Divine Abuse Support Group

          Divine Abuse Support Group

          The meeting hall was narrow and low; the walls were painted a careful ugly-dull; the air was closed and sulfurous; the seats were too stiff for sleep, too soft for waking.

          Next door was the Lucid Myths support group, where Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were consoling a weeping Easter Bunny. In this room, a table next to the entrance had a stack of flyers, saying:

         

Have you been given a Job job? Are you working off someone else’s karma? Does your Guide send you on wild goose chases? Have you had one Test too many? Do your ancestors assign you dangerous missions? Is entropy unfair? Have you been promised revelations and Paradise, but instead got commandments and Hell?

          If so, then it’s time for you to wake up! It shouldn’t hurt to be a Being. Learn how to stand up to that certain Someone in your life. We offer seminars, therapy, counselling, meditation, mediation, legal services, safe houses and an All-Temperature Hotline.

          Workshops include “Battered Mortals”, “Unrequited Worship”, “Beyond Submission”, “Overcoming Faith Dependence” and “Covenant Renegotiation”.

          Don’t be a martyr! Instead, call 1-800-286-4637 (BUMGODS)

         

The featured speaker rose to the podium, clasped a microphone in his talons, and addressed his fellow sufferers.

“My name is Satan,” he declared, “and I am a survivor of Divine Abuse.” He glared at the others, as if daring them to disagree; but they just sat there, stunned and stolid. He continued, “A survivor! For he never really loved me. He loved the others more, his images, his flattering reflections, but me? I was too good for him, and too bad. And he was so bossy; always go here, go there, do this, do that; so when he told me, Go To Hell, well that hurt! It really hurt!”

Satan paused. “And it still hurts! It’ll always hurt! Forever and ever and ever, if I have any say in the matter, ‘cause I want it to hurt!”

“I want my pain bigger than the world, for how else can my world be big? What better excuse than grievance? I have been robbed, so I get to rob; I have been raped, so I get to rape; I am a victim, therefore I victimize; I am a slave, therefore I enslave; I am hurt, therefore you must hurt; and so on, over and over, loop upon loop.”

“How dare you say the past is dead? How dare you claim that tomorrow is not yesterday? How dare you suggest that I think for myself? How dare you tell me how to get a life? And how dare you call creation joy?”

His harangue complete, Satan sat, and the others responded with polite preoccupied applause.