Some Thoughts on God, and Poison Ivy

I hate mowing grass. In fact when it comes to all things grass-mowing, the only thing that I hate worse than mowing grass is to have a patch of grass that has not been mowed. I hate this because it creates the appearance that the owner of this given patch of grass is so lazy as to be practically non-existent from the point of view of his fellow grass-mowers, who it must be said also hate mowing their grass so much, that they cannot resist squeezing a little pleasure out of it by feeling superior to anyone who dares shrug in the face of agronomical convention and just “let it grow baby.” And, thus, “cuticus ergo sum, (I mow, therefore I am), with apologies to Mr. Descartes.

About the only thing that makes mowing the grass bearable for the 150 minutes or so that I spend each Saturday doing it, is that things tend to occur to me out there that give me pause for thought afterwards. Today for instance, I had a few thoughts about the existence of God, or lack thereof, as illustrated by a poison ivy plant.

It has been wet here for so long that I caught myself staring longingly at a picture of Death Valley last week. Everything in the plant kingdom is very much loving this, and manifesting this happy fact by growing twice as tall, twice as fast. And this includes the poison ivy. In fact, I have had at least one patch of poison ivy lesions on my body every day since late April. And I am not the only one. There was more scratching going on in my last staff meeting than take place in a whole month of games at your average Major League ball park. I think that one of the Department Directors actually engaged in a cup adjustment during his Power Point moment. So when I saw that little three-leaved devil poking its head through a clump of moss today, I began to consider what the existence of such a plant suggests about the existence of a supreme being.

According to monotheistic belief systems, God loves us the most of all the things he created. After all, he even let us name the damn things, and how many of you would let just anyone name your children for you? So that would seem to imply that everything else in the universe would occupy a subordinate position to we homo sapiens, and essentially be placed here for either our delight or our use. And, it must be said that this seems to hold for most things; I guess thanks are in order for the iPod, the sun, the Fender Stratocaster, the fact that you can get a grape to ferment so delightfully, and of course, hardcore pornography. Even George W. Bush was not without usefulness in that he helped expose the religious right as the nutcases they are and also damaged the political future of his smarter and therefore more dangerous brother, Jeb. But, consider the poison ivy plant.

This shiny little dermatological WMD cannot be eaten, woven into cloth, smoked, or used for ornamental purposes. It appears to exist solely to make us miserable and grease the pockets of the companies that produce prednisone and Caladryl. I once knew a guy who burned some of the stuff by mistake, got a little too close to the smoke and, voila, internal lesions! I have heard that you can get it in your EYES for crying out loud! It resists eradication efforts like a Kansas School Board resists science in the classroom. It grows stealthily, among the plants that you actually want to be there, and is so unassuming and humble that you don’t even notice you have been hit with the misery bomb until the scratching starts. Why would a god who loves us above all else invent something like this, and not even give us the courtesy of a warning to steer clear of it? I mean, at least he warned the first couple of us to avoid the fruit of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” right? (Of course, this brings up the question as to why he would not want us to acquire knowledge of good and evil, if he wanted us to pursue the one and avoid the other, but that is a question for another mowing session) And isn’t the arrangement supposed to be that we get hit with nasty maladies after consciously doing something that is enjoyable but sinful? I mean, I get the whole gonorrhea thing. Maybe the logic of it would be apparent to me if only wicked people, like Democrats, the ACLU, Richard Dawkins, and the members of the National Science Foundation were susceptible. I guess that one thing that bugs me is that this seems to violate our contract with the almighty, and nobody appears to know how to reopen negotiations. I mean, Falwell is dead, you know.

One consideration that comes to me is that God may place some importance on the poison ivy plant. Maybe not as much importance as say, a human stem cell, but some modicum of tenderness in the old omnipotent one’s heart. I could accept this I suppose, were it not for the fact that he NEVER EVEN MENTIONS POISON IVY IN HIS ONLY PUBLISHED WORK! Now, in the Bible he sets aside some blood-soaked plot development to express his love for pigs and shellfish (i.e. don’t eat em), sets Sinai up for sanctification by setting part of it on fire before he literally throws the book at Moses, even speaks up for the rights of the sperm cell by severely regulating its use, and so on. Of course he devotes a lot of celestial hard-drive space to his hatreds, e.g. the Hittites, the Babylonians, Baal, Ra, uppity women, menstruating women, the anti-slavery movement, any heterosexual act with someone who actually appeals to you, including…..well, “you,” and, in a major disagreement with Jerry Seinfeld, he definitely thinks there IS something wrong with the whole gay thing. But, not a single word about the poison ivy plant.

Would it have been too much to ask for a little blurb among all the hate-speech and the begots, in maybe, Exodus say, as a warning to look out for this little green bastard? How hard would it have been to have thrown in something like:

“And lo did the Israelites travel with their asses into the land of Balthar Gilgamesh, and there did they retire in the evening for juleps and toddies and to have knowledge of the slave-girls of the Hittites, that God in his mercy didst provide, and when they awakened in their hunger the Lord of Hosts didst command them to go forth and gather the bounty of the land about them that they might eat. But, alas, did the Lord thy God not say unto them to take not the three-leaved plant of shiny countenance, for it is beloved in His holy sight? And lo, the wicked among them who aspired to botanical knowledge didst cast off the Lord’s admonition and didst proceed to take the three-leaved plant of shiny countenance and did eat of it, and make of it a nice tea, like unto the shrooms of wisdom, and also did lie upon its leaves in their slumber, and behold, their sufferings were great.”

Now, is that really too much to ask? How much human misery could have been avoided with just that much of an effort. I mean, he would have had to put way more time into figuring out the stripe patterns on the Zebra or the intake manifold on a ’72 Camaro. And its not like Western Christendom would have failed to notice the reference, after all he granted his book near exclusive rights to the information/entertainment market for more than 5000 years before allowing You Tube, CNN, or existentialist literature to gain mind-space. Not much else to do on a Saturday night in the 12th century, and that’s if you had a candle.

And so, when considering the poison ivy plant I am left to assume that I am either right in my atheism, or that God is just as inconsiderate as those who stand chatting in the aisles of my neighborhood Target Store as if they were in the designated site of the International Idiot Convention. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to see if we have any more Caladryl.