aldiboronti’s thread about Shirley MacLaine and the Holocaust, over in the BBQ Pit, got me to thinking about the nature of belief… and how it can very much affect how you interact with your fellow humans. And it also brought to mind a reminiscence…
Once upon a time, I made pizza with a Christian.
I was raised Methodist, but it didn’t take too well. I could be considered a Christian, albeit not a very good one. I always kind of liked Ben Franklin’s “Deist” idea, myself. But in the course of my life, I have been subject to a great many people who REALLY wanted me to switch over to their religion, belief system, or church.
One of them – an extended episode – took place over the course of nearly a year when I was working at a pizza joint in the days of my misspent youth.
I’ll call him Vince. He was one of the night managers, and for some reason always got stuck working Saturdays, one of the days we stayed open until midnight. At the time, I was a crew chief; he was my immediate supervisor. And he was a born again Christian. In a lot of ways, this was a remarkably good thing. Vince was determined to walk the walk like he talked the talk; he acted the way he felt a Christian should act, and was quite conscientious about it. He was determined to lead a Christlike life, in the sense of generosity, charity, and general righteousness. He worked at being a good guy, a thing far too few of us really practice.
…but the rest of us were all going to Hell, and that really, REALLY hurt him.
…and this led us to the Saturday Night Sermons.
Vince was a good, solid guy. But he was not much of a preacher. He was not especially compelling or charismatic, nor was he especially eloquent. This did not stop him from attempting to get us to curb our sinful ways and accept Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior, and join his church, learn the teachings, and enjoy a blissful eternity in Heaven, as opposed to the lake of fire. After all, you could get hit by a bus at any time! You have to act NOW!
…and I will tell you: being more or less constantly preached at does a LOT to erase the goodwill you generate by being a neat, upright, righteous dude. You literally could not have a conversation around the guy without him dragging his religion into it, and demonstrating how you were just on the WRONG SIDE, man!
And this is how the crew came to think of working on Saturday night as “attending the sermons.” Because in the dead time between ten o’clock and midnight, Vince seemed to come into his own. He’d quit doing manager stuff and hang around in the pizza kitchen, and more often than not, spend that two hours preaching the way of the Lord to the exclusion of all else.
Now, if you have a boss who talks about sex all the time, you can hit him with a suit for sexual harassment. But how do you get a boss to shut up when he yammers about religion endlessly? And more importantly, how do you ignore him or tell him to shut up, when he’s your immediate superior?
We tried firing up the tape player. He ranted about “devil music.” We tried discussing film or literature. He’d talk about Satan’s influence in these areas, too. It got to the point where we would bring in random things just to see how he would judge their “Satan Content.” We actually had conversations about how when Vince was with other members of his church, did they talk about anything EXCEPT Jesus and Satan? Dang, even the POPE had to think about sports or something ONCE in a while, didn’t he?
And this led us to the conversation about the wine.
Someone mentioned how blitzed they’d been the night before on Schnapps and coffee, and Vince leaped on the opportunity to explain the Satanic and evil nature of alcohol… which led to something of an argument, as several crew members knew well that alcohol was in the Bible. Did Jesus himself not turn water into wine? And what about that quote, “Wine that maketh glad the heart of man?”
Vince laughed, and was pleased to clear away our misconceptions. You see, the Aramaic word for “wine” was the same as the word for “grape juice.” Jesus never drank alcohol, nor did any of the Bible’s great figures. Whenever the Bible says “wine,” it means “grape juice,” that’s all.
“What about when Noah got roaring drunk and cursed his son for looking at him funny?” someone asked. Vince explained that perhaps Noah had got a little too free and easy, but he HAD just saved the world; no doubt God had forgiven him his lapse.
“What about when that one prophet got smashed and his daughters sorta raped him so they could have children to support them in their old age?” someone asked. Vince explained that the prophet in question had not willingly become drunk; his daughters had tricked him, and therefore the sin was theirs, not his.
…and this last one irked me. My first thought was to argue about how, precisely, one becomes “accidentally drunk,” at that time. What, did the girls disguise the taste with Coke? Did they put roofies or something in it?
…but then, something occurred to me. “Vince,” I asked, “you are aware of where Jesus did his teaching, right?”
“Sure,” he said. “Galilee, and around in there. It’s all in the Bible.”
“You are aware,” I said, “of the kind of land you get around there.”
“Mostly desert, I think,” he said. “Why?”
“Because grapes don’t grow in the desert, Vince,” I said. “Historically, they don’t grow a whole lot of grapes out there. They’re too busy cultivating actual food crops. If you eat grapes in the Holy Land, the odds are that those grapes grew in a vineyard in… Lebanon, most likely.”
“And your point is?”
“Well, if you’re squeezin’ grape juice from grapes in Lebanon, you’re puttin’ the juice in those big jugs, amphoras, right? And exporting it to Galilee, Nazareth, Rome, Israel, all those places?”
“Sure. I don’t see where you’re going with this, though,” said Vince.
“And for the grape juice to GET there,” I kept going, “it had to be transported. Caravan, most likely. Camelback. So, we’ve got all these camels with jugs strapped to their backs, marchin’ across the desert, for MONTHS, to Galilee and all these places, right? After all, Jesus did a lot of traveling.”
Vince looked at me, still not getting it.
“So… Vince… are you going to tell me that if you start with a jug of grape juice, and you seal it, and then you put it aside for a couple months, perhaps with gentle agitation like you’d get on camelback… months of this, in the hot sun… are you tellin’ me that when you open that jug, what you’re going to find is GRAPE JUICE?”
Vince’s mouth fell open.
Max immediately jumped in. The conversation, not Vince’s mouth. “Oh yeah,” Max said. “You’re going to get wine, totally. Either that, or vinegar. And I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t drink a lot of vinegar…”
“That’s totally true,” said Jennifer, who ran the till. “My brother did that once. You just start with a jug of grape juice, and put it aside in a sort of warm place, and in a few months, you have wine. Not real GOOD wine, but it’s wine. With alcohol in it.”
“You know, I was reading,” said Randy, who was working a ball of pizza dough, “about how in the old days, travelers would order wine or booze instead of the water, because you couldn’t trust the water in strange places. Historically speaking, that’s one of the reasons booze was invented in the FIRST place; amoebas and germs don’t live in it, and it’s safe to drink no matter WHERE you are.”
Yeah, this is the sort of thing you get from pizza joint workers in a college town.
Vince’s mouth was still open. He looked at us for a minute, and then excused himself and left the kitchen.
And lo, there was much rejoicing, and for the remainder of the shift, we did not see Vince, nor did we hear the word of God from his lips.
For several days afterwards, though, Vince was… weird. He had very little to say, and he kept looking at me funny. I began to become concerned. Was he going to try to get me fired or something, for making him look bad? Or for insulting his religion or something?
It was nearly the end of the week before I had my answer. Vince asked to speak to me privately, and I agreed to do so.
The first words that came out of his mouth were, “I just want to let you know that I forgive you, and that I think you’re okay.”
“Wha?” I said.
And Vince let me know what had happened. At first, he’d listened… and he’d heard… and he had thought about what had been said. Could it be that we were right? Could it be that Jesus HAD drunk actual wine? COULD IT BE THAT HIS CHURCH WAS WRONG? After all, grape juice in the hot sun, in jugs, for months… HAD JESUS BEEN A DRINKIN’ MAN?
It had EATEN at him. It had HURT him, this awful, gnawing DOUBT! And finally, he had sought out someone wiser than he, someone in the church, to help him with his suffering and his doubt. He never told me what that conversation had entailed, but it had apparently settled his doubts and cleared over much of his pain… but that had left the issue of ME. I had, after all, been the instrument of this great and painful blow to his faith… was I, in fact, a tool of the DEVIL? Had SATAN sent me to assail his faith with my poisonous logic and facts?
Or had God sent me to test his faith, and in so doing, make him a stronger Christian?
…well, now it was MY turn to stand there with my mouth open.
He continued. He had pondered for quite some time whether I was a tool of God or of Satan, and had eventually come to the conclusion that I was not WILLINGLY or KNOWINGLY in collusion with the Devil, because he honestly thought me to be a person of good character (if a knowing, and possibly unrepentant, sinner), and that while debauched, I would certainly not willingly serve the will of Satan… not knowingly serve the cause of Evil. And he was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, so far as being a tool of God, to test his faith and strengthen his resolve.
And he forgave me for the suffering I had caused him. Surely, I had not INTENDED to do such a thing. And he recognized this. “…and I just wanted you to know you’re all right. You’re an okay person.”
I stood there for a moment. And then I thanked him.
I wasn’t sure what I was thanking him FOR, but Momma always taught me that when someone offers you something and is trying to be gracious, you thank them kindly, even if they’ve just given you a polished turd as if it were the Crown Jewels of England. One must be gracious, whether or not the other person is making sense or not; the attitude is everything. He was trying to be nice, therefore, I must be gracious in return. And we remained friends after that.
…although it did put an end to the Saturday Night Sermons.
Apparently, one crisis of faith was enough for Vince.
In fact, it’s more common to hear grape farmers complain of too much rain than not enough (grapes need sunshine to grow sugar).
