Serpent in the Sacristy

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Good Kitty

by Serpent

Good Kitty
Photo by Samuel Scrimshaw / Unsplash

16th century organist and composer Richard Farrant wrote the beautiful hymn "Call to Remembrance" with these simple lyrics:

Call to remembrance, O Lord,
thy tender mercy and thy loving kindness which hath been ever of old.
O remember not the sins and offences of my youth,
but according to thy mercy think thou on me, O Lord, for thy goodness.

The text is an excerpt from Psalm 25, in which David asks God to look on him with mercy and not with anger, and to show him the right way to live. It reminds me a bit of when Abraham is bargaining with God in his futile attempt to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction:

Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
- Genesis 18:23-25

If you actually trust that God is merciful and loving, why do you need to ask God to remember that he's merciful and loving? Does he forget? Isn't that just who he's supposed to be? It's an odd juxtaposition with a supposedly omniscient being.

All the songs and scriptures in which people remind God that he's supposed to be kind and merciful can't help but remind me of people's reaction to a large dog, or a lion. "Good kitty," you say, slowly backing away from the lion's glare.  "You don't want to eat me. I'm stringy!" It's as if they need to encourage the beast to be kind toward them, but the fact that they're saying it expresses the fear that it won't be.

From a Satanic point of view, I don't have any expectation that the universe will treat me with mercy and kindness. The sun and the rain fall on the good and the evil. I have a privileged position in the society I happen to have been born in; that's coincidence, albeit a coincidence I enjoy.

I'd rather have an unvarnished view that the universe doesn't owe me any favors than mental contortions when a benevolent God forgets he's supposed to be nice to me.

Hail Satan! Amen.