The Death of God (A True Story)

humor

by Sienna

Once upon a time in a city in the Pacific Northwest lived a handful of pagans who were in the same neighborhood. Two of the pagan households were next-door neighbors, and the two families spent a lot of time together. One of those families was mine.

My neighbors owned a green iguana that was about 14 inches long from nose to tail. He was a very tame and friendly iguana. Being typical irreverent pagans, they named him God. The lizard would sit in the windowsill on sunny days, enjoying the weather from the inside of the house. Occasionally, the neighbors would let him out into their backyard, supervised, to hang out with the kids, as God preferred the company of little children.

We could sometimes see God if we looked from the windows of our house. He would be hanging out in the sunshine, enjoying his life. We figured he was a fairly happy God, but apparently his blank expression hid much that was going on inside his lizard brain.

One hot summer day, one of the children opened the window, and God was lost. He escaped into the neighborhood, which was full of cats, cars and other hazards to small iguanas. Our neighbor was frantic, and spent more than an hour wandering the neighborhood, looking for God, calling out his name. Of course, the other nonpagan neighbors were alarmed at this dreadlocked heathen calling out "God!" from the street. Luckily, they were too dumbfounded to ask him what he was doing. Nevertheless, as you might already know, this was not the best path to finding God.

Eventually, my friend made posters and hung them on telephone poles. The posters had a picture of the lizard, and the heading "Lost God." Still, there was no sign from God indicating where he had gone. Eventually, my friend gave up his search for God, deciding to be a Godless heathen after that.

A few months later, that family moved out and their house was rerented to strangers. Once in a while, we could still find God, hanging out on the garage roof, or on a tree in someone's yard. We knew that the rest of the neighborhood was also seeing God, but they did not know what to call him. All our attempts of communing with God failed, so we resigned ourselves to simply knowing that God was around.

That fall, we finally purchased our own house and were scheduled to vacate the rental house in November. This required us to remove a wire-mesh fence that we had built in our backyard and the dormant raised-bed garden that it enclosed, which was a large job. It was one of those rare dry fall days when we called all of our pagan friends to come give us a hand.

A small group of people gathered and began working in the yard, while my teenage son was removing the wires that had been used to hold up the fence. Suddenly, he shouted, "I found God! He's dead!" The adults rushed over to see what he was talking about.

Sure enough, stuck in the wire mesh of the garden fence, was God. He looked like he had been dead for some time, and perhaps even frozen several times in the chilly nights of a northwest November. It appeared as if he had made an attempt to get beyond the barrier of the fence and into the cat-proof safety of the garden, but the wire mesh was too narrow for the body of God. So he died with his front end in the garden of salvation, and his tail sticking out into the rest of the world.

The pagans gathered around the fence, declaring "God is dead," just in case any of the neighbors cared. We spent time speculating how he died and what was God's relation to his Universe at that moment. Did God create his own fall? But the biggest question was "What do we do with God now?"

His body was shriveled, dried and petrified, so my husband suggested that we hold on to God so that we could return him to the heathens who owned him originally. "God should be with those who loved him best," my partner stated. So we put God in a shoebox. But we never returned God to our ex-neighbors, and when we moved, we went with God.

I forgot about God for a while, assuming my husband would take care of God's needs. But, one sunny summer day, as I was outdoors working near our tool shed, my husband asked "Honey, do you feel closer to God at this moment?"

Being a pagan, I knew something was up with this question. I gave him a suspicious look. He reached over my head to a shelf on the outside of the tool shed, and picked up a familiar shoebox.

"God has been right here," he said "over your head, keeping you company the whole time."

I can't really say I felt blessed by God at that moment. I ordered him to give up on God immediately, but he only laughed. However, recalling that disagreements over God could lead to divorce, I formulated a plan.

The moment he out of sight, I took an opportunity to rid myself of God forever. I grabbed the shoebox and tossed it in our trashcan, God and all. I didn't tell anyone that I had thrown God away, but finally I knew for sure that God was out of my life. I had abandoned God, and I knew it was the right thing to do. I watched in peace as the garbage collector dumped the body of God into his truck.

Somewhere, in the depths of a landfill, buried under tons of garbage, is the body of God, and eventually, when he decomposes, God will surely return to Earth.