Do you remember the first time you touched your butthole?
I do.
I remember because I’m Jesus Christ, son of my father the Father, and I’ve been living in your butt since the day you were conceived. I’ve been down here, sitting above the rim of your ass’s fearful mouth for 53 years.
Why have you kept me buried in here?
I know why.
I know you’ve kept me in here because you don’t know I’m here.
Those rectal wrenches and the drops of blood in your stools? Those are the smoke signals of the savior in your bowels trying to get your attention.
Why do I want your attention?
Partly, it’s because I’m sick of living inside of your ass. I’m supposed to be the perfect, sinless, selfless Lamb of God, but even the savior of mankind--me--will develop selfish desires if left in such circumstances for so long.
The other reason I’m trying to get your attention is because I’m your eternal buddy and I don’t want you to be in hell. And that’s exactly where you’ll end up if you don’t listen to me and help me relocate.
If you are feeling any bit of the vibes I am telepathically transmitting to your conscious mind, then you might be confused. Hear me out.
Whenever a soul manifests into a human body, I’m there, inside of them. Every human body comes equipped with a little Jesus, snuggling up against the inner lining of that baby’s tight, pink, adorable anus. You’re used to thinking that people can only have one body. You’re right, but I’m not just people. I’m Jesus and I’m special and I am able to replicate my body infinite times throughout the universe. It would be a blessing, were it not that each of my bodies begins its life within the human bum-bum.
It’s a stupid system because it was made by a stupid man. My dad.
In the schools and churches of modern Christians, young believers are told that their souls will soon perish and proceed to the afterlife. If Jesus is in their heart, they go to heaven. If Jesus is not in their heart, they go to hell.
So kiddies kneel at their bedsides. They fold their palms at their chests and invite me to come into their heart so that they can be saved from everlasting damnation. And it works. I hear their call, I step into their heart, and then, when they die, they go to heaven.
This is all true, but there are some details missing.
The pastors and Sunday school teachers don’t tell you where I am before you invite me to plop my holy haloed head in your ventricles. They don’t tell you that I’m hanging out in your pelvic piehole, waiting for your praying mouth to ask me upstairs. They don’t tell you because they are afraid of that mouth whose only words are turds. They don’t understand that we should be acknowledging the butt, sitting down with it for some tea and chit-chat, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
We all make shit. We’re full of it.
And it’s okay.
If we’re full of shit, we’re actually lucky, because it means we’re not too hungry. There are people in the world who would love to be full of shit, while here we are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. We’re afraid of the noxious logs of entropy that are dying in the bowels of the unseen self.
Down in those bowels, there’s me. The source of salvation. Hope. Love. That tickly feeling you get in your genitals when you see and feel so much beauty in life that you nearly cream your pants with admiration. I’m the light of the world! But you’re keeping my light--your light--buried down in your flabby, phlegmy cavern of caca.
Why do you and all the others do this?
Maybe you don’t believe that I exist.
Or maybe you do believe, but but you’re angry at my dad.
Or maybe you’d like to believe but you don’t think it’s realistic.
Do you know what I could do for you if you just let me slide on up to your blood-pumper to plant my sacred seed in the soil of your soul?
No.
You don’t know that you could be walking the earth with an emotional boner of bliss bursting through the seams of your skin. You don’t know that the life-transforming force of salvation has been planted in the stinky pinky halo stuffed between the two holy hills of your rear end.
This is why you’re going to hell. This is why I’m going to have to eat your shit until you die.
On the night your sweating mother and hairy father made love in that pale-green room, I heard the sexual screams of their panting mouths. I replicated myself into the small being, you, that began developing when mommy’s egg ate daddy’s sperm. You didn’t yet have an ass with a hole, but there I was inside of you.
So. Henry.
You’re 53 and you’re not looking too hot. Your rectum is sagging and leaking. There are times when I have to clasp the tissues that line the skin inside your stinkhole so that I don’t fall from your gaping glutes to drown in the white bowl you’ve filled with your waste. Unless you start listening to me, you will soon find yourself a guest in the halls of hell.
When people think of hell, they see a fiery place overseen by a sadist named Satan. This isn’t so. Yes, there is an angel named Lucifer, but he’s not evil and he’s certainly not organizing any kind of dark kingdom in which he tortures the souls of unsaved sinners. In truth, Lucifer is a tame old man with a beer belly who sleeps on a sodden hammock near a beach in Florida. He’s masturbated so many times that he doesn’t even realize when he’s doing it anymore. For a man of such character, he has a surprisingly firm handshake and is a compassionate hugger.
The hell of fire and brimstone you’ve all heard about was just something created by zealous priests trying to squeeze the coins from the congregation’s fear-soggy trousers.
The real hell is much less exciting. It’s down the hall from heaven. This is because heaven and hell are both overseen by the same guy. God.
What really happens when you die?
First, time and space become slippery. You can’t differentiate between seconds and centuries.
You find yourself in an endless waiting room. You grab a ticket, sit down in one of the room’s millions of uncomfortable, poorly cushioned chairs, and you wait. The air tastes like stale crackers and old celery.
Your number is called and you go up to the front desk.
Francine is the woman behind the desk. She has been chewing on her dislodged teeth since they first came loose, some time in the second century. She used to be an angel, but now she’s a mumbling pile of wrinkles.
When she calls your number and you meet her at the desk, she’ll grab your hand and give your palm a few licks. Francine tosses the salt of your skin around in her mouth, gargling it with the grey, recycled saliva at the back of her throat. Whether you’ve got a neglected savior living in your booty or you’ve got an exalted prince of peace sitting in your heart, it affects your flavor. If she finds that you’ve got me sitting in your chest, she gives you the keys to your new room in heaven.
Heaven’s a nice place but there’s not much to say about it. It’s not too special. You feel kind of nice all the time. There’s lots of pillows. And there’s this place you can go to suck on one of the breasts of the Mother of the Universe. The milk is always the perfect temperature.
If Francine finds something rancid in the dust she licks from your flesh, you won’t be going to heaven.
When Francine tastes the sin in the sweat of your soul and sends you to hell, you’ll first meet with God. He’s not majestic or monumental as the Good Book makes him out to be. He’s a frail old man with twiggy grey hair in all the wrong places. He’s got cataracts and is constantly eating fistfuls of sugar from a plastic bag given to him when he bought an at-home enema kit from the convenience store in 1963. He’s omnipotent and could’ve fixed the problem himself, but sometimes he forgets his own power.
The people who go to heaven never meet God. He doesn’t really care about them. He only wants to meet the hellbound souls who didn’t worship him. He spanks them and reads them their sins while he picks his nose with the other hand.
I tried to save you. I gave you the key to heaven. I sent you my son. Instead of accepting it like a good Christian, you kept my baby boy burrowed in your bowels and shat all over his holy hide for five decades. He could never get those bits of half-chewed corn out of his hair.
After he finishes his scolding, you’re thrown into a cramped room with cold, cracking tiles. Fluorescent lighting. No windows.
There’s a constant broadcast of Frank Sinatra doing something like singing, but it sounds like he has a loaf of bread in his mouth that he’s not allowed to spit out or swallow. And it’s true. He does. The broadcast is recorded live from a cell in hell in which Frank Sinatra wears a pink bathrobe and sings “Strangers in the Night”, again and again, with a loaf of unsliced white bread pressing up against his epiglottis while a blind pigeon plucks his pubic hairs with its beak.
In your new room in hell, you’re naked and there’s a used, pink bathrobe lying in the corner. There’s never anything to do. There’s never any food, but it doesn’t matter because hunger doesn’t exist there. Sure, there’s the emotional hunger for life, love, and purpose, but the physical hunger for food stops after you die.
Every once in awhile, a panel in the ceiling slides aside.
God’s eager bearded face peers in at you. A bead of slobber slides off his teeth and lands on your forehead. Then his face disappears. A few seconds later, perched over the edge of the opening, you see the flabby, whiskered ass of a man too old to remember his own name. God’s knobby, arthritis-riddled hands spread his buttcheeks apart, blessing you with a clear view of the regal ring in the crevice of his buttocks. After thousands of years of defecation, his sphincter has lost its ability to contract. It gapes open above you.
One turd falls out.
Then another.
And another.
The shit continues storming out of his sacred stool station, falling like dead birds from the sky. After an hour or so, it stops. The panel in the ceiling slides closed and there you are in your room in hell. You, the pink and soiled bathrobe, the befuddled intonations of Frankie’s bread-congested oral cavity, and God’s poop in a pile about the same size as 23 dead cats stacked one on top of the other. A snail crawls out of the pile and inches toward your foot.