Tag Archives: Religion

The Priest and the Cat

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

Transcribed from interview with my informant:

“There’s this priest. He goes outside one day, he sees that there’s a cat in a tree. Of course being a priest and a good man he wants to get the cat down from the tree, but for some reason he decides he’s going to go down the most cartoon-y route possible.”

“His neighbor has a pick-up truck, so what he does is he borrows his neighbor’s pick-up truck and then ties a rope to one end–the first end of the rope he ties to the tree, the second end to the back of the truck. Now he thinks he’s going to be able to bend the tree down just far enough that he’ll be able to reach up to the branch, get the cat, and put it safely on the ground.”

“However, the rope snaps midway through- the rope snaps midway through, the tree shoots back upwards and the cat goes flying into the sky. The priest searches all over for the cat, never finds it. Then about two weeks later he’s at the grocery store. He sees this woman who is buying cat food and he knows this woman hates cats, so he asks her ‘Why are you buying cat food?'”

“She says ‘Well you’re not going to believe this but the other day I was talking to my little girl. She said she wanted a cat very badly. I said to her you can have a cat when God gives you one. So she went outside, went on the ground, and started praying. Then out of nowhere a cat flew out of the sky and landed in front of her.'”

My informant heard this story from his Catholic priest in Nantucket, who would apparently end every sermon with some sort of a joke. He couldn’t remember the particular sermon this story was attached to, but suspected there was some thematic connection between the above narrative and the sermon.

This particular joke is interesting in that at its root, it concerns the actions of a priest being mistaken for divine intervention, perhaps speaking to some concerns of the Catholic faith. Notably, the priest was unaware of the consequences of what he did, so the point might be that providence governs our actions whether we realize it or not.

Pious Man on the Roof

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

From interview with informant:

“So there was this one day this very pious man got trapped on top of his house during a flood. And then there was–a rowboat came by, and the guy rowing the rowboat was like, ‘Hey, get in the rowboat, you know, I’ll save you.’ And he was like ‘No thanks, you know, I’m a religious guy, I pray every day, I go to church. God we’ll save me. It’s awesome. You know, I’m good. God’s got me covered.'”

“Then a jet-ski comes by, like a guy on a jet ski, and the guy on the jet ski goes ‘Hey dude, get on the jet ski, survive. We’ll, you know, we’ll get out of here, get to safe ground.’ And he’s like ‘Uh, you know, uh, I’m a Christian, it’s cool. God loves me, he takes care of me. Jesus loves me. I go to church every Sunday, I’ll be fine.'”

“Then another guy comes by in a helicopter and this, like, safety patrol team is like getting people like airlifted out and he’s like ‘No, I’m good helicopter, it’s fine, God will save me.’

“And then he drowns. And he gets up to heaven and he talks to God and he goes ‘God, why didn’t you save me, why did you let that happen to me?’ And God’s like, ‘I sent you a rowboat, a jet ski, and a helicopter.”

He then briefly reflected:

“The priest who told it to me said like, that was like a joke priests invented to like, sort of inspire religious faith and, you know, God can only help so much, or some crap like that. Like God can only help those who help themselves.”

I agree pretty much entirely with that interpretation. I have no idea if that joke began with priests or not, but it certainly might have. I’ve definitely come across this piece a few times over the years, so I suspect it’s a fairly common example of religious humor.

 

Body of Christ

Nationality: Irish/Italian
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles, from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Performance Date: 4/18/2012
Primary Language: English

My mother was told – and believed- that if she bit the uh Eucharist wafer or whatever, it would bleed forever and that you would drown in the blood. Like it would just fill your stomach. I guess you wouldn’t drown, I don’t know what would happen if your stomach was just forever filled with blood, you’d probably get sick.

 

My informant was told this by his mother who heard it at church as a girl. What’s interesting is that this could have multiple purposes. Maybe another kid told it to her just to scare her within a religious setting as a form of children folklore backlash against an establishment and ritual associated with parents. Perhaps she was told this by an adult who believed that biting the communion wafer was disrespectful, because it represents the body of Christ and biting it might represent mutilating it, thus s/he scared my informants mother into not biting it.

 

Jehovah’s Witness Dungeons & Dragons Legend

Nationality: Latino
Age: 19
Occupation: student, officer worker in a shitty office
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/7/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: some Spanish

It’s supposed to be a warning tale. Basically the story is that back in the seventies, there were some kids that were Jehovah’s Witnesses that got really interested in Dungeons and Dragons and played it a lot. They got the idea that it would very cool if they could trap a demon themselves. So they decided they would glue a bunch of Watchtower magazines to this box and the walls or something – they were in a garage. And then they would do a summoning incantation to summon the demon…and they happened to summon a demon, but it wasn’t as easy as catching the demon in a box. And the boys were stuck in the garage for a long time, like quite a few hours, umm…but when their family finally got them out, one of the boys was dead and two of the other ones were like insane basically, and they were never okay after that.

I’m not sure how far outside of California this story goes, but there are different people I’ve talked to that have kind of said that story or some version of it that those people were alive in the seventies and stuff. And I got to hearing it because, you know, there are different card games and stuff that you grow up with that are usually kind fantasy based like, every generation seems to have them now. So when I got interested in certain card games, that was a kind of story my dad would tell me to get me to not play or throw it away or why he would throw it away. Funny thing, like, he liked Lord of the Rings a lot, but he kept it really hidden, really quiet cause he didn’t want other people in the church knowing, because it was satanic. It had magic in it and it had monsters and stuff like that.

 

It’s pretty clear by what my informant said, that this legend is meant to scare kids, and probably adults too, away from anything associated with the occult, magic, monsters, or anything deemed unnatural and dangerous by the congregation. My informant heard this legend from multiple people, particularly his father and stepmother as well as people who claimed to know the congregation where the legend occurred. The purpose of legends like this, with their essences of possibility and truth, is to keep people in line and keep them obedient. I’m skeptical of all organized religion, but particularly those that foster a culture and lore of fear to keep the followers “faithful.”

Bar Mitzfah

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/11/12
Primary Language: English

My informant was raised as a reform Jew in a household with two Jewish parents. He described to me the ritual of his “Bar Mitzfah” when he was thirteen years old. He says that a Bar Mitzfah is an age-old Jewish ritual that all young men undergo (Bat Mitzfah for females), that signifies the transition from being a boy to a man. The tradition carries back to Israel and dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years. My informant said “it used to be easy for kids raised in Israel or that grew up knowing Hebrew, but the hardest part was having to learn to read Hebrew to be able to perform the chants and prayers”. “It was a bitch to learn”, he said.

The tradition, he said, is performed very differently in different levels of the religion. He said that he was thankful that he was a part of a reform synagogue, where the ceremonies last for only an hour and a half at most. On the other hand, ceremonies in conservative temples can run up to 4 or 5 hours, and orthodox temples even longer. My informant discussed how he remembered attending a conservative Bat Mitzfah for one of his friends from synagogue, and that he and his other friends “couldn’t stand it any longer after the first two hours”.

There are a few things that all Bar and Bat Mitzfah’s have in common, he says. Everybody has a Torah portion and a Haf-Torah portion assigned to them, depending on what time of year that the person performs this ritual. That is, for the rest of their life, their Torah and Haf-Torah portion.

“The thing I was most excited about was the party that night, and all of the gifts” said my informant. He stated that it was a tradition, probably American, that the new man or woman celebrate with a party that night, inviting all of his or her friends, Jewish or not.

My interpretation of this ritual is one as an insider as well, because I am also Jewish and have gone through my own Bar Mitzfah. I believe that this has been a long-standing tradition since the time when men would be considered adults and marry as teenagers, and start their families as young as 16 or 17. Both my informant and I distinctly remember feeling too young to be passing through the gates between boyhood and manhood. My informant stated that he hadn’t even hit puberty yet! I believe that this tradition carried on so young from the old days because Jewish people saw it as a tradition and meaningful in their lives and their community. Changing it would go against old tradition.