PRAISE THE LORD

About fifty yards away stood an immense figure of a being with wild, unkempt hair and beard on a huge head and face. He must of weighed somewhere between three and four hundred pounds that was spread over almost seven feet of bone structure. On top of his head rested an old and well worn black derby hat and his body was covered with an equally worn and patched black frock coat. His grey, tattered, long john shirt, that had once been white, hung over ragged black trousers. He looked like a large gorilla in a tuxedo suit that had escaped from the circus but there was something vaguely Homo sapiens about him that held me back from reaching for our weapon.
“Praise the Lord!” he shouted, “I am the Most Reverend Chubby Gentile of the Universal Life Church, at your service, gentlemen,” and with that introduction he took off his derby and made a sweeping bow.



To Yogondo this was a yeti, a devil, a malevolent spirit all rolled into one big monster and nothing could convince him otherwise. Even after the Reverend sat down on a nearby rock and had a cup of tea with us Yogondo would not come close and stayed far enough away just in case a fast escape was necessary.
The Reverend had a very interesting story. He had been living in the mountains, cut off from all civilization, for about five years. He had come up to this desolate Himalayan mountain area in order to be closer to God. A most sinful life he had led before coming to this Asian holy land, a life of self abuse, degradation, debauchery, whiskey and blue movies; unspeakable, ungodly behavior. He had come to meditate, to focus his energies on controlling or overcoming his appetites and living on locusts and honey like John the Baptist, a natural man, totally at the mercy of God and the environment that surrounded him.
The first year was the most difficult as images of his past debauches invaded his mind most of his waking hours, visions of vaginas and penises always on his mind, and wanton dreams of orgies and beastly fornications visited his sleep at night.
Then one morning tragedy struck. Or so it would be for most people. Yetis came out of the forest, four of them, wild, hairy creatures strong as bulls, and subdued the Reverend. Then they tied him to a stone slab and castrated him with a flint knife, disengaging his testicals from the rest of his body by cutting through the soft skin that separates them. They then roasted them over a small fire and very solemnly ate them. Before running back into the forest they untied the Reverend and made sounds and gestures of friendly appreciation. The Reverend was touched in spite of his loss.
At that point his life started to change. The erotic dreams stopped, the day time fantasies stopped, his thirst for strong drink was no more and his lifelong weakness for tobacco never again gave him heed. He gained weight in spite of his sparse diet, his movements became softer and his voice became higher and overnight he became comfortable with himself, for the first time in his life, he said. “They took me bollocks but gave me new life, I was born again, praise the Lord!”
After recovering from his operation the Reverend decided to stay in the mountains and build a tabernacle to his God, a temple of thankfulness where he could worship everyday and a sanctuary in which he would be protected from further disturbances. But after that one incident the yetis never bothered him again. He knew that they were there, he could hear their unearthly screams in the night and every so often they would leave him foodstuffs of berries and root food and an occasional dead animal that he would cook in the same fire pit where they had prepared their meal of his most tender parts. On one occasion they left tinned meat and a metal bottle filled with kerosene that had been left or stolen from a trekking party. On another occasion they brought him books. They watched over him for now he was one of them, a blood brother, a member of the tribe. They had eaten his blood and flesh, had taken his power into themselves and were now one with each other. He had also learned how to identify and prepare the eatable flora in the area as well as construct traps so he might catch small rodents and birds. He suffered not from the lack of food in his new home but there was something still missing. There was a twinge of loneliness. Then one day after the rains he discovered the mushrooms.
They were small and white with delicate purple flutes on their undersides and grew under and around small evergreen trees that were prevalent in the area. He usually ate them raw or made a tea and would sometimes subsist for weeks at a time on this one fare. After the rains there would be an abundance of them and he would gather them all and store them in honey when he was able to locate a hive.
“When I eat these mushrooms I think about God all the time and nothing worries me,” he said one day. “This is God’s flesh, a blessed sacrament for us sinful mortals, no more dreaming about beer and vaginas, no more self abuse, no more thoughts about filthy lucre, no more need for the baubles and bangles of Babylon, I’ve been reborn again. Heaven smiled on me twice, I lost me bollocks and gained everlasting life and found a friend and ally in these cosmic vegetables, praise the Lord.”
The Most Reverend Chubby Gentile lived in a small cave about a hundred yards from the clearing. The entrance was well hidden behind large bushes and several small boulders prevented access to the narrow passageway until they were removed. The inner room contained a bed made of planks and some kind of animal fur, a crudely constructed desk and chair and several shelves overflowing with books and papers. On the far wall was an altar with a wooden cross and a leaf plate of dried mushrooms that were being offered first to the deity before being consumed. A well-thumbed Bible lay on the altar next to a small flame in a stone dish that smelled of animal fat. Shadows of the wooden cross danced on the cave walls to the flickering beat of the flame. It was the hermitage of a true holy man and when he spoke it was with the singular authority that only deep faith or divine madness can produce.
“The appearance of man on the planet is the culmination of organic evolution that has been guided by an all powerful intelligence, they say. Intelligence is a mental attribute that cannot exist without the functioning of a brain. It is an attribute of mind. Mind is the unfolding of thought. They both come from the convoluted mass of tissue inside the skull. None of these can exist without life, without a body, so to speak about an impersonal intelligence is not very intelligent. That leaves us with the alternative of personal intelligence. And what is that? Is intelligence in my noodle? If so, how does it come out? Or is this mess of grey matter a receiving set for the intelligence out there in space to come through?”
We were sitting in the Reverend’s cave one afternoon having a cup of his cosmic tea when he told me his story.
“I was a lapsed divinity student and minister of the gospel who one day became a cynical atheist. I lived with my little old mother and spent my time masturbating and watching dirty movies in lieu of any real relationships in my miserable life. It was a terrible way for a three hundred pound genius to live. One day I went to a festival where the people wore strange clothes and didn’t eat meat or even cook their food. There was a guru there who used to be a psychiatrist but was now a holy man and taught the Kabbala in the Arizona desert. He gave me shaktipat initiation and my nadis blew out the top of my crown chakra and the whole cosmos became available to me. I left my mother’s house and started to travel the world. I was looking for the secrets of the universe. I traveled to all the exotic places on the earth. I would take an apartment and write books of an insightful nature to earn my living. I started to get famous and people wanted to interview me and have me talk on the radio. They wanted to make me into some kind of folksy guru. It was gratifying to my very large ego but I knew down deep it was a false and ungodly way to live and that the purist way for me was to be a hermit in the mountains. I didn’t want to eat rich food anymore or sleep on a soft bed. Women gave me impure thoughts. I wanted to live like the hermits of old. I had heard that there was a very holy mountain here and that there was a valley with blue flowers that was most special. A celestial hand brought me here. The flowers that I have found are purple and white but that’s good enough. Here the secrets of the universe are revealed to me. This is my home now.”
I asked the Reverend about the Bible on his altar and if he read that for spiritual inspiration or as literature.
“Now that there is a strange book, my friend. It is indeed literature of the first water and the language can be a delight once you get the hang of it. You’ve heard the saying, “you are what you eat?” Well that book is the head food for the majority of the western world and that food, those messages contained on those pages, have been going into our pointed little heads since we were in the cradle. And what are those messages? Why bigotry and intolerance, slavery, dishonesty, persecution, pornography and sexual perversion, cannibalism and genocide. I won’t bore you with chapter and verse but it’s all there. No other book ever written has had such a perverting influence on mankind as that bloody book. Is it any wonder the western world is so pathetically neurotic? A book of this nature should be kept away from the youth of the world for it sanctions and defends behavior and characters of the lowest order. But it does make for great reading if you don’t take it too seriously and don’t use it as a moral or ethical guide. And the women in that book are pretty hot stuff, you know, the Esthers and the Jezebels and of course Eve who started the whole darn sex thing. Sure glad that’s over with for me.”
I asked the Reverend what his thoughts were on reincarnation and rebirth.
“I have eternal life, my friend; the plants have shown me that. The lilies of the field come and go every year but lily has always been here and always will. I go to my heavenly abode for a while to be remade into a different form, to change my costume, put on another kind of hat, but sooner or later I come back on stage to continue my part in another theatre of the absurd production. It’s not a question of returning because you don’t really go anywhere. Just off stage for a teeny bit. Where else could I go?”