Whereabouts Unknown

Years later, this I learned:

your absence told me more

about you than your presence.

Empty-Flavoured Holiness

The Church sells empty-flavoured holiness,

from lollipops with Papal faces on them

to dictator-sized cathedrals.

Monuments to our vulgarity,

with more kitsch in them

than a really bad Duran Duran album,

to house and protect such ideas as:

‘blessed are the poor’.

The Church is so human, it’s actually hilarious.

How can we not all laugh out loud

at the juxtaposition of the spectacle and the congregation;

the pantomime and the foolishness?

Scripted audience participation,

as spontaneous as the reciting of a train timetable.

You can’t dogma your way into heaven.

Love can’t be compelled.

They turned God into a desperate and deranged stalker:

‘Love me or you will suffer!’

I had an epiphany once, sitting in church.

It wasn’t religious.

Forever and ever and ever and ever. Amen.

How did we get it so wrong?