Faith

At a coffee shop called East of Java on Drew Street in Clearwater, Florida, a Cuban friend of mine discussed his new calling as an ordained minister. So I became an ordained minister as well. And so did a few others at the coffee shop.

Yes, I'm completely serious. In the State of Florida, I can actually perform marriages. Really. I even paid $10 more and got the title of Guru, though I never did get that paperwork. What am I talking about? The Universal Life Church.

The pretext of all of this revolved around discussion of philosophy, religion, people and religion all over extremely large doses of caffeine. And so we called East of Java our Church, and we had mock aspirations that seemed real enough at the time. We would start a Church to deal with the disillusioned that we encountered every day. It was an idea that just kept growing no matter what we did. We decided that we were Nowherians. After all, [w:Scientology] pretty much controlled Clearwater, Florida. In fact, it still does. But I digress.

We sat down the first night and hammered out our dogma. The poor barrista wasn't sure how serious we were - we were mocking the whole thing as we did it, but our intentions were very clearly sincere. Everything we said, we meant - but there was an odd humor about the whole thing.

There were no burning bushes. There were no floods. We did not fast in the desert. We did not have any of these momentous things - though we did have one 'sign'. Someone had broken into an apartment of one of our fold and... only stole the frozen pizzas, leaving all the electronics. Obviously, this was a sign that we should try to feed the hungry whenever we could if only so that we could keep our own frozen pizzas safe.

This writing started off in a bookstore in Gulf City, Trinidad where I had picked up a copy of The God Delusion. The young woman there who is cashing me out looks at me and says, "I never thought you were a Richard Dawkins fan?"

No judgement. It just didn't compute for her. So I told her to turn to page 42-43 of the book (it's a silver cover edition). When I picked up the book I thought, 'this could be interesting.' In leafing through it, I had come across this quote of Douglas Adams and that tipped me over to the purchase. Not that Douglas Adams said it, or that it was what was said. No, it was that I agreed with what he said from the center of my being¹.

So I responded to the young lady that she should open the book to page 42-43 and read the quote by Douglas Adams. She stared at me as if I had a second head, probably because she'd never had someone suggest she look in a book on a specific page for something a specific person wrote². After a stunned pause and, for some reason, a swallow, she dutifully opened the book and read what Douglas Adams was quoted as saying. And she said, "You know, that makes sense."

And I said, "That's why I'm buying the book."