When I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a fiction author. The germ for a story idea would jump into my head, through some observation, and then would multiply and merge with other broodings and books I’d been reading. Hopefully, you are trying to go to sleep right now, as perhaps this episode will take you there, as it’s going to be a long one. I’m going to summarize a story idea that I never wrote. The germ of this story popped into my head at the grocery store when I observed an elderly woman and a young businesswoman approach a fully stocked banana stand at the same time. That was it. Here’s the short version of a story called The Fountain of Youth.

A young businesswoman is rushing about to collect the items on her grocery list, while at the same time, in the same store, a thin, old woman, hunched over and unattractive, rides in a mobile cart. They both shop the produce aisle, and the elderly woman is slowly driving her cart toward a table that holds the bananas. Only a single bunch of green bananas remains. The young woman is swinging her basket, grabbing peppers and lettuce, while chatting on her phone. Before the old woman reaches the table, the young woman swoops over to the banana table and grabs the last bunch of bananas, unaware that the old woman is reaching for it.

The old woman says, “Excuse me, but could I have a few of those bananas?” The young woman at first ignores her due to her phone conversation, but the old woman keeps talking. Annoyed, the young woman pauses her phone call to interact with the old woman, and upon hearing her request for the bananas, the young woman considers her strict diet of smoothies, her intermittent fasting plan, and her rigid exercise schedule and says, “No, I’m sorry.”

The old woman pleads, “I can only get a ride to the store twice a week and I’m out of bananas, and my doctor recommends them for my heart health.” Then she coughs and wipes her mouth with a flannel shirt sleeve, which causes the young woman to recoil.

The young woman cannot find the charity to give the old woman any of the green bananas and tells her, “Sorry, I got here first. Better luck next time.” She puts the phone back to her ear and attempts to resume the conversation with her friend, but she hears a response from the old woman. The young woman puts the phone down again. She can sense the old woman has said something rude. She asks, “I’m sorry, but what did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

The old woman says, “I said, may you age with those bananas.” The young woman is stunned at first, but then laughs out loud, and with condescension says to the poor woman, “You are adorable. Pathetic, but adorable.” And with that the two women part ways.

The young woman drives home in her BMW 3-Series and doesn’t think about the comment any further. She hits the gym, engages in some hot sex with her manscaped boyfriend who lives with her, and ends the day watching a TV show while perfecting her presentation for work. Over the next few days, she eats a few of the bananas, which have now turned golden yellow. Everything in her life is perfect.

But five days after the interaction at the grocery store, she is in the bathroom and notices a spot on her hand that she has never seen before, a small brown spot, slightly irregular in shape, and she makes a mental note of it but rushes off to work. The following day she goes for a run in the hot sun with her hairless boyfriend, and they talk about family and kids briefly but veer off into social issues and political problems that face the future of the world. When she arrives home, her boyfriend says to her, “Wow, look at those freckles! It’s like they just appeared on your nose and cheeks.” She has never had freckles, and doesn’t believe him until she goes to shower and looks in the mirror. Her face now has freckles. Very normal freckles, but unexpected freckles that were unplanned and unwanted.

Then she suddenly remembers the little spot on her hand, and notices that it has grown ever so slightly. In a scoff, she remembers the bananas. She remembers the comment from the old woman, but laughs nervously, and while showering she walks out of the bathroom dripping in her towel to inspect the bananas on the counter. One of the bananas has begun to show spots.

The next day the spot on her hand has grown splotchy, and she is no longer laughing but considering the possibility that the old woman has somehow cursed her. She begins to find ways to preserve the bananas, first trying to keep them at an exact temperature, but eventually finding so many spots forming that she has to freeze them, and her skin becomes more blotted. She attempts to find the old woman at the grocery store, returning at the same time each day but never meets her. A doctor’s visit diagnoses her with “Bronzing,” and she begins seeing a dermatologist and two separate skin specialists.

Her obsession with preserving her youth becomes maniacal, as she feels her destiny is now somehow linked to the bananas. After a year, a succession of maddening events causes her to unravel. Her boyfriend’s mother asks innocently about potential grandchildren. Feeling badgered, the young woman admits she does not want children due to the effect on a woman’s body and alludes to a “miscarriage” in her past that creates a rift with her boyfriend. He breaks up with her, and soon her friends drift away into family life.

She has a horrible scare when her mother housesits for her while she is away on a business trip. From the airplane, after landing, she calls her mother and amid the obnoxious sounds of screaming infant on the plane, her mother tells her that she is “making banana bread with two of the frozen bananas,” leading to a frantic freakout on the airplane that nearly gets her arrested. She drives home in a panic, unloading her anger and long held resentments against her mother, while fanning the banana bread and wrapping it in plastic. A falling out between mother and daughter happens that is never again healed.

The years begin to pass by and she maintains a youthful look, managing the skin condition with great care and vigilance. She spends large amounts of her earnings on skin-care and aging products. As she enters her fifties, she is still spending most of her time with twenty to thirty year olds.

Her career soars and by the age of fifty-five she moves into the role of Vice President of People Operations.

Fast forward: she is sitting alone in a one bedroom apartment at age seventy-five, her lips and face full of botox, with bottles of prescriptions and hormones spread out on a coffee table. She is mutilated by plastic surgeries, wearing excess makeup, and living on shakes, powders, and supplements. Childless and friendless, with few family connections remaining, in her living room chair she scrolls on her phone, researching therapeutic cloning techniques. She sets down her phone and gets out of the chair, to sit on the floor to do her daily meditation and mindful breathing. In the silence, an electric hum from the corner of the room permeates the air, but somehow this sound comforts her. The soft buzzing comes from a special freezer, with a backup battery. In the corner of the room is a mini-freezer that holds the last remaining moldy and cursed banana, frozen and sealed in extreme cold. She smiles in her meditation, proud that she has proved the old woman wrong, and has preserved her youth.

The end.

I never wrote the full story. I thought about the story for days until I could see the story unfold to where it wanted to take me, or where I wanted to take it. Sometimes I’m not sure how the flow happens.

This is the strange thing that happens once you start writing. If the urge to “be a writer” bites you, then you will start writing stories and you will spend a lot of time thinking about stories you want to write. The urge came to me in 1999 when I started typing out poems and short stories. I remember reading books and feeling disappointed in the plot or characters and decided that perhaps I could write better than those authors. In 2000, I went for a run one day and decided halfway through that I needed to return home to my house and begin writing, and I ran home with urgency and did just that. Thus began an obsession around writing. Then I began to realize that writing stories is more difficult than I thought, but the urge to produce and create consumed my days and nights. This continued for about fifteen years.

Thinking of stories is one thing. Writing them in a compelling way is far more difficult. The idea for a story is the simple part, because many people have ideas for stories and novels floating around in their heads. Consider how many people have great business ideas or inventions in their mind, but cannot or have not put them into physical form. With stories, it’s the same. To flesh out and write the story is difficult because it moves from being a dream into a grueling task, like when you go from thinking about getting in shape to actually joining a gym or counting calories. It’s much easier to imagine a result than to work for it, because the work is neither glamorous nor easy.

A significant amount of time is needed to write the actual stories. Writing requires dedication and resolve, but when I was writing and doing the work, I felt compelled to get the story out, to the point that I needed to get it out of my brain and onto paper or computer screen. This same notion began anew once I found the urge to do marathons and triathlons. I needed to get out and run or bike. The need felt unstoppable because of the desire for the goal of completing the upcoming race to the best of my ability. Both writing and racing brought about this mania.

The story just had to be written, making it almost like a lust, or a sickness. This baby had to be born. Creative desires can be like any other addiction. Watch what happens to someone who is clearly addicted to their phone if he or she cannot find it. The phone-addict will begin to get antsy and squirm, and start looking, searching, until they get irritated and cannot live in their skin until the phone is found. Or think of a regular marijauna user or daily drinker you know who is “not addicted” but turns into a completely different person if their drug is taken away. They assure you that they can quit any time that they want to, but for some reason never do, because they actually cannot. The sickness demands the underlying need to be fulfilled.

While nowhere as dramatic, this urge to write and “get the story out of my head” reminded me of a story about Caravaggio, the great Italian painter, while he was working on the Raising of Lazarus. Whether or not true, the tale reports that Caravaggio had a dead body exhumed for the painting, and told two of his models to hold the dead body so he could paint it. When they objected, he pulled out his knife and told them to stand still or he would make them just like the corpse they were holding. Clearly, this level of obsession shows that he had to get this painting out of his system, since he was willing to kill (and dig up bodies) in order to get the picture out of his head and onto the canvas.

What’s interesting is the urge to write can become an addiction, but as a creative pursuit never seemed like a problem. Oddly enough, when I talked to hunters, they would describe a similar “sickness” - a need to get into the woods, to be in nature in pursuit of a deer or a turkey or other small game. This description was strangely like the need to write or drink or smoke. There’s a common thread in all of them. Initially, in those conversations I could not relate to hunters at all, but when I considered my own need to find a silent library to flesh out story ideas or to immerse myself in reading, I think my need for that refuge was not different from a fisherman seeking a quiet trout stream or a hunter hiking into a valley floor. Although hunting is shunned by much of modern society, the hunter feels and connects to something deep and visceral in our nature. The hunter is seeking what the artist or drunkard is seeking. What are we all after?

We are searching for paradise. We are seeking something that is good, true, and beautiful, but with different ideas about what that means and how to obtain it. Everyone is after those things, but some are unaware of why and if the “sickness” is not driven by the right motives, the pursuit becomes ugly. Some hunters are just out for blood. Some artists just want fame. Drunks (that are not like ordinary, calm drinkers) are seeking a direct escape to heaven, without the work of creating or capturing. Drunks and drug users want to take the elevator, not the stairs.

At the root of our pursuits is the desire to reach something higher, because those three nouns - the good, the true, and the beautiful - are the only things that will ultimately satisfy us. But in our pursuit of these three things we can easily mashup temptations, distractions, and pride with that purity. The real reason hunters are hunting at all is to find meaning in their life, to experience fellowship with other men, to get approval from a group, to connect to their ancient instincts, and to stand in awe of nature and creation. I am not a hunter, but what I see in hunting is a kind of sacrifice and thanksgiving. While writing a story is creative, and hunting is for killing, there are curious parallels to the passion guiding both pursuits. To some degree, the published book is not unlike the trophy deer. In the end the book sits on the shelf, and the stuffed animal is displayed on the wall. The same happens with diplomas and exotic photos from vacations or medals from military service or even private memories of sexual conquests. We are chasing a desire that is difficult to describe, but we want to display it and let it be seen, to make a name for ourselves, to feel worthy, to amass a list of accolades that will in the end be mere phrases in our obituary as the world continues to turn without us. (I have to resist the urge to dive into the Tower of Babel story, but it’s so relevant to this.)

The banana story is about clinging to something, to a dream or idea, to a concept or want, and expecting that dream or fantasy to bring fulfillment. For the woman in the story, it’s youth. For me, it was writing and being considered smart or creative. This idea of sacrificing your time, money, and energy to save your most beloved thing, is not a new story. I recall choosing to give up friendships and social gatherings in order to read or write, believing that the creation I was working on would bring fulfillment. I felt that for anyone to succeed or reach a goal that everything must be sacrificed. Marriage, children, socializing, weekends, nights, television, dining out, running errands, folding laundry - those things were for others, for those without a “noble” pursuit that I had. Full of myself, I was like Leona Helmsley when she said that “Only the little people pay taxes.” My inflated self wanted to believe in my invented mission. When pride of self takes over the mind, everyone else and everything else become “little” compared to the dream.

Whenever it felt like the goal of writing the great novel was getting further away I would isolate with books or a laptop. “Wherever your treasure lies there will your heart be.” Thus I was willing to forego friendship and fellowship to be alone with the imaginary treasure. Unfortunately, it took years to realize that the treasure was actually just a warning light.

The young woman in the story clinging to her youth is just a metaphor for my own obsession from age twenty to thirty to be “a writer.” What I didn’t know is that crossroads would find me at three places in my life: marriage, children, and addiction. The avoidance to commitment to anything beyond my goals had to be shattered. But it didn’t happen all at once. I still clung to the dream and goal of writing even after marriage and kids, which means my treasure was still in the wrong place. I was keeping things together, but when you have one foot in the fantasy world, the commitment to real relationships cracks. I could publicly declare myself as committed, but privately hedge my bets. But thankfully there was a day I recall sitting in a cubicle and realizing my future, where I could have a wife and family and dog, or I could remain alone and possibly get a book or two published. This realization changed my life, and I don’t know how else to describe it except that there was a kind of guidance happening on that day, as I recall the cubical and the lighting and the place of business where it happened. Whether it was a guardian angel or good orderly direction or just plain sense clocking in for duty, I am grateful for that startling jolt, because it meant the first step away from my “self.”

The goal of a quiet house with two or three books on a shelf suddenly seemed selfish and even foolish. At the same time I relished the idea of being like one of those lonely scholars or curmudgeonly writers who pursue their craft with such a rage to master it that they let their obsession rule their days. I worried that time would pass and that the creative years were short. I knew that the high energy of my early twenties would fade, as I saw my co-workers in their forties and fifties who had dreams of pontoons, cabins, and retirement. The evidence of creative atrophy was all around me in programmers whose white-hot urge to invent had burned down to the wick. Discussions of 401K and TV shows replaced the intensity of youth. I was judging them all, yes, but I was most often judging them for what aging and family life had seemed to strain out of them. They seemed like decaf coffee beans, washed out, with very few milligrams of caffeine left in them (which explains why so many of us drink so much coffee as we get older). I felt that two years in my twenties had to be worth twenty years of the old, tired, expired later years.

What I failed to see is that my reckless living in my twenties was less fulfilling than what these middle-aged mothers and fathers felt about their own lives. They had raised families and done the long work of putting food on the table and doing late-night math homework and attending numerous music or sports activities and essentially giving up their goals to bring another to successful adulthood in the world. These fuddyduddies, who I thought had done so little, had done more than my imagined solitary writer would ever accomplish.

That was the temptation that I yearned after: youth and fame. This was stoked by reading biographies of writers, which I treated like hagiographies. But the writers I admired were not like the saints, not at all. A misguided admiration of Hemingway and London and Fitzgerald only helped me justify alcohol abuse as if it were a virtue, and made it a sacrificial offering to creativity. If I was destroying myself, it was for the creative act. If madness was the price for creative grace, I was willing to sign my life for that loan. In fact, I sought out writers that were known drunkards, thinking that those authors had more depth, when in reality many of them wrote completely forgettable books. This is the temptation I accepted, as drinking and writing seemed like fitting accomplices. The urge to create is the germ, but piggybacking very closely on that positive goal is the fungus of desire for fame and approval. Sometimes I wonder what comes first - the desire to create, or the desire to be noticed, like a chicken-and-egg scenario. I think the “desire to be noticed” came first, because the desire to be noticed is really a desire to be loved. Thus in some cases the desire to create is a fig leaf we wear to mask the desire for love. We want to be noticed, because we think it will make us loved and respected.

So what I really wanted was a stamp of approval for my behavior, but way underneath that was a desire for appreciation, stacked under layers of other manure and dirt. The manifestation of the need for love became visible in the pursuit of writing, but the inability to stop drinking once I started was the cry for help from underneath the pile of garbage. I wasn’t interested in tattoos or piercings or coloring my hair or weird sex. We have different cries for help, and mine was just drinking. I convinced myself that heavy drinking was a righteous burden of all writers.

See the trick? Did you catch it? A swap happened.

The need for approval and love gets transplanted with some strange idea like this. I felt that drinking hard was the cross that writers must bear, and even something to be proud of. Perhaps this desire to drink guided me toward writing in the first place so that I could justify drinking, since writers and artists get a free pass for their madness. Writers who were not alcoholics, I felt, lacked the “gift.” Oddly enough, drinking is a cross to bear, not a gift, but when dealt with it ends up becoming a gift. What shocked me in the end is that these crosses can become a gift. This is why so many recovering addicts and alcoholics introduce themselves at recovery meetings saying, “I’m Jane, a grateful addict,” or “I’m Joe, a grateful alcoholic.” They realized when they turned back to God that the cross they took up was the greatest gift they ever received because it is the exact thing that forced them to change.

How upside down we are once we re-name the vice as a virtue. This can be observed in our world all the time. We “flip the script,” to quote the TV show Cobra Kai, and make our fig leaf the identity of our life. I don’t want to dive into the character of Hawk from Cobra Kai, but his “flipping the script” is his journey into his vice, which kills his virtue, until he returns to his true self and flips things back to right-side-up. The very thing that we are using to cover our nakedness, our fear, our feeling of inadequacy is what we need to remove in order to be healed. The wound hides beneath the vice and until it is exposed, there can be no healing. How can a physician heal something that cannot be seen? Cue up the Jesus words! (you knew it was coming):

The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? He heard this and said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:11-12)

The whole solution is right in those two verses. We want to turn our “sacrifice” into a virtue. Jesus says, “No, I don’t want sacrifices, especially not bad sacrifices. No, I want your whole life. Now show me the wound!” He’s practically shouting it like Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. “Show me the wound, Jerry!” These verses from Matthew make Jesus the undefeated and defending champion of both religion and psychiatry for two thousand years. I remember taking a class called “The Psychology of Adjustment” in college and not once did that textbook mention faith as a possible solution to problems “adjusting” to change. What a shame, since it could have been a short class. I can see the need to avoid mentioning this, since it might put a large amount of psychology majors out of work, which is already an issue for a field that provides most of our nation’s baristas. Jesus is a bigger threat to the therapy industry than self-driving trucks is to the logistics industry. Who needs truckers if can trucks drive themselves? Who needs expensive therapy when you can read Matthew and talk about it with others for free?

Yes, I’m simplifying and generalizing to make an editorial. I also empathize with psychology majors as I pursued computer science and English majors, and only one of those fields is sought after for employment. But it cannot be denied that faith has been shoved into a corner by medicine, by our schools, by government, and most of all by our media, yet the open secret is that faith can be, without a doubt, a proper and effective cure for many mental issues. The head-scratchers in the media wonder why suicide rates have increased and depression is at an all-time high, while church attendance and affiliation plummet. The cry goes out daily to do more for mental health, while we ostracize people of faith like lepers to the fringe of society.

The gift of faith heals, but it is exactly that: it is a gift. This odd thing called faith can be more effective than a lifetime of depression pills or affirming therapy, and it costs nothing. But, it’s not so simple. It cannot be prescribed or ingested or bought or sold. There is no insurance needed for it. Unfortunately, people can walk the corridors of modern pharma and therapy for years and not once hear that there is another way, but honestly even if they are told, they may not “hear” it because the time has not arrived for the hearer’s ears to be open yet. The timing varies for each person. So I understand why it’s not talked about, but it’s a shame because many people would benefit. Therapy is a modern version of “faith-healing,” but the faith must be in the techniques and drugs, not in God. The faith must be in the science and the credentials on the wall. The efficacy of the therapy is measured and studied to find improvements. All of this is great. But there’s something fundamentally missing from this equation. Science was never intended to replace faith or morality, because those are not parts of the observable and testable universe. You can see the sacred being replaced with science, but it’s not the right tool. The trend today is moving toward a merger of science and morality, which will ruin science. Just like religion merging with state power ruins religion, the same will happen to science. For those not paying attention, the Soviet Union and China have already done this experiment and it doesn’t end well. Papers and research must conform to party doctrine, making it a leap of faith, not a study of nature. Worse, if you put morality and faith into the halls of state power, brace yourself for bad weather.

We’re all talking about mental health today, constantly, as if mental problems just started happening in recent history. The only cure offered comes in the form of pharmaceuticals and paid therapy. The healings that Jesus does in the Gospels are mostly related to mental health. Yes, there are the skin healings of the many lepers and the withered hand and the woman who bled for many years and re-attaching the Roman’s ear (ok, so there are a lot of physical healings), but the majority of his healings are the same soul-wracking mental problems that we have today. When it says he “healed many people that day,” those are just the ordinary everyday miracles that he did, while the bigger miracles get a full telling, like raising Lazarus from the dead or restoring the paralyzed man’s legs or healing blindness. These ordinary “healings” don’t only happen in the pages of the Gospels. You can witness them happening today in recovery meetings, for all kinds of mental health issues, and these are attributed to a Higher Power, to God. This isn’t like the TV evangelist pulling some audience plant on-stage so that he can heal a man so that you wire him a check. This is happening in back-rooms of office buildings and churches and government centers, where no one is watching, where the smell of burnt coffee acts as the incense, and the liturgy consists of the Serenity Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer with real, open honesty in between.

This can be witnessed right now in a meeting in your own town. The wildest thing about the healings that Jesus performs is that I have seen these very things occur in people, in real-time, in the 21st century. Even for myself, for all the times I tried to quit drinking, through willpower or using science or techniques, none of those things worked. Nothing changed until I asked for God’s help and started to pray. Full stop.

Other people I have known, they have seemed so far gone that there was no hope for restoration, much like the Gospel stories of the Gerasene demoniac or the boy with an unclean spirit. Yet they get clear and clean, and a year passes and they are still clean. Then another year, and another, and they are bright-eyed and flourishing. There are Mary Magdalenes among us. There are former demoniacs walking around in our midst. These souls are everywhere, rubbing shoulders with you, interacting with you, but you don’t see them because they are healed and restored.

As I’ve said before, I discarded pills when I turned back to God and I am extremely doubtful that I ever needed them in the first place. Had I followed the steps prescribed by the physician in Matthew 9:11-12 and from the doctor named Luke, I might have learned this sooner. People that don’t believe in miracles scoff at tales of healing unless a double-blind study was used, and peer-reviewed papers support the evidence. But you can meet people who have restored their mind, body, and soul through friendship with Jesus. As for the re-attachment of the Roman’s ear, I understand the difficulty for some to believe in stories like that, but given the incredible real-life healings I have seen, I’m willing to say, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Nothing is impossible for God, and if Jesus could multiply bread and fish, I doubt that surgery presented much of a challenge for him.

So in living in my world of the flipped script, I felt that alcohol made for authenticity. “In wine, there is truth”; In vino, veritas. Truth had to be conjured, raised up from within by being uninhibited, so that I could speak like a jester before a king. Liquor was the secret potion to unlock the hidden “truth” within. The wild and awful alcoholic lives of the writers I admired seemed to be the required gate fee for entry into greatness, as the wise fools, I thought, were the ones that must hold up the mirror to society. Oh, the lies we can tell ourselves. This is not the sound of one hand clapping, this is the sound of one hand slapping its own face.

In reality most of the writers I admired lived terrible lives. They burned bridges constantly. They had multiple marriages that fell apart in dramatic fashion. They ended their lives in suicide or slow death by addiction. But they reached their goal. Yes, they got what they wanted. They had their treasure, a skinny volume or two on their bookshelf with their name printed on the spine. Did that make them happy in the end? Did it fulfill them? I doubt it made any of them happy or content. It probably fed their pride, making the dragon even bigger.

This is why my woman and her cursed bananas had to be a caricature in the end. I thought a woman character would work best for the story because I could juxtapose her youth, beauty, and vigor against a twisted gargoylish solitude in the final scene. I wanted to display the inside, unseen, gnarled experience of misguided pursuit on her character. A male character would have required a different path, but I could have done the same story with a male bodybuilder or womanizer who has his trophies gathering dust on a shelf, and the notches in his headboard being reminders of many broken relationships. In the closing scene, he could have been a freakish, wrinkled body sitting hulking and damaged in a recliner, and for added effect I would have him spray tanning his orange arms while he sipped from a cocktail of branch chain amino acids and collagen peptides. 

Anyone who has felt a sense of transcendence, or the temporary “greatness” we all get to feel on occasion, yearns to recreate the moment. If you can’t experience it again, then you may feel like a “one hit wonder” or “a flash in the pan” or “a fluke” or “an intellectual lightweight” or whatever else the outer doubters and inner critic can hurl at you. Ex-athletes have a rough adjustment to the world because they peak so young. Likewise, an inventor whose idea catches on must try to invent again to catch lightning in a bottle a second time. An artist who catches the eye of a patron must continue producing desirable work. These blessings of success can become a curse, unless you surrender the ego. As life teaches us all, the two great tests we will face are success and failure, and success is sometimes the more difficult test.

To give up a dream may seem like defeat. But to surrender, which took years and stages to happen for me, led me to the greatest elevation I could have hoped for or ever imagined. Every phase where I had to make a choice to chop away at the false god of writing and imagined glory led to the ultimate death of that idol. It’s like St. Boniface cutting down the oak tree that the pagans worshiped. If you can chop down a god, then that’s a false god. I always thought it was incredibly rude of Boniface to cut the tree down, but in reality, what was he doing? He showed them the absurdity of a tree as a god. He exposed the false treasure. To have a false treasure revealed as fool’s gold is the greatest gift to give someone, even if it initially enrages them. People only get mad at the death of false gods because they are still in denial about its value. If a man is never told or shown that what he worships is phony, he will find out in the worst way of all when he tries to cash it in at the end. Like Narcissus, he will keep gazing into that illusion right until his death. 

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