Is George Carlin In Heaven?
Service:
Is George Carlin in Heaven?
Speaker:
Michael Relland
George Carlin was a comedian who obsessed about religion and the people who practiced it. He would say things like, “Why would you put the plastic Jesus on the dashboard facing YOU and not THE ROAD AHEAD?!” He was the unofficial class clown in parochial school who you could imagine standing up during a slow study period and yelling “fire,” but George I think would instead have waited for just the right moment in chapel, and yelled “HELL.” He was just that theologically gifted. So of course he would be the one who later in life would play in a movie, not God, but the Cardinal who blesses his golf clubs before a game. He was always about converting real-life religion into something highly questionable. And he says that when he dies—when we all die—we go to where we think we’re going to go. George says we should look for him in a public toilet in Honduras. So today, with the memory and loss of one of our most religiously outspoken comedians, I ask “Is George Carlin In Heaven?” Is he reconciled with God, with the work he has completed on earth? Did he get what he wanted—here? Is he getting what he needed, now after his death? Let’s start with his life.
In life where did we see George Carlin? On stage, jumping around, talking about our all-powerful God who has a place of suffering for those he loves, and how you can support it with money to your local church. He is the fool in the court. Back when the court, and native cultures around the world, had fools. A colleague in Unitarian Universalist Ministry, John Tolley, has written about art and religion. He writes, artists “expose the false and pretentious and pass judgment on those who [are] indifferent and unconcerned.” I see these artists in scripture. They are called prophets. But the fools at court begin to disappear around the time of our ancestors the puritans, when we had no room in our contemplation of heaven for lunacy or frivolity. Again, it is Tolley who reminds us of what such lost art can mean. He quotes the theologian Paul Tillich, who describes great art as that which challenges and transforms us. Tillich invites us to look beyond institutions to places non-divine, to the religious dimensions of all life. (Tillich, Art and Architecture, 166) Another theologian, Henry Weiman writes this: “Since God does not confine the revelation of [God’s] self to the Church, art which is not explicitly [religious] may be a revelation of the nature of God.” (Quoted in Tolley: “Art and Religion, Twin Manifestations”)
A revelation of the nature of God.
So I’d like to say I have bumper stickers for sale that say, “Go hug an artist.” After all, if they are revelations of God, if they are our brother and sister, we want to embrace them. But George Carlin didn’t want our hugs.
While the Church used to offer support to artists and in turn received the benefit and inspiration of cathedrals and paintings and sculpture and music… this past century has seen modern artists and social commentators like George Carlin speaking against the church. Who George is for us goes way back and I’m not encouraged by our recent history with George and the church, which I will go into in a moment. First, however, I need to lift up my vision of what an artist can be for us and do for us, because I think it this vision is what George Carlin wanted to give us—even to us religious sort.
There’s a Native American story about a young man who fell in love. He would see his love from across the village, but he didn’t know how to say anything about love. His sorrow wounded him; his frustration grew, and he began to walk. This is all he could do. His walk took him far from the village, far from everything he knew was real, because as he walked he drew out into an unknown place, where he learned new things, about himself, about the mysteries of the world he had left and of a world beyond—this was a place we might call heaven. He was given a flute that could communicate all of the knowledge he had absorbed, all of himself, if he chose to return. So he could return, he received this gift. So he could describe his sorrow and frustration, he received his gift. So he could transform pain into mercy for others, he received his gift, this gift of a being an artist, a creator for people.
Yeah, he gets the girl, but he gets the tribe too, and his music and his stories get the young people, get them through their own struggles. The artist generates meaning and holds people together in a culture that nurtures him. I think this was God nurturing a community through a holy person. This was God’s gift made real among people who accept the gift and the wounded young man who returns into open arms… and the young man also is willing to return.
George Carlin says he tried to believe. He says he tried. I think all his life he tried. If I were his chaplain in that hospital room for his third and final heart attack, I would be asking him, “Why?” Why all this talk about God? What do you want, George? Do you want me to sit here and apologize for the loneliness? Because I sat in a room all alone, too, a little kid, and played your records. I was a class clown, too. I had to be, to keep myself moving forward in a world that felt unmoving and cold. You were my friend, George, when no one else would be. And you taught me seven dirty words you were not allowed to say on television. Those were good times! But then I had to watch as your jokes became vicious, in your attacks on humanity, as if we were all going to hell and you were going to lead that charge. …When you said, in response to a church shooting in Texas, that you were happy for it, that you had actually prayed for it, that it was about time Christians were killing each other, or better yet, that it was a non-Christian who murdered those people in the pews. When did you turn from a seeker and believer in life, to this person who preys on our sins. When did you become the preacher you always hated, George? You hurt me – we were friends. But I want to help, because if I save you, I save the part of me that wants to give up, too. Of course our UU history tells us the important question for us is not whether George is in heaven, but that we know he is not in hell. We know, like our early Universalist families, that there is little biblical evidence of hell. No matter what George says, no matter his pain on earth, we know there is reconciliation in his path. Our history—the very name placed on our doors—tells us this. It calls out today, “George Carlin, your pain is done. Your work continues in us, your religious family, the Universalists.”
I had a dream of you last week, George. I was on one side of the street, you on the other, and down a half block was a lady walking with her baby, and over there was the man I always see on the corner… and I got this sense that in a minute I would have to save someone. I felt it so strongly that I couldn’t turn away--I had to look… at you , at the lady, the baby, the man… and I was overwhelmed by fear, for me, for them… and then I heard you call out to me, “You’re screwed.” Because you know I can’t help them all. You know if I’m a Unitarian Universalist, this is where I am weakest—you got me… but thankfully it is where I am strongest. Because we are creators and doers and sometimes we put something out there that gives our best energy and it inspires another, and a connection is made. We create a heaven that is our relationship to each other, a “heaven” of purpose and intent, where we feel right with the link between us, what we do and what we believe… but it doesn’t happen enough. It doesn’t happen so that we feel strong enough as people of faith, so that we could make that choice at any moment, the choice of who we can really reach out to, as Universalists, as people who really think all souls will find God. Your soul, and her soul. Do we really feel that in our dreams, this urgency of love and care? I believe we do, because the universalism in us knows—no, feels—moments of reconciliation in our lives and in others, as if the settlement of our lives lies not in a far off end-time, but here in this time. I felt it when George died, a combination of loss that I mourn and a light that I know lives on in me, a light George gave to me.
A Director of Information for the Unitarian Universalist Association in the late 60’s, Henry Hampton, quotes a line from a play he once saw. “In dreams begins responsibility.” He says sometimes Unitarian Universalists wish more than we dream. I hope to find you dreaming, being the creation you were fashioned to be, as an artist yourself. How do you know what that is? How do I know what heaven is? George is gone, but there will be someone else who challenges us, who can help us. We wait for that person’s return with open arms. Meanwhile, we walk into the woods like that man who fell in love and did not know how to speak about it. We try to imagine the world beyond as we create a world here. We look for the revelations of God. We sing about them and we laugh. It can be such a heaven, this.
May it be so, for us and for George. AMEN.
