest, pious and pretender, almost all with no marker but a blanket of thin, weather-toughened grass, inside a low log railing.. Such is our own special brand of philistinism, and we are quite humbly proud of it.
Yet what will happen to that mound of old French reliquaries?
The cathedral has stood for many centuries. It would be no big deal to let these gilded priestly discards lie in that niche for a few more generations, as the thickening dust becomes opaque and the last faithful who remember them die off.
Then — well, the honorable denouement would involve chanting processions, polished pointed mitres, incense and special crypts.
But one can also imagine an ever-increasingly anemic church, now bleeding for billions in cash from long overdue costs of priestly pedophilia, being forced to send a nameless team to unlock the chain, likely under cover of darkness, pry open the squealing iron gates, brusquely check relic boxes for precious metals and gems, and dump their other contents into some common container.
Then an unmarked truck heads for a compliant, close-mouthed funeral director’s crematory, which would be fired up before dawn, with little more than a parting splash of holy water if they’re lucky.
Douglas Gwyn, author of “Into the Common.”
Presumably in Heaven the rewards of their honorees are secure. But in Arles I saw, as a non-mystic visitor, that alongside the ancient motto of Sic Transit Gloria Mundineeds to stand another, Sic Transit Sanctus Mundi (Goodbye to yesterday’s earthly holiness) as well. And maybe even a third, if only as a footnote, that not even an ornate gilded urn will do more than slow the eventual passing.
Oh, wait: “Dust to dust”(Genesis 3); they already said it.
As you see, my cathedral stop was no masterpiece, but memorable all the same. I wonder how different It would have been had I been able to take a weekend side trip to Ghent. Much better if Doug Gwyn and I had gone together.
“Just In terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
Rudolph has spent a lifetime dealing with physical and mental pain from the bombing. Despite her injuries and lingering stress disorders, Rudolph provided testimony that helped lead to the convictions of the men accused of planting the bomb, and she
