The Day I Fired God

God and I have issues. It all came to a head yesterday morning when I leisurely double-checked my 1 PM lunch appointment only to discover it was for 12 noon. I had to leave now, right now. Now as in NOW!

Shit!

It was all God’s fault, of course. Was it too much trouble on His part to actually equip me with a brain that worked? Or at least a non-working brain that came with technical support? Ever try getting through to God? I’ve been on hold all my life. Never mind. Just grab my wallet and I’m outta here. Wallet? Wallet!

One minute ... no wallet. Two minutes ... no wallet.

Now I was really mad at God.

Three minutes, four minutes ...

I’m late! Or rather late for being a half-hour early. I had to give myself time for getting lost, stuck in traffic, or a comet randomly landing on my head. And the way things were going with my day, there was clearly a high probability of things falling out of the sky, totally exclusive to me.

There’s a passage in Homer’s Iliad that best describes how I was feeling. This is when the Greek’s mighty warrior, Achilles, discovers that the god Apollo has played a trick on him (sort of equivalent to hiding my wallet on me). As Homer describes it: “Achilles of the nimble feet was furious.”

“You have made a fool of me!” Achilles lashes out at Apollo. To add a bit of context to the conversation, our mere mortal only minutes before had had a run-in with the river god Xanthus, who “towered up and rushed upon Achilles with an angry surge, seething with foam and blood and corpses.”

First the river god, and now Apollo. “Much as I should like to pay you out,” Achilles rages at the son of Zeus, “if I only had the power.”

Being a mere mortal totally sucks.

At least Achilles got to vent his anger on Troy’s best warrior, Hector, whom he confronted “looking like the god of War, in his flashing helmet, girt for battle,” brandishing “the formidable ashen spear of Pelion.”

Me, I had the option of punching the crap out of my throw pillow-laden love seat.

I looked up at the ceiling instead. “God, you’re fired!” I said in a voice that would have caused all the plants in the house to shrivel and die had I been a god, myself. The plants paid no attention.
Minutes later, I found my wallet, or rather God surreptitiously returned it to where I had left it in the first place. At least, where I think I may have left it. How the hell would I know where I left it, me with my factory-reject brain with no tech support.

I looked back up at the ceiling. Let this be a lesson to you, God, said the look on my face.

Nothing dropped out of the sky on me on the way to my lunch appointment. Lunch was great.

Homer's Iliad: Grief, Rage, and Fate

A good friend of mine recently started up a support group we call "A Spiritual Conversation About Mental Illness." At my first meeting, one of the members happened to bring up Old English poetry. The bleak times, he explained, set new standards for the expression of what can best be described as fatalistic lament.

I whipped out my iPhone, and on Wikipedia found this verse circa 991 AD:

Thought shall be the harder, the heart the keener, courage the greater, as our strength lessens.
Here lies our leader all cut down, the valiant man in the dust;
always may he mourn who now thinks to turn away from this warplay.
I am old, I will not go away, but I plan to lie down by the side of my lord, by the man so dearly loved.

I couldn't help but think of Homer's Iliad, the product of a no less fatalistic age:

"Rage - Sing, goddess, the rage ..." begins the epic.

It's nine years into the Siege of Troy. The Greeks (Achaeans) have been driven back to their ships, but Achilles Son of Peleus is sulking in his tent, refusing to fight. Finally, he consents to his dearest friend Patroclus going into battle in his stead, outfitted in his armor. Patroclus is predictably killed (and stripped of his armor) by the Trojan commander Hector, son of Priam King of Troy. On hearing the news (from the Rieu translation), Achilles ...

... picked up the dark dust in both his hands and poured it on his head. He soiled his comely face with it, and filthy ashes settled on his scented tunic. He cast himself on the earth and lay there like a fallen giant, fouling his hair and tearing it out with his own hands.

Thus sets the scene for the greatest temper tantrum in all of literature. Clad in splendid new armor conveniently forged by the god Hephaestus, Achilles sets out on his own rendezvous with destiny. To exact his revenge will seal his own fate, maybe not today, but very soon. The gods have already determined this. Achilles is fully cognizant of this fact, but such is his grief and rage that even his goddess mother Thetis realizes there is no stopping her son.

We pick up on the action, in progress:

Thus Achilles ran amok with his spear, like a driving wind that whirls the flames this way and that way ... He chased his victims with the fury of a fiend, and the earth was dark with blood ... And the son of Peleus pressed on in search of glory, bespattering his unconquerable hands with gore.

Such is the force of his rage that he does battle with the river God Xanthus and vents his spleen in a face-to-face encounter with the God Apollo, who has been lending a divine assist to the Trojans: "Much as I should like to pay you out, if only I had the power."

Finally, he gets his chance to take out his anger on Hector:

"Lions do not come to terms with men, nor does the wolf see eye to eye with the lamb - they are enemies to the end," taking care to deliver an exclamation point with a spear through the neck. "So now the dogs will maul and mangle you ..."

It's not over. Achilles strips Hector of his armor (actually Achilles' original armor that Hector had stripped from Patroclus) and lashes his body by the feet to his chariot and "with a touch of the whip started his horses."

Priam and his wife Hecube witness the spectacle from the walls, but no one informs Hector's wife, Andromache, who is in her chambers awaiting her husband's return. The sound of laments from nearby draws her outside, just in time to witness her loved one's body being drawn toward the Achaean lines.

For the next nine days, Achilles drags Hector's body around Patroclus' funeral bier. Finally, the god Hermes persuades Achilles to allow Priam to bring his son's body back for a proper funeral. Thus ...

Dawn came once more, lighting the East with rosy hands, and saw people flock together at illustrious Hector's pyre ... Then they collected his white bones, lamenting as they worked, with many a big tear running down their cheeks. They took the bones, wrapped them in soft purple cloths and put them in a golden chest ...

Homer ends his account with:

"Such were the funeral rites for Hector, tamer of horses."