Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
God Locks Heaven’s Door For a Reason
I have a pamphlet on my kitchen table that says “Celebrate the Death of Jesus,” and I want you to know that I have read it three times now, and I am not closer to salvation but I am significantly closer to having opinions.
The pamphlet was delivered yesterday by two impeccably dressed middle-aged women who appeared at my front door with the kind of warm, purposeful energy that makes you think one of three things.
They are canvassing for a local candidate.
They need signatures for a petition about saving the whales in the watershed.
They have heard, correctly, that I am an extraordinary lover and they would like to discuss arrangements for a threesome (while Dr. Karie conducts office hours).
It was none of these things. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they had driven out to my farm in rural Virginia to invite me to a party celebrating the fact that Jesus Christ is dead.
I am an atheist.
I want to be upfront about that. I do not believe Jesus died for my sins. I believe Jesus, if he existed at all, died because the Roman Empire had a robust and enthusiastic capital punishment program and he showed up at a very bad time with a very provocative bumper sticker. But I will say this: if you are going to try to recruit me into your religion, leading with a death celebration is a bold opening move. Most franchises lead with the perks. Jehovah’s Witnesses are out here like, “We don’t do birthdays, Christmas, or really any of the fun parts, but we ARE doing a tasteful memorial for a crucifixion. Dress code is business casual. There will be unleavened bread.” No cake. Never cake. Cake implies someone is having a birthday, and birthdays are a gateway drug to joy, and joy is not on the approved list.
The Heaven Door Was Locked Long Before I Got There
I used to do stand-up, and I had a bit about this. A friend posted one of those inspirational memes that said “Prayer is the key to heaven, but faith unlocks the door,” and I remember pausing and thinking: why is the door locked? Why is heaven in Gary, Indiana? Is there a bunch of bad neighborhoods up there nobody told us about? Is there a Heaven B that the brochure doesn’t mention, full of people who were pretty good but occasionally mean to waitstaff?
My current theory is that God locks heaven’s door specifically because He is hiding from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He is crouched behind a tablet or an icon or a sacrificial lamb. He is texting Moses to turn the sun off. He is whispering to Gabriel, “Do NOT play that fuckin’ horn. They will hear us. And do not answer if they knock. They will stand there. They will wait. They have nowhere else to be.” Even an omnipotent deity, it turns out, will pretend not to be home if the doorbell rings at the wrong time. I respect this. I have done it myself.
In fact, I did it famously once in Atlanta, early in my first marriage.
The Rake Incident: A Love Story in One Act
My ex-wife and I were working in the backyard on a Saturday morning, which in married life is what passes for romance once the thrill is gone. We had a system. She dug. I supervised. It was a good system. We were happy, or at least in the specific marital state of agreeable coexistence that feels like happiness until you meet a lawyer.
From around the corner of the house, I spotted them. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses, moving with quiet determination down our street like a very well-dressed combine harvester. They had that look. That clipboard energy. That brochure-in-hand forward momentum that said they were not going to stop, and our house was next, and there was no diplomatic exit available. I had approximately forty-five seconds.
I turned to my ex-wife. I looked at her with the tender sincerity of a man who has already made a decision he will not be sharing in full. I told her I really needed a rake from the garage, and that she was the only one I trusted to get it. She believed me because we were still in the part of the marriage where you believe things. She went around front. I stayed in the backyard. I waited.
I heard the gentle, inexorable voice of organized religion beginning its pitch.
She was gone for thirty-five minutes.
When she came back she was holding a pamphlet and a slightly glazed expression, and she said, “They were very nice.” I said “great” in the specific tone of a man who has not moved from his spot in the yard because he has been standing here laughing silently into his elbow pit for half an hour. I made a face she did not see. I was very pleased with myself.
This is, in retrospect, probably one of several reasons we are no longer married.
I have thought about it.
I do not think I would do it differently.
They Wanted to Come Inside and Look at My Art
Yesterday I had no such escape route. I am a hobby farmer, which is basically the agricultural equivalent of a lapsed Catholic. I have the land, I have the pig, I have the full intention of doing this properly, and yet here I am, standing at the door on a Saturday morning in a t-shirt instead of overalls, not quite committing. The farm offers distance from civilization but not, apparently, from organized religion, which has four-wheel drive and laminated talking points.
The two women were genuinely lovely. That is the frustrating part. They were warm and curious (and earlier I even thought they were hot. Wink. Wink.) and they noticed my artwork inside the door and asked if I had made it and asked what I did for a living, and I found myself disarmed by basic human decency, which is a well-documented Jehovah’s Witness tactic I should have been more resistant to. I am fifty-nine years old. I know better.
I talked to them anyway.
They kept gently angling toward the door. Not aggressive. Just persistent. The way water finds a crack. The way my pig Trouble finds a weak spot in the garden fence, except Trouble is more direct about her intentions and does not bring literature.
They wanted to come in, and they wanted me to come to the Memorial, which is what Jehovah’s Witnesses call the annual Celebration of Jesus’s Death, because apparently “Easter” felt too festive and someone in the governing body looked at the resurrection story and said, you know what, skip it. Let’s just honor the killing part and serve crackers. Most religions at least pretend the ending is cheerful. Jehovah’s Witnesses looked at the cross and said: that’s the logo. The cross is a murder weapon. We’re going with that. Very bold. Very metal.
It was at this exact moment that I realized I had missed an opportunity. What I should have said, with complete sincerity, leaning slightly forward in the way of a man who is very concerned about scheduling, was: “Shouldn’t you be at Jehovah’s trial?” Because technically, if we are keeping score, Jehovah is not merely a bystander in the death of Jesus. He is, at minimum, a person of interest. He had means. He had motive. He had, by his own account, a plan. The DA in any reasonable jurisdiction would have questions. I had questions. I still have questions. Instead I said something like “oh that’s very interesting” and I have not forgiven myself.
What Does Jehovah’s Mom Call Him at Dinner
This brings me to something I have been turning over in my mind since yesterday afternoon, which is the name. Jehovah. It is a very formal name for an entity that allegedly has a personal relationship with every human being on earth. It is the name of someone who signs things. It is a name you use in a strongly worded letter. It is not, if we are being honest, the name of someone you call when you need help moving a couch.
So what does Jehovah go by with his inner circle? Surely not the full thing. Nobody is three drinks into a celestial happy hour going, “Jehovah, buddy, you have GOT to hear this.” There has to be a nickname. There has to be something for the close friends, the archangels, the guys who’ve been around since before the firmament.
My leading candidate is Jev. Short, punchy, three letters, confident without being aggressive. “Jev says we’re doing Mediterranean tonight.” “Have you seen Jev? He was just here.” “Jev absolutely lost it when Gabriel did the horn thing.” I feel like Jev went to a good school, drives something sensible, and has a very dry sense of humor about the whole omniscience situation.
The runner-up is Vo. Which is either extremely cool, like a DJ name, or extremely menacing, like a Bond villain. DJ Vo, spinning the cosmos. Or just Vo, standing in the doorway of eternity in a turtleneck, saying nothing, communicating everything. I cannot decide if Vo is the kind of deity who listens to your prayers or the kind who has already moved on. Probably both. He’s Vo.
The dark horse candidate, the one that will keep me up at night, is Joey. Because what if the most powerful force in the universe goes by Joey? What if the burning bush speech was delivered by a guy named Joey? What if Moses came down from the mountain and said “guys, I talked to Joey and he has some notes” and history just quietly agreed to upgrade that to something more impressive for the pamphlets? I find this deeply plausible. History has done worse. Joey Jehovah. Joey H. The H stands for itself.
A Pamphlet Is Just a Door They Want You to Open
I should note that during this entire exchange I WAS wearing my Violent Femmes t-shirt. The one that says “I forget what eight was for.” For the uninitiated, that lyric is from a song called Add It Up, and the song is counting toward something that is very much not scripture, and the number eight is not, let’s say, arriving at a prayer circle. The shirt is a masterpiece of casual profanity, rude as a meth whore, invisible to anyone who doesn’t already know. These lovely women saw a man in a math shirt. A puzzling math shirt. A math shirt that seemed oddly wistful about arithmetic. They tilted their heads slightly, the way a dog does when you say a word it almost recognizes, and they pressed on with their pitch. I stood there wearing my secret joke like a coward.
What I wished… what I will always wish, in the specific way you replay missed opportunities at two in the morning… is that I had been wearing my other shirt. The one that says “I Direct Midget Porn.” Because that one requires no footnotes. No familiarity with alternative rock. No working knowledge of what the Violent Femmes were counting toward. That shirt is its own complete argument, and these women would have been back in their car before the screen door closed. I own both shirts. I grabbed the wrong one. I have only myself to blame, and also whoever does my laundry, which is Dr. Karie… well, probably not now as she is all hoity-toity.
Here is the thing about the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I find genuinely fascinating as an atheist who has spent decades cultivating a refined, artisanal disbelief: they are playing a long game with an extremely thin margin. No birthdays, no holidays, no blood transfusions, no Halloween, and a governing body that makes the HOA board look like anarchists. What they do have is an annual death memorial, a very organized publishing operation, and the willingness to drive to a hobby farm outside Charlottesville and talk to a man who is not quite a farmer, standing next to a pig who is looking at them with the serene, uncomplicated skepticism that only a pig can truly achieve. Trouble sniffed the air in their direction and went back inside her shelter. She is not a joiner. I respect that more every day.
That is a hard sell. That is selling ice in January. To a lapsed hobby farmer. Who is an atheist. And who owns a Violent Femmes shirt about sexual frustration and arithmetic that he wore to zero effect, when a simple declaration of pornographic career ambitions would have closed the deal in seconds.
I will not go to the Memorial. I did take the pamphlet inside. I kept it, because it is without question the most interesting piece of direct mail I have received since the time I got a coupon for 20% off a funeral pre-arrangement package addressed to “Current Resident,” which is a sentence that really makes you think about your relationship with your mail carrier and also death.
The door to my farm is now always locked and guarded by Mr. Pickles.
Jev, apparently, knows the feeling.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
