God’s Gorilla

~ WWGGD? ~

“I see you got yourself a gorilla,” you say.

“It’s not my gorilla,” says your friend. “It’s God’s gorilla.”

“God’s gorilla?” you echo, astounded.

“God’s gorilla,” he affirms. “God chooses unlikely creatures to do his work here on earth.”

As your friend keeps a loose hand on a leash, the careless beast knocks you into a brick wall.

“Hey!” you exclaim. “He nearly killed me!”

“He’s not well behaved,” your friend says, pulling back on the brute’s leash, “but still … God raised him up to do good things.”

“Good things?” you ask, your voice marked with skepticism. “What kind of good things?”

“Restore law and justice and prosperity. Make things like they were back in the good old days.”

The gorilla backhands a queer person, who shrieks and flees with blood on their cheek.

“God’s gorilla will make America great again,” says your friend.

For a moment, you are too stunned to speak. You watch as God’s gorilla tears a tree out of the ground and hurls it into a dilapidated house.

“Justice for who?” you ask, unable to believe your eyes.

“For good people like me,” says your friend.

A stunned family crawls from the wreckage of the home.

“And what about these poor folk?” you ask, pointing to the ruins.

“They’re the ones who messed up this country. They can’t be trusted.”

With mouth agape, you shake your head.

“You’re afraid of these people,” you say, “so you get a gorilla to bully them. And as if to throw ape shit on God’s name, you claim that he sanctions all of this!”

As if it were a twig, the gorilla snaps off a lamppost and starts swinging it.

“He’s good for morality,” says your friend. “Good for creating jobs. Good for family values. And best of all, he’s pro-life!”

The beast lumbers down the sidewalk, steps on a brown-skinned child and pushes her mother into oncoming traffic.

“Your damn gorilla is destroying everybody who happens to be in way!” you shout, your face red with rage.

With an expression of disappointment, your friend sighs.

“I told you … it’s not my gorilla,” he says. “It’s God’s gorilla.”

~~~~~~

“… one stands perplexed, above all at the sight of human sin, and wonders whether to combat it by force or by humble love. Always decide ‘I will combat it by humble love.’ If you resolve on that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.” — Starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky[1]

Images by MagentaGreen and Bernard Spragg / Creative Commons.

[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).