How to Plan a Christening

Planning a christening can be a real headache! Relatives’ schedules to balance, clergymen booked and remunerated, and lest you forget the end goal of buttressing baby Marcel_Proust against Tzvarnoharno, the force that hates the good in mankind and applies unceasing pressure towards our moral ruin.

One: If buds are on the vine, then it’s that lovely season for baptism—the Spring, but should your baby be born in the despair of late fall, waiting on crocuses to bloom is no option, because for babies born under dark accord as otherwise, baptism is just one of many safeguards needed against confinement to the abode of the damned.

Two: Based on your own life experience, request a caveat to the baptismal vows wherein the baby should be protected against what Wilhelm Reich styled “emotional plague. ”20 If the priest gives your many napkin-scrawled baptismal caveats the hairy eyeball, pull theosophical rank by asking, “Would 20 (Wilhelm Reich, 1945) you agree with Gurdjieef that ‘the force and degree of a man’s inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will?”21

Three: Baptismal gowns can cost as much $$$$$ as a wedding dress. If you were married at city hall, and ergo remain unexploited by the wedding dress and DeBeers mining industries alike, why start that exploitation train a-rollin’ on this most earnest of life’s milestones? If your mother is leery of providing material from your sister’s prom dress of 06/15/2001 after your anniversarial onanism incident of 06/15/2011, assure her of the occasion-specific need for the coveted fabric.

Four: Slick and frilly invitations are worth the extra buck. Baby Marcel_Proust’s family and friends can tuck theirs away in some drawer until the family and friends die and the frilled stationery enjoys its life’s second act brightening some squalid landfill.

Five: To hedge bets against the Infernal Serpent, ask that a reading be (what is it?) performed from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, the gist neatly summarized by the gnostic blogger LonerWolf: “the Archonic force’s main objective is to keep humans ignorant of their divine origins beyond the physical universe. ” Six: If the priest argues that Our Lady of Lourdes is a Roman Catholic rather than a Gnostic church, invite some local Light Worker pals from the Sethian Gnostic Community to suss out if the priest is some sinister Rosicrucian intent on maybe hexing rather than blessing Baby M_P. 21 (Gurdjieff, 1933)

Seven: At the post-baptismal reception, in the park, with its frozen branches reminding everyone of necrosis, do not mention your deal with the Infernal Serpent wherein baby Marcel_Proust is destined to bring about mankind’s unceasing imprisonment by means of exponential advances in deconvolution, lest any forward-thinking Light Workers decide to remove Baby M_P from the penitentiarial equation then and there.

Eight: Ask that the reception be soundtracked by Stalaggh’s Project Misanthropia, described by the 1 st-year journalism students at VICE as “the ugliest, most horrific oppressive noise possible. ” This should keep the bars of the Black Iron Prison in full view for any relatives deceived by whatever celebratory skeins of jubilatory crepe paper the occasion has temporarily stretched between the bars of the Black Iron Prison.

Nine: If the priest compliments your grief blogging profession to clear the air after the Gurdjieff incident, elucidate exactly what you grieve for as per Grievin’ Gary’s advice: “It has to do with my sister, Padre. We spent summers playing cards or reading paperbacks called It and Phantoms on the splinter porch of my aunt’s cabin. It may sound strange for teen siblings to spend entire summers in relative seclusion while beach beers beckoned as they only can before beers grow so stale, but peers came to Catherine hat in hand. She could choose when she wanted beach beers as I can’t now or couldn’t then. My social status was dubious, as you might back-extrapolate from my current affect, yet no peer did I prefer to her. She’d dive over top of me into ice-cold Patton Lake, risking catastrophic neck injury. Sweat rivulets and bristling brown hair on her tan arms in the sauna straight from an erotic Lorenzo Lamas movie, which may be too abstruse a reference for a man of the cloth, though I’m not sure what you were up to in 1992 when Lorenzo was portraying Gropius in The Flesh and the Devil. We’d pour water over each other’s heads from the dipper, father. Shivers ran as happiness does down the spinal column. Her innate sensuality made sensuality with even one’s sister feel natural enough, no sin against God and nature or anything all that worthy of condemnation to hell. We took turns changing in the sauna’s little lobby area and I’d perch on the sauna’s top bench and catch glimpses of a breast’s underside or that uppermost portion of intergluteal cleft that possesses not the faintest stigma of anality. After such saunas, I’d believe in the future. Aunt Claire would be reading her Ed McBain wondering why so many saunas so often. Despite her normalization of insauna sensuality, Catherine did act differently when Aunt Claire was around: standing a little less close to me, touching me less frequently, making me wonder if something transgressive really was occurring in the haze. I’d pump water from the well feeling like a real frontiersman. As our baptismal boy’s namesake elucidated in suffocating detail, time’s duration dilates during adolescence. A month feels like a year. Three months of a sixteen-year-old’s summer equate to most of middle age. An entire life stage of duration as Catherine and Aunt Claire washed yellow beans, seeming more like my wife and mother than my sister and aunt, and after dinner, there was Catherine’s graven image illumined across the bonfire, her laughter as fresh and clean as the lake after each sauna. We would stay up all night buzzing like katydids, a cricket noted for its mating call. I’d fidget on the top bunk debating the bold move towards her bunk below. Tell her it was for warmth when she gasped in mock astonishment, maybe. And then came her murder so soon after, taking all of my contented yellow bean middle age from me before I’d turn twenty, leaving me all alone to face the horror of true middle age, misunderstood, love not having been learned, unless then again this child might teach me something. ” If a long silence follows, the priest will uncharacteristically quote words you won’t comprehend until embraced in the San Francisco Public Library by Divinitee, It is the sister who guides the path of the wanderer throughout the nihilistic metamorphoses, during which the securities of ontotheology lose their authority and disappear into their twilight, and before the arising of that new thinking which betrays itself only in scarcely perceptible hints. The sister is associated with transition, and with the indeterminacy of an unthreaded time. Even the corrupted seals that stamped the distinctive mark of scholasticism and theological apologetic are broken, and no new type has taken their place. The haunting voice of the sister is heard as the brother drifts away from the ancient genus of theological metaphysics and towards the genus of the stranger. Yet the sister’s voice cannot be identified with the type of the past or with that of the future, it cannot be subsumed within a genre.22

Ten: If the priest returns from his extratemporal trance state to subsume your grief into the genre he’s better suited to, Beatitudes, “Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted, ” before inquiring what gnostic theology offers you, realize you can only cobble together some flimflam from Bibliotheca Pleiades articles and bloggers with names like UNLEARN THE LIES. Should all the marbles of man’s continued residency in the open field of divinity be in play, epiphanically understand it’s best to knuckle down and quietly align yourself with the One True God depicted in that corpus of Abrahamic scripture that pre-dates the big find at Nag Hammadi. 22 (Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation, 2011)