Merry Christmas and the Sandwich Cult

Roundabout Seemingly Profane Thoughts to Get to the Magic of Christmas

We called some of the homeless people who wound up in my hometown “Dead Enders.” It was a mark of some distinction and even something like the highest possible mark of anti-refinement. To be a “Dead Ender” was to be part of the House of Windsor of homelessness.

It was one thing to grow up in Aberdeen, Washington and then get addicted to meth and wind up on the streets. It was quite another to grow up some place back east and then bum your way across the entire nation until you were stuck out on the Olympic peninsula with no way back just because you liked Kurt Cobain or something. You had to manage to avoid being saved by pretty much the entire nation before you could graduate to being homeless in Grays Harbor county.

I’ve talked about some of these folks before, like the Watchman who looked at his watch every few seconds and carried a brief case around town. There was a whole local legend that he had been an emergency rescue diver and had damaged his brain trying to save someone. He was still living the day of the accident, somehow, stuck in a loop looking at his watch and trying to gauge how much oxygen he had left. Sometimes he would walk into the grocery store, take out a giant can of peaches, and shave his feet right in the middle of the aisle. To be honest, I liked him quite a lot and so did most people. I think that’s why he had a heroic backstory.

There were less reputable types, of course. The Knife Salesman used to appear in front of you in random alleys. He’d take out a giant knife, that he had almost certainly stolen, and ask you to pull out your wallet. Then with a certain kind of genius he’d take all your money but then give you the knife so that legally he hadn’t mugged you and you’d feel too confused to mug him back. The Karate Guy used to fight invisible enemies in empty parking lots, sometimes seeming to be battling five or six opponents before defeating them all after a hard fought battle. He could actually be fairly charming, a sort of meth-addicted Jackie Chan, although he was a Pacific Islander with striking blue eyes. I won’t say what he did, but when we found out nobody found him that funny or charming anymore and we all wondered why he wasn’t in an institution somewhere.

Very infrequently, but still much more frequently than you would suppose is reasonable, one of the more enterprising Dead Enders would work their way out of homelessness by starting a cult. Washington state is thick with cults and I think it’s another thing you can blame on the rain. Everyone is looking for something to do.

The rules of these cults were always the same. It would turn out that one guy was super special. Better than all the other guys. He had been given divine authority to be responsible for all decisions for a group of people. It would then transpire that those decisions were always something along the lines of him getting to have sex with whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and if you said no you had to leave the cult. Also he needed everyone’s money because he was the only person in the cult too pure to be corrupted by its influence.

And when the cult was falling on hard times, and this happened on something like three different occasions to my knowledge because apparently this is a pattern written into the fabric of reality, the cult leader decided they would all go start some kind of organic food business. The purpose of all these cult was to lead the world back to nature and a better way of living by making sandwiches but with one magical twist, which was these sandwiches would have avocado. Avocado was a brand new kind of either a fruit or a vegetable —no one was certain— that people had invented all the way out in California. Eat avocado. Smoke pot, which would save you from smoking meth. Give the cult leader all your money. Work like a slave. Have sex with everyone. Peace on Earth.

These were always very low trust businesses as you can imagine, so they’d make the whole sandwich right in front of you. You could watch them take the lettuce out of the bag they’d got from the grocery store right across the street. The same bread you bought at home would be spread out before you. Then that avocado would be cut and sliced right before your eyes. And what’s that? A smear of cranberry sauce! And not even on Thanksgiving? In the same way that republicans are constitutionally incapable of making a good cup of coffee, somehow being a borderline homeless nature cult member makes you really good at making artisanal sandwiches. I don’t know why it works this way. It just does.

And they were quick to innovate on punch cards for loyalty rewards, too.

I never gave credit to Christianity for all the zags that it took with all the zigs you expect in the formation of a cult. It was all so easy to dismiss. Historically, a lot of religions had the same kind of beginning as the cults I was discussing above. I’d like to take a moment to examine the origins of Christianity through the lens of someone expecting to join a Sandwich Cult.

Enter Jesus of Nazareth. I’ll skip over the whole birth thing, and go to when He announces himself as the Son of God. Everyone must have been pretty nervous when that first happened because back then a lot of times the next step would be for the guy who just said he was God to point to one person in the crowd, accuse them of causing all the problems in the world, and then direct the crowd to murder them. Only He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t even insist He has a special knowledge and status that makes it okay for him to sleep with everyone’s wife. Doesn’t even ask anybody for money.

What?

Instead of following the normal playbook, Jesus skips a few steps and goes around and displays amazing feats of magic. Everyone must have been thinking, “Okay, this is when we’ll get back to the normal part. Let’s get to the cruel punishments!” If you’ve read myths, the Greek gods used to do stuff like turn women into swans so they wouldn’t go wagging their tongues about an extramarital affair. Stuff like that is in a surprising number of religions. Lightning bolts get thrown at people. Fires burn down whole towns. A lot of smiting. All over small petty stuff. Instead of any of that stuff, Jesus says everyone has a responsibility to take care of the sick and the poor. He wants to talk to the sick and the destitute. Everyone is important, He says, even the lowliest beggar. Even people you don’t like. Even people you hate. You have a responsibility to care about your neighbor as you care about yourself. For the first time ever to my knowledge, a deity said you had a duty to actually care and not just perform the right actions. He didn’t seem to want to kill anyone, and I’m guessing that made some number of hopeful followers extremely disappointed.

One thing, which I absolutely did not know when I was young and an atheist, is that charity for the poor as we currently understand it is a Christian innovation. Or, at least within the religious context. People gave help before, and so did religions, but almost always exclusive to their community. The Romans religious cults didn’t do it. if you gave money to the temple of Zeus it went to the priests of Zeus. If you gave money to anyone, it was obviously for them to spend on themselves. Duh. It was seen as crazy to just sort of… give it away. Then Jesus says, hey whatever you do for the least among you, you do for me.

When the world wanted him to be a war leader, Jesus talked about being reconciled with your brother. When He was expected to condemn, He talked about forgiving others as you would hope they might one day forgive you. When He was broke, and you would have expected Him to start an avocado sandwich business… He just didn’t do any of the normal stuff. Even when He was being murdered, and surely at least someone was thinking, “Ah yes. Now’s the time. He’s really going to show us the meaning of vengeance now.” He said, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”

I still have lots of questions. None of this sits perfectly at ease with me. But the thing I can never escape, and which inevitably catches me again and again is, “Do you have a duty to be good to people to the best of your ability?” And when I think of what it means to do good for someone, not the how but the what, I don’t think of a man in a white coat in a laboratory. I think of a construction worker on the back of a donkey riding toward His death. And even if it was all a lie, which I no longer believe, I would be astonished that Iron Age people would have known what lies to tell.