The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God by Douglas Harding Read Free Book Online Page B

micturition, as you call it? This muckraking is provocative and does your case no good.
    MYSELF: I’ve no choice, Your Honour. The topic’s forced on me by the Prosecution. But also, more importantly and persistently, by the Highest Authority, who has deliberately chosen the low things of the world to confound its Pecksniffs, its moral prigs and spiritual snobs.
    Of course for purposes of inspection and description this great Body has to be dismembered notionally, differentiated into a hierarchy of organs. But in fact it is always an organic whole. Or rather, it’s the one and only Organic Whole, the only true Organism that includes all it needs to be itself, the only true Individual that’s independent and strictly indivisible. Every layer and every member of it (whether honoured or neglected or despised, whether overlooked or looked at or underlooked, whether labelled ‘decent’ or ‘common and unclean’ or ‘foul’) - every least itsy-bitsy fragment of it is holy: by which I mean wholly cleansed and made good and sanctified in the Whole. Not on the whole and partially, but as the Whole and absolutely. Rightly viewed by its Proprietor, no part is a mere part. Or even a hologram of the Whole. It is godly. It is God.
    And, of course, all this applies to peeing as well, with its associated anatomy. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, to the whole urino-genital-excretory works. Dare you - can you - amputate or expurgate from the Body of God those members which Mrs Grundy would like to expurgate from the body of man?
    JUDGE: Surely you’ve made your point - and are now in danger of running it into the ground.
    MYSELF: My point, Your Honour, is the Ground! Let’s dare to be as grounded as God, as low. It may help us to take kindly to the facts in all their earthiness, and the necessity as well as the depth of the divine descent into their midst, if we recall how many have found hope and comfort in that descent. I’m thinking of the Christian tradition whose Deity is, to put it mildly, no toffee-nosed snob: of the faith that has for substance and centre-piece the coming-down of the King of Glory to be born in a shed reserved for beasts, and to die on a dump reserved for criminals judged lower than beasts. According to this faith, such is the world’s Top Liner that He becomes its Bottom Liner, thereby saving and sanctifying all between. What I’m saying is that, if so many have valued so highly and for so long this incomparable Comedown, the very minor part of it which is the Witness’s specialty is worthy of your sympathetic reconsideration. For you must agree that the Witness’s Convenience is a lot more convenient and respectable and salubrious than that stable in Bethlehem which (according to this great tradition) was not despised by Almighty God. Far from it: He moved right in. ‘Love,’ says William Butler Yeats, ‘has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.’ Here is the God of St Paul, who has ‘chosen... [the] base things of the world, and things which are despised.’ Here is indeed the Highest who looks down on no creature. However low that creature, He’s lower, He’s lower.
    I find it touching and beautiful that Who I really, really am should be great enough and humble enough to play the part of one of the Witness’s regulars, and witty and humorous enough to be his one Irregular. He’s nearer to a man than his jocular vein.
    All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and God a dull God. It’s not Him but the world of men in general (and of Counsel in particular) which takes itself so seriously, and gets down to things with furrowed brow. But at the Earth’s centre, where gravity’s zero, all ways out are ways up. So also at the Centre of the universe (which is where you are Who you really are), at its lowest point, gravity bottoms out and levity takes its rise. Here, God has great fun getting up to things, and forging the link between spirituality and humour. It’s no accident that the