The 10 Secret Things...

When I was growing up in Chicago, the first Catholic I ever met was my friend Gino. He was who first taught me about religion. He went to Blessed Redeemer, so he had a lot of inside information we didn’t get in public school. We had that whole separation of church & state thing, so we had to trust science & math & physics & PE to explain the mystery of life. So, one Saturday afternoon, we were smoking a cigarette behind his garage & looking at a Playboy he snuck from under his big brother’s bed, & he told me about sin. We didn’t go to church that much, except maybe on Christmas & sometimes Easter, so I didn’t know as much about sin as I should. Gino said the best book on sin was the Bible, which had been invented by the Pope back when people were living in caves.

The first Pope? He was like a genius, he said. He pretty much invented everything.

Gino said the Bible was one of the Secret Ten Miraculous Things That Catholics Believed. There have been lots more miracles since then, he said, like maybe a thousand, but these were the big ones. So, that day, after swearing me to complete secrecy on pain of instantaneous death, Gino gave me the Secret List of Ten.

1.  God was relaxing in the void & one day, he takes a big handful of nothing & makes it into something & he calls it earth & then he takes more handfuls of nothing & makes it into baboons & garter snakes & trees & Chihuahuas because they fill up a lot of quiet really quickly.

2.  God invents Adam & Eve from the rib of one of the other things he made, maybe a mastadon, or a baboon. Or dirt. I don’t remember. Definitely not a Chihuahua, or we’d all be really short with big ears. But, it’d explain why we can’t go for 10 minutes without yapping, though. Then he gave Adam & Eve free will, which basically means they could do anything they wanted as long as they followed the rules. The minute they broke the rules, God threw them out of Paradise & made them live with the Chihuahuas & snakes. I wasn’t convinced that free will was worth it & I’m sure Adam & Eve had their moments of doubt, too.

3.  God invents the Catholic Church. Joey said he was a little fuzzy on this one because he heard his uncle say one time that the Catholic Church was Satan. I said maybe we could put a question mark by this one, or say God invented the Church & Satan at the exact same time, so it makes sense why human beings can’t always tell the difference.

4.  Moses parts the Red Sea. I saw Charlton Heston do this one, too, so that seemed a little less than miraculous, but still pretty cool.

5.  The Virgin Mary gives birth to Jesus Christ, pretty much guaranteeing that every girl in my neighborhood wouldn’t let you touch even her elbow for fear of getting pregnant by the Holy Spirit. The only good thing is that I’ve seen some of these girls 30 years later on reunion.com & I’m glad I was enough of a Lutheran that the Holy Spirit kept a safe distance between me & those elbows.

6.  The Pope writes the Bible with a little help from God for the parts he wasn’t there. The Pope is infallible which means that after God whispered it all in his ear, he didn’t have to write it down right away because he never forgets anything. Later on, when they had to go back & write down more stuff to fill it out so people felt like they were getting their money’s worth, the Pope assigned it to other people because he was busy, but he always graded their work to make sure it lined up the way he remembered. The stuff that he graded lower, they still used, but they put it in books of the Bible that people didn’t check all the much, like Habakkuk & Amos.

7.  God invents Italy & gives it to the Catholic Church.

8.  God invents the US of A & gives it to the Puritans. Gino’s uncle said The Catholics had to wait until JFK to get it back. He also calls this one of the minor miracles.

9.  The Flood. This one never made sense to me, no matter how many times Gino explained it. I've always thought the real miracle was that God didn’t just drown us all & go back to living quietly in the void.

10.  I’m still unclear on this one, too. The best I can tell is that the tenth miracle is about some secret handshake. Some people, like Gino, were just born knowing it, but the rest learned it later in Confirmation class. For awhile, I wanted Gino to teach me, but then we moved away to the south suburbs & I learned about other miracles, like French kissing & I decided free will wasn’t so bad after all & I never really looked back after that.