Being a Saint is far too much responsibility for me. Don’t get me wrong, I have no delusions of actually ever becoming one, nor even being considered. I assume the simple fact that I refer to the current pope as Pope Palpatine completely knocks me out of the running. I think beleif in some sort of higher being is also a requirement, but that part I’m not sure of, my dogma is a bit rusty.
As I lay in bed trying to sleep in among the wife, the pillow amplified purr of the cat, and the dog whose sun-dried tomato bagel that she stole last night decided to fight back and have it’s odorous revenge on the people who were stupid enough to leave it on the floor, I had a strange epiphany. George Carlin had wondered how long your dead relatives were supposed to look after you from heaven or Rather when you die, how long do you have to look after the family? Is my great Great, Great, Great Grandmother looking after me and my siblings and my cousins as well as people that are her descendants that I’m hardly related too? At what point does the responsibility end? I went with Grandmother instead of Grandfather simply because going back that far would put them in the early to mid part of the 19th century. Being of Irish decent, I assume my Great, Great, Great Grandfather was a hard working paddy that left the responsibility of the children to the wife as was the practice at the time. He was also probably a drunk so most likely not capable of watching after me anyhow, but more than happy to interfere and influence my life. He is however my favorite dead relative that I just made up.
As I lied there pondering this whole scenario, for some reason it occurred to me that must be what happens when people see relatives during their near death experience. It isn’t that your stuck watching over and exponentially growing hoard of relatives that you really could give two shits about because you were dead before their their grandparents were born. No that is simply too much tracking, logistics, and paperwork that would do nothing but grow and become chaotic. Though I bet it was attempted at some point, and through mix up of paper work and typos is how we ended up different ‘races’ and cultures as well as the platypus. Oh, sure, they tried to reorganize, the mess after the filing cabinet was invented, but each file folder just instilled this need of ours to live in segregated neighborhoods, every drawer created a new xenophobia, and just exacerbated the problem. Nowadays, digitization of the files seems to be helping, but they are short handed, and there are a LOT of files to go through. They also came up with a better solution to the babysitting problem with the rise of Catholicism unfortunately this is also why they are so short handed now.
After you die, you are assigned one relative to look after until that relative dies. This is the relative that people see “at the end of the tunnel”. The tunnel is actually the holding plane; Limbo. They are stuck there until you actually kick the bucket. The light you see is the door at the other end. They’ve opened it just a crack so that you can see it’s awe and wonder, in order to entice you into limbo so that they can be done watching over your dumb ass. They close the door behind them and your stuck. When you turnaround and try to get back is when you discover that you can only see your assigned prodigy and are stuck looking after the little shit until they die. After that, you are free to ‘ascend’ into heaven play your harp, pan pipes, lutes, or what have you. Dance, sing, praise God, etc. You may also choose to help with the digitization of the Trillions of files. You have probably guessed from the current state of affairs in the world that the latter is not the most popular option. Now, if you know your math you probably realize that this doesn’t really add up. Two persons used to create three to nine others (and more that had different mothers) This was how they took advantage of Dogma.
Remember, it was until recently that unbaptized babes were not allowed into heaven. There was a permanent labor force. There were millions of innocents stuck in limbo, having to watch over relative, after relative. This system worked wonders until WWII threw everything out of balance. For some there were not even any relatives yet created as they were the end of the family line, and by this time the human race had already developed a different attitude towards work. “I didn’t ask to be born, I didn’t father or mother anyone, I am the last of my line, why should I have to do paperwork for all eternity?” the logic was sound, so they were free to pass through. That and the paper pusher of paradise were awfully busy trying to deal with the flood of people that didn’t even have enough time to shut the door before the next relative was in and they never got the chance to create more offspring to look after in the first place. They also were exempt from the limbo rules as they were the first chosen people and their culture was grandfathered in to the new rules. It is my understanding that Peter and Paul are blamed for spreading the word of the Jesus to the Gentiles and declaring them also chosen, thus ruining the whole system that was originally set up and creating the current mess.
By the 60’s the unbaptized were beginning to cause a little unrest. Times were changing, they had seen countless ‘relatives’ come in, server their time, and ascend. always seeing their little baby head silhouette on the desk in front of them. They organized into the Unbaptized Babe Union (UBU) and protested for equal rights. Fearing a severe loss of work force, the heavenly bureaucrats started spreading rumors that life now began at conception, instead of when God breaths life into a nose. This plan didn’t really have much though behind it. Millions of embryos were just floating around like dust in a hallway. The zygotes and blastocystis were not much help either and also began to pile up in all the corners that they could cling to. The fetus’s were some help. well some of them anyhow. The ones that were older did alright. The younger ones just kind of sat there with their muscles twitching and their ginormous heads throwing them off balance.
In April of 2007 the UBU won it’s victory and the rush to digitize the whole system was on. There are not many extras now who will sit at the doorways, though there are those that are volunteers of a very responsible nature. There are after all a LOT of embryos, zygotes and blastocystis’s that need to be gathered up from the air and the corners before some recently deceased unknowingly steps on them like a leggo in the dark. I have the utmost respect for these individuals, and will probably do the same after I’m finished with my assigned relation. The whole system is expected to be digitized by 2050. Possibly cutting things a bit close.
Now, the problem with being a Saint. Being a Saint is basically like the original plan of looking after your ancestors. You have your tasks that you’ve been assigned, such as looking after lost things for everyone. Everyone and, forever. I can’t imagine how many store rooms of lost crap there must be at this point. Now I’m sure that as someone else find your shit, it gets to leave the storeroom, but there is still paperwork to fill out. Add recycling into the equation and you’ve got the larger issue of how to even categorize it for the files. and that’s just Saint Anthony. Think about th problem of some of the older or more popular Saints like St. Candida or St. Secundus. Their jobs never end. No that is not what I desire. I’ll just net some embryos and vacuum up zygotes and blastocystis’s for a few decades and call it good.
Like I said, a strange epiphany. Of course I also had the thought that having the various gods of history set up as different Corporations, and all their various powers reduced to marketing of appropriate products could make an entertaining comic or sit com. Though I did not dwell on that as long.