Heh. 

Post Edited (One Love) : 2/7/2010 4:48:27 PM (GMT-6)

Arius, by the way, would not like you, Benny. He had, I hate to say, a better theology.

But that doesn't matter.

You've won.

You are the reason why I have a hundred people, maybe, if they all show up.

And you have a hundred thousand.

You have anointed spectacles and earthquakes and coliseums filled with dollars.

But I, in Pittsburgh, am full of Lent and snow and funerals.

I spent this night, bending my arrogant back, touring the Old Testament, being reminded by Andrew, a saint, that I am worse than David, than Manasseh the iron-manacled, than Reuben, than the priapistic Solomon, than Adam.

I also spent the night pleading with a woe-begotten woman who wants your ecstasy, your cocaine spirit, and doesn't want the rule of faith, the ascetic renunciation of rush, the penitential death-struggle against the passions, and the weeping, crawling, ex-prodigal turning from the demonic swineherd suicide-rush off the cliff toward the simple, soul-naked knee-churning progress into back into the penitentiary of Climacus where she belongs.

I begged her to be brave, to force her brain into the forge of Nicaea, her heart in the River of the Leaves of Spring.

If she wants saved, that is.

But she doesn't, damn it. She wants your stuff instead.