I've always enjoyed the image of Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates. The clouds, the lectern with the big book on it, the elderly white guy with the long white beard.
Although, you know, I've generally pictured the gates as being golden. Which is interesting - they're known universally as "the Pearly Gates", yet you rarely see them visualized as being pearlescent. They tend to be portrayed as shiny wrought-gold, rather than as shiny mother-of-pearl. I wonder why that is.
I also wonder where the whole concept came from. I'd do some research, but it's late and I'm lazy. Still, I'm quite confident that neither Testament of the Bible mentions Saint Peter as the doorman at the Pearly Gates.
And speaking of, how did he get that gig? Why not one of the other Saints? Is Peter somehow associated with doorkeeping? And does that make him the patron saint of those guys with little purple or red caps that stand around in front of hotels?
Okay, I'm curious enough now to leverage the Internet. Let's see. It will not surprise anyone to learn that ninety percent of what comes up in Google searches about Peter and the Pearly Gates are jokes. Let's check the Catholic Encyclopedia... nothing on Pearly Gates, although apparently EBay has great deals on them. No shit, "Great deals on Pearly Gates at EBay." Who knew?
Wow, are there ever a lot of Saint Peters. I'm going to assume that it's the big one, Peter the Apostle, who's up there at the Gates. I already know a bit about him, Quo Vadis and all that, but where do the gates come in... ah, here we are. Matthew 16, from which comes the image of Peter as the gatekeeper of heaven. Boy a lot of Christian - and particularly Catholic - theology rests on that one line. Let's have a look:
18: And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
19: And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
There you have it. Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom, which apparently means that he has to stand outside and screen everyone who comes in. Talk about not knowing what you were getting into.
Ah, and here's the origin of the Pearly gates. From, you guessed it, Revelations, that fount of Biblical nuttiness. Revelations 21, to be precise, wherein Heaven, or at least "the holy city, new Jerusalem" is described.
18: And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.
19: And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald;
20: The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst.
21: And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
So there you have it. Not just one, but twelve gates. Each one made of a single pearl. Like scrimshaw, I guess. I'd ask who was watching the other ones, but contrasting modern Biblical legendry with the actual source material isn't what I'm interested in today. I could rant about that for weeks all by itself, to no purpose. No, I was just curious where Peter and the Gates came from. And now I know at least part of the answer. And so do you!
What brought this column about is my commute. I have a commute that takes me at best an hour each way, and at worse double that or more. It's not fun. And although I'm a very mild-mannered and kind person, notable chunks of that commute are spent flecking the inside of my windshield with spittle and turning the cockpit air blue.
This is because the Washington D.C. area is chock-a-block with terrible, terrible drivers. I moved here from Los Angeles, where at three on any given weekday the 405 freeway is bumper-to-bumper... all driving seventy. Where people know how to merge. Where you never find the person in front of you leaving an eight car space ahead of them in heavy, slow traffic because... well, because they are critically stupid, I guess. 'Cause if their reflexes are that bad they should not be behind the wheel.
The worst I can say about Los Angeles drivers is that they don't use their turn signals. The best I can say about Washington D.C. drivers is... hrm. Coming up empty.
Saturdays, ironically, are the worst. Worse than Sundays, worse than (although not as congested as) weekdays. On Saturdays the stupid asylums belch forth their cretinous contents onto the roadways, filling the freeways with people who drive forty and veer erratically, saturating the surface streets with people who apparently have nothing at all to do before they die but piss everyone off by driving twenty in a forty-five zone with the wrong turn signal on and braking randomly when phantom loved ones appear in the road.
I'm not exaggerating. I saw all this just this last weekend. And every weekend.
And before you start in with that "woah, calm down, you'll get there eventually" bullshit, let me just say: Fuck You. Why are we all on the road? To get somewhere. And these morons are interfering with that. I'm not out to get some fahrvergnuegen. When I want to enjoy driving I go to the country. I'm trying to go from point A to point B, and in theory at least, so is everyone else. So when you fuck us all over by coming to a complete stop on the freeway because you don't know how to merge, well, fuck you you fucking fuck.
Which brings me back to my point. So I'm wishing polio on someone's kids the other day when I think about good ol' Saint Peter. And I realize that, at such point as I'm standing there with clouds in my toes, we know what's going to be on the highlight reel. Oh yes. All those hours of shouting imprecations across a heated steering wheel. It won't be pretty.
I don't feel so bad about it, though. After all, my distemper doesn't hurt anyone but me. The targets of my wrath never know. And I'm still a courteous driver - it plays a bit to my sense of irony and a great deal to my sense of "everyone better off" to assist people in merging while at the same time dumping gallons of invective on retards whose brake lights don't work.
So I think Saint Peter will let me off with a deep sigh after extensive and embarrassing reviewal of my roadside manner.
And then I can ask him how he likes his gig.
- Sun Ra