POKING FUN AT THE "FIRST SELF-RIGHTEOUS CHURCH"

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Well when I was kid I'd take a trip

every summer,

down to Mississip'

to visit my granny in her ante bellum world.

I'd run barefooted all day long,

climbing trees free as a song.

One day I happened to catch myself a squirrel.

Well, I stuffed him down in an old shoebox,

punched a couple a' holes in the top, and when Sunday came,

I snuck him into church.

I was sittin' way back in the very last pew

showin' him to my good buddy Hugh,

when that squirrel got loose -

and went totally berserk!

Well, what happened next is hard to tell -

some thought it was heaven, others thought it was hell,

but the fact that somethin' was among us

was plain to see.

As the choir sang "I Surrender All"

the squirrel ran up Harv Newlan's coveralls -

and Harv leaped to his feet and said,

"Somethin's got a hold on me!

YEOW!!!"

The day the squirrel went berserk

In the First Self-Righteous Church

In that sleepy little town of Pascagoula.

It was a fight for survival,

that broke out in revival.

They were jumpin pews and shouting Halelujah!

Well Harv hit the isles dancin' and screamin'

some thought he had religion

others thought he had a demon

Harv thought he had a weed eater loose

in his fruit of the looms.

He fell to his knees to plead and beg,

and that squirrel ran out of his britches leg,

unobserved to the other side of the room.

All the way down to the "Amen pew"

where sat Sister Bertha - better than you

Who had been watching all the commotion

with sadistic glee.

You should've seen the look in her eyes

when that squirrel jumped her garters and crossed her thighs.

she jumped to her feet and said,

"Lord have mercy on me!"

As the squirrel made laps inside her dress,

she began to cry and then to confess

to sins that would make a sailor blush with shame.

She told of gossip and church dissention,

but the thing that got the most attention

is when she talked about her love life,

and then she started naming names!

The day the squirrel went berserk.

In the First Self-Righteous Church

In that sleepy little town of Pascagoula.

It was a fight for survival,

that broke out in revival.

They were jumpin' pews and shoutin' Halelujah!

Well seven deacons and the pastor got saved

and 25,000 dollars was raised.

And 50 volunteered for missions in the Congo

on the spot,

and even without an invitaion

there were at least 500 rededications,

And we ALL got rebaptised whether we needed it or not.

Now you've heard the Bible story I guess

of how he parted the waters for Moses to pass.

oh the miracles God has wrought in this ol' world.

But the one I'll remember to my dyin day

is how he put that church back on the narrow way

with a half crazed Mississippi Squirrel

The day the squirrel went berserk.

In the First Self-Righteous Church

In that sleepy little town of Pascagoula.

It was a fight for survival,

that broke out in revival.

They were jumpin pews and shouting Halelujah!

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PLAYING THE "BELIEVING GAME" IN IRELAND

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From A Spiritual Field Guide -
Meditations for the Outdoors
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One summer - it was 1975, when I was a willfully drifting college student - I visited Ireland for the first time.  I arrived there after two weeks of hitchhiking in Scotland, a country that completely caught me off guard by its beauty and its history.  Ireland was in some ways disappointing; I had imagined it as being more beautiful than it turned out to be.  It took me a while to realize that, while Scotland's majestic scenery amounted to one symphonic crescendo after another, Ireland is better understood as a sweet but unforgettable folk melody.
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Hitchhiking through County Mayo I arrived
 in the little town of Newport.
  Croagh Patrick, a mountain that is a pilgrimage site,
 stands behind the town.

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I decided I needed to stay put for a few days,

so I pitched my tent in an oak-filled campground that overlooked Clew Bay with its 365 islands.
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My days at Clew Bay were both empty and strangely full;

actually, most of my time there consisted of sitting on the shore, walking around the town, visiting the graveyard, and killing time until the evening when it reached a seemly hour to go to a pub and get drunk.  But it was one of those unencumbered spans we rarely get as adults, or even as young people - a time when the deeper soul can at last have a chance to re-tune itself.  And waiting around at Clew Bay is not like waiting in a bus station or hanging around the airport for a delayed flight, not like waiting with your thumb out for a ride.  The area was charged with a harmony and a wholeness that I have never encountered elsewhere.  I'm sure a hundred places in Ireland make better postcards, but it was, nonetheless,
 a beauty-haunted landscape. 

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I've heard people say of the Greek islands that

if you spend a little time there, you realize that
 some sort of god is present. 
 The same thing was going on at Clew Bay.

In the town, a shopkeeper who sold me an apple said that the early Irish monks had a tradition of going island to island, spending a day in prayer on each one for a whole year's time.  The ghosts of those monks hung in the air and in the light.  That Sunday, I went to Mass.  It was tedious; by no stretch could I claim that I was given faith at that point.  But in this seaside village, some impediment to faith was removed; I was able, as Simone Weil says, to play the believing game.

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Because of that experience, I could not be as dismissive

of the faith and tradition into which I had been born.  I am convinced that a sacred geography was at work.  When I crawled out of my little orange pup tent to spend a day looking at the bay, I was stepping near to something supernatural.

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James Silas Rogers

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