Read The Last Testament: A Memoir Online
Authors: God,David Javerbaum
Tags: #General, #Humor, #Literary Criticism, #Religion, #American, #Topic
5
(Jesus disagrees with me on this; he favors a more communal governance based on sharing resources, and caring for the sick, and faith, and hope, and some other third abstract noun I never let him get around to telling me.
6
For whenever he begins to spout his utopian vision, I angrily cut him off: “That’s socialism!”
7
And he saith, “No, Father. It is not socialism.”
8
And then he afflicts me with more of his worldview, and I interrupt again: “Yea, socialism! Thou art a socialist!”
9
And he saith, “Father, that is but a bogey-word used to demonize others.”
10
And I say, “Thou art demonized?!? Out! Flee my son, evil socialist demon!”
11
And he saith, “Father, I am Jesus Christ. Dost thou really think me possessed?”
12
And I say, “Truly, no; for a socialist demon would not possess thee; he would share thee with all his lazy demon friends on welfare.
13
Verily, Jesus, thy traitorous words almost make me question the authenticity of the strange circumstances surrounding thy birth.
14
Keep this up, and I will demand thou furnishest me a copy of thy long-form birth certificate.”
15
Cue the Look.)
16
All manner of dualistic hierarchies flourished during the Middle Ages: king-subject; pope-church; priest-flock; lord-serf; happiness-misery.
17
But the maintenance of these hierarchies would have been impossible were it not for the fact that this was also an era when literacy knew its place: as the exclusive property of religious fanatics.
18
For the medieval monks saw books as treasured commodities; regarded reading as a kind of sacrament; and labored so hard on their writing that they created ornate illuminated manuscripts that to this day remain unsurpassed in glittering illegibility.
19
True, Islam was simultaneously suffering through its Golden Age, marked by a flourishing culture and great advances in arts and sciences; but I was patient.
20
I knew deep inside its urbane exterior lurked a puritanical center just ululating to get out.
CHAPTER 3
1
I
maintained a thorough oversight over human affairs during this time; but as for divine intervention, the Middle Ages marked the start of the third and final phase of my dramatic career.
2
Like Garbo, I had begun in silence, made the transition to talking, and now, increasingly, just wanted to be left alone.
3
So I made fewer and fewer cameos; and many well-known figures of this era who are widely assumed to have been my associates, had no connection with me whatsoever.
4
Attila the Hun, for example; even in his own time he was nicknamed the Scourge of God; to be sure he was a scourge, but not mine; he was but a tribal scourge, scourging whatever he deemed Hunnably scourgable.
5
The same is true of the Vikings; I played no role in any of their raids, or ransacks, or pillages, or plunderings; though I did admire their work.
6
(As an aside, I must briefly state my displeasure that through some quirk of historical circumstance, four of the seven days of the week are named for pagan Germanic gods.
7
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday; 80 percent of thy office hours are spent in nomenclatural Valhalla.
8
The worst is Friday, for that is the day I am forced to hear myself endlessly and mistakenly thanked.
9
Thank not me; thank Frigg, the Norse goddess of love, ye unwitting pagans.)
10
At one point during Genghis Khan’s brutal conquest of half of Eurasia, he said, “I am the flail of God.”
11
I sent no such flail.
12
Nor were the great heroes of the age in league with me; men like Charlemagne, who was deified by many of his subjects after he named his kingdom the “Holy Roman Empire”; they took it as a sign of my providence; it was not; it was just good branding.
13
And the knights who roamed the countryside as ostensible paradigms of the Christian warrior; some rescued fair maidens, others ravaged fair maidens, and over half
dressed
as fair maidens under their armor, but nary a one was doing “the L
ORD
’s work.”
14
Even Dante, author of
The Divine Comedy
—the greatest sci-fi trilogy of all time—worked alone; though his work was infused with such genius I wound up borrowing a few of his ideas, as did the devil.
15
(Which ones? Thou shalt have to wait and see!)
16
But there were a few significant events during this godliest of ages that I actually did a little godding on.
17
One was the Black Death, to which I referred earlier as the butt of one of Raphael’s great mirths; I imposed it on Europe as harsh but fair punishment for . . . something.
18
At the moment I remember not what, exactly; but knowing me my guess would be something in the general ballpark of wickedness;
19
Though it may have just been “that time of the century.”
20
I also played an active role in the Christianization of Ireland, guiding St. Patrick on his journeys through the Emerald Isle.
21
Yea; how I loved watching St. Patrick parading gaily along his route, marching and prancing in his gaudy finery, inviting the many like-minded men he encountered to join his festive procession; which they did, often fueled by mead; in this way converting the entire nation of Ireland to Christ, and/or sodomy.
22
And I personally guided Marco Polo on his epic journey to China.
23
For he had prayed most devoutly to me to satisfy his wanderlust by guiding him to the Orient; so I agreed to help him, but only if he promised to show perfect faith in my navigation.
24
Thus, throughout his entire journey he kept his eyes closed; ascertaining the direction of travel by repeatedly shouting out his first name, then listening for the sound of my voice ahead shouting back his last name.
25
In this slow yet oddly amusing way did he travel from Venice to Cathay, whereupon he celebrated with a dip in the pool.
CHAPTER 4
1
A
nd then there was Joan of Arc; that sweet, innocent young farmer’s daughter who flat out gave it up for me.
2 No, I mirth; truly, Joan of Arc was beloved of me; for she was none other than the earthly incarnation of my daughter Kathy, sent down to earth like her brother, to be born, inspire, and die young.
3
Jesus and H. G. had long since become active partners in all aspects of my business; but Kathy had spent the previous 14 centuries assisting Ruth in her duties as a heavenwife.
4
(Note that I did not say “
just
a heavenwife”; for I know how difficult it is to maintain a proper heaven.
5
Yea: in some ways heavenwifery is the toughest job of all!)
6
Kathy had been in awe of Jesus ever since his triumphant return, yet also a little jealous; for though never one to gripe, every century or so I would overhear her in the throes of an all-out martyrdom complex, complaining, “It’s not fair! Why won’t Daddy let me die for him!? Is it ‘cause I’m a girl?”
7
For over 1,000 years I ignored her pleas, because I harbored concerns about her pursuit of a career whose inevitable end was excruciating death at an early age.
8
As I have said, I can be overprotective.
9
But she was the apple of my eye; so when in 1412 I overheard her grumbling yet again, I lovingly set out to get her killed.
10
She did not require a mission as global as Jesus’s, only one that would make a difference in some epic earthly enterprise; and the obvious choice at the time was the Hundred Years’ War;
11
Which was already so-called even though it had only been waged for 75 years; for those were the days when men dreamed big.
12
Until that point the war had been a purely secular conflict between England and France, and I had no stake in the outcome; but it was suitably vast for Kathy’s modest messianic purposes, so I decided to plunk her down smack dab in the middle of it.
13
I flipped a coin; it was tails; she was French.
14
I will spare thee the tedious details of our planning, along with those of Kathy/Joan’s short life, which thou mayest read elsewhere; though I will point out that unlike Joseph and Jesus, the definitive musical version of
her
story hath yet to be written.
15
(I am looking at thee, Jeanine Tesori; for I admired thy score to
Caroline, or Change
, and I hear Joan’s story told with the same kind of stylistically eclectic musical vocabulary.)
16
Yet also unlike Jesus, “Joan” never learned the true nature of her identity; so up until the moment of her death, she considered herself no more than a French peasant woman;
17
Or, as that was known at the time, a “triple non-threat.”
18
But her brothers and I keenly monitored her progress; indeed, the saints who visited her and commanded her to fight for France were not in fact Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, but the three of us in disguise.
19
I was Michael. Just so thou knowest.
20
And lo, Kathy rose to the occasion; she was fearless and incorruptible; she forever proved the point that a woman
could
achieve success in a man’s world, so long as she was tough, and hid her femininity, and cut her hair like a lesbian, and was personally protected by the king and God, and there was only one of her.