Every time I fart I think of God.
I realize this is antithetical to the common word association associated with the word "god", but hear me out. People are conditioned to only see the divine in sunsets, mountains, dolphins, the apex of some sexual congress, or even a Red Sox World Series Championship. We can only think of God in concert with something sublime. Why?
The problem, really, is that people have what I think is a disciplinary notice about the nature of God. The god we've created in our minds is a grandly figure in a flowing robe. He created our world and everything in it – or so we've been told. The problem is that if He created everything, then certainly our brains, lungs, and circulatory system are an expression of the divine. Could our digestive processes be any less so?
In fact, farting is so prevalent in this world that it accounts for a substantial percentage of methane in our atmosphere. The livestock we cultivate is the source of most of it. It begs the question, did God see a need for methane in our atmosphere and that farting mammals were specifically equipped to meet this requirement?
I understand that most people have an issue associating things like flatulence with divinity, but I think this is simply mental conditioning. If God is everywhere and in everything, then certainly flatulence is part of the divine. In fact, so much of what we consider unpleasant is actually part of our creator (whatever form that takes).
Consider Mother Teresa. She was once asked how she could continue, day after day, attending to the terminally ill in the shit-hole that is Calcutta, India. Her response? "It's not hard, because in each one I see the face of Christ in one of His more disturbing disguises."
If the divine can be experienced among the terminally ill in the dank, fetid slums of Calcutta, is it not even present in a crowded elevator in Milwaukee, where the result of someone's earlier celebration of bratwurst and beer might not become silent zephyr of olfactory unpleasantness? Does not the memory of being in proximate of an unplanned public toot not bring forth a sense of mirth?
We've all experienced it. I recall a particularly long senior staff meeting consuming the afternoon of an all-too-pleasant spring day, complete with a seemingly endless cavalcade of mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, each longer than the one preceding, silently stealing our souls and challenging our ability to stay conscious, when – from across the room – someone shifted in their seat and ripped an inglorious toot that sounded like someone un-zipping a fog horn in mid-blast.
What sweet relief! The room was immediately filled with the sound of 20-odd professionals trying to stifle a righteous guffaw at the impertinent trumpet, but trying to stifle the mirth this audible report brought forth just made it worse. Soon we were simply laughing out loud – the contrast of a sober, professional setting and a dorm-room quality riff were beyond our ability to end with stone-faced indifference.
This memory gives me a chuckle every time it comes to mind. I came to see the genius of flatulence. The glorious retort in that conference room broke through all sense of decorum and social strata. From the low line supervisor to the gilded, gray-haired directors and vice-presidents, all were moved to laughter. Men and women alike experienced some measure of joy from this audible emission from some anonymous anus in the room.
That rat-a-tat expression was more than cheese being cut. It was a timely reminder that the meeting had really gone on too long – and that we were human.
I think God saw that we would periodically need the boredom of a long meeting perforated with something joyful. This conceptualization of flatulence as a piece of the ethereal might seem far-fetched, but I think that excluding it from the litany of God's graces is to place something natural in the realm of evil.
Really, is considering flatulence evil less absurd than seeing it as part of a divinely-inspired consequence of human digestion?
I do not think so.
© 2011 by George Jones
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