The Wit's Guide to God
Or, the Hidden of Hiddens
Are you there, God? Is my call important to you? OK, I’ll stay on the line, and I’ll listen carefully because I’m sure your menu options have changed.
In last week’s Quote Vote, you the readers affirmed the Deity’s Supremacy by a landslide, thus ordaining an issue about God right in the middle of the Days of Awe, the ten days of the Jewish calendar during which everyone’s names are either written into the Book of Life or, uh, left out. (The phrase “kill your darlings” comes to mind.) So I’ll choose my words carefully, as Vladimir Nabokov did when asked if he believed:
“To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”
Ah, the ring of incomprehensible wisdom! Vlad, as usual, nails it. The best way to think about God is as a subject that can’t be understood, the Hidden of Hiddens. Unfathomableness is next to godliness, as the specifics only get us into trouble. When God becomes a stranger on the bus trying to make His way home, you’ve got a chart topper that makes no sense.
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
— Anne Lamott
The only notable exception to this rule is George Burns, whose corporeal form the Supreme Being takes when He appears before John Denver in the 1978 film Oh, God!
“I'm tired of all the talk that I may be dead or that I never was at all. Or, that God was just particles of cosmos, gas. I'm not gas. I found that very insulting.”
— George Burns as God.
In that movie — which briefly knocked the original Star Wars off the top of the box office, proof of a divine hand — God’s quick with a wisecrack, admitting that He flubbed the dub with tobacco, ostriches, and avocados (“Made the pit too big.”) When mortals wrap their heads too snugly around the idea of the Ultimate, they tend to fixate on exotic fauna.
“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.”
— Pablo Picasso
And when you discuss the Almighty as a colleague, you’re probably not getting a promotion. As the Prime Placeholder, God can be a guarantor of humility. To make public your faith is to admit that you don’t see yourself as the center of the universe. Though it can also conveniently draw a dotted line from you straight to the top of the org chart.
“The more humble a man is before God, the more he will be exalted; the more humble he is before man, the more he will get rode roughshod.”
— Josh Billings
The Tetragrammaton’s other indisputable use, even as Unknowable Figurehead, is as a working answer to such questions as:
“The chicken probably came before the egg because it is hard to imagine God wanting to sit on an egg.”
— Anonymous, quoted by Leo Rosten
If you accept the premise that God is inexplicable, atheism is as fraught as any organized religion. In the battle of He is a Robed Caucasian Male With a Long White Beard vs He Definitely Doesn’t Exist, the best answer is: In God we shrug. Though at least it gave Hitchens a chance to talk about something other than Iraq.
“Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.”
— Ricky Gervais
“I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.”
— Fran Lebowitz
No one man had more clever aphorisms about God’s inexistence than good old Fred “God’s Dead” Nietzsche. We can distill his conditions for belief down to two zingers:
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
I would believe only in a God who could dance.
God is light, per John 1:5, and to dance is to trip the light fantastic, per Milton, so it stands to reason that God is dancing. Or not. How would we ever know?
“I’ve absolutely no idea if God exists. It seems unlikely to me, but then — does a trout know that I exist?”
— Billy Connolly
Quote Vote
“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”
— Alexandre Dumas
Isn’t it nice to get a complete distillation of a complex subject every week? In another year or so, we should be pretty sure of ourselves. And for next time? Write-in candidates are always welcome in the comments below.
Speaking of…
Shaggy God stories
The Other Guy
That was the 169th issue of Get Wit Quick, your weekly collection of salutary little chills. To be struck by lightning is conveniently a metaphor for wit, as per Patricia Lockwood on that “jolt of connection when the language turns itself inside out, when two words suddenly profess they’re related to each other, or wish to be married, or were in league all along.” All the words in Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting are God’s children, and God is❤️ .
I think God likes me. He/She's let me live to 70...
The Anne Lamott quote is divine.