The Cannabis Stampede: John Smith
John Smith
“One of the nice things about being a Unitarian is that you don’t have to be right; just reasonable. Many of you know that I was raised Lutheran and as a boy I was quite literally given a list of things I could not do because they were sinful. I do mean a list. I was given a list. The list was short when I was about ten and grew, page by page, as I grew older. Every time I came home from school with a new experience, another line was added to that list.
Yes, it is easy to chuckle about it now but when you are 10 or 11 you take your parents and your church seriously. After all, you don’t want to spend the rest of eternity with horrible people who got there by committing all kinds of horrible sins like drinking and dancing and reading Socialist literature. Terrible people!
Like many of you here it took me a long time to wash that kind of upbringing out of my soul. There were years when I believed myself to be a very bad person. Then came the years when I knew was not a bad person but was still a lost soul. Then there were the years when I found my soul but lost my way. That’s why I like being a Unitarian. I have a soul and my quest in life is to find my way forward. It’s a spiritual jungle out there and, like most of you, I’ve taken quite a few paths that have gone nowhere. Or, they looked promising but after a year or two, well, those paths did not go where they were supposed to go. Some ended up right where they had started. Others lead to some very dark caves.
Like I said before, being a Unitarian Minister does not mean you have to be right. I never am. None of us are. Oh, we may be right for a day or two and some decisions we make carry us into the next year but you can be sure that nothing you think will last forever actually will. No one can predict what is going to happen tomorrow and no knows what happens one split second after we die.
Even the evangelicals don’t know. Neither do the Jews or Muslims, Catholics or Baptists or, I can say with surety, the Lutherans. These are all prophetic religions in the sense that they have a prophet who is going to return to what we call ‘earth’ and when that prophet arrives, there will be a Day of Judgment. Or THE Day of Judgment assuming that all mankind only gets one bite of the apple, so to speak. All these prophetic religions believe that there is a Day of Judgment coming and you had better have your spiritual house in order before that day arrives. Unitarians also have a Day of Judgment concept but it comes a little quicker: it’s when your father gets home.
But there remains a single, universal questions for these prophetic religions and this questions involves Unitarians as well. No one is sure when that Day of Judgment will come but that day is not today. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be in our lifetime. Or the lifetime of our children. Or their children. Whether it is coming or not should be of no concern to any of us because our job in life is to live the basic rules of the Old and New Testament and the Koran. It is also known as the Golden Rule. You live your life honorable, forgive others, avoid the Seven Sins and practice the Seven Virtues. But what no one knows is what happens to the soul between the time we die and that Day of Judgment. Do we linger as ghosts? Are we spirits that visit old friends and grandchildren in sequence? Do we have great parties in the sky? Or do we wander some multidimensional expanse that is neither earth nor sky? We have all had visitations. We may not have seen anything that could be called a ghost but we saw our deceased father in a dream, remembered an old friend at an odd time or felt someone sitting beside us in a chair that was empty. There is more to life than what we can see or feel.
Which brings me to the subject of this Sunday’s sermon, what is now being called the Cannabis Stampede. At least that’s the newspapers are calling it. A lot of other people are calling it the Cannabis Circus. I agree with both assessments. There is a buffalo stampede to move as fast as possible now that the voters have approved the legalization of marijuana. And it is a circus with all three rights filled with clowns, lions, knife throwers, fire eaters, high wire ballerina and trapeze artists. And there is comedy as well. It reminds of the 1933 movie THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER where W.C. Fields — of all people — details the evils of drinking and the low morals of those who swill liquor. The movie was made in 1933 and was probably one of the last ones to condemn liquor because Prohibition ended in December of that year.
At this point it really does not make any difference whether you were — or are — in favor or against the legalization of marijuana. It is a done deal. It is the law of the land. It’s all over but the proverbial shouting. The legalization is not the issue now, it’s maintaining the integrity of your immortal soul in an increasingly addictive-oriented society. Every day we are bombarded with advertisement which offer us all manner of elixirs to make us thinner, healthier, better looking or more sexually active. We are told we can get cheaper, better car insurance, lower house payments, cleaner kitchens and fungus-free toenails. Celebrities sell skin cream, plow horses push beer, dogs advertise tacos and throat lozenges are shilled by Swiss long horns that sound like farts. We are offered drugs to get us up, make us sleep, take away pain and cure cancer. Then there are the lawyers who promise to make us rich, loan companies who will make our bills disappear and credit card companies who will charge less and offer us more travel options to places we cannot afford to go. Now the internet has pop-ups we cannot keep down, advertisements that obscure news stories that cannot be closed and spam message from Nigerian royalty trying to hide ill-gotten millions in our bank account.
Yes, marijuana can be addictive. So is beer, bingo and soft drinks. No one talks about going to church three or four nights a week as being addictive because that considered a good addiction on the par with spending hours each week in your flower garden or volunteering at a soup kitchen. Then there are the addictions that raise eyebrows: collecting wooden ducks, pen knives or sweaters. We all have addictions even though we do not look at them that way. We waste hundreds of hours each year doing things that are unproductive but harmless, like playing computer solitaire on slow days at the office, sneaking in an hour of pornography on the private browsing window or watching repeats of television programing because we have nothing better to do.
We all have addictions and some of them are quite expensive and time-consuming. Marijuana is just another of those lures. It isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It’s simply temptation. So is a weekend gambling in Las Vegas, that extra can of beer during the Super Bowl or another clump of tulips in the backyard garden. We are all human and the lure of the unknown is always a draw. Just don’t overdo it. Be a good Unitarian. You don’t have to be right; just be reasonable. Thank you for your patience to be here on such a bright Sunday morning when you could be out collecting wood duckies, weeding your flower garden or playing solitaire on your home computer.”
[This story comes from Steven Levi’s THE CANNABIS STAMPEDE available on ACX and Kindle.]
