The Broom of the System

21
1990
/a/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF ‘THE PARTNERS WITH GOD CLUB,’ SATURDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 1990, 8:00 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME. HOSTS: THE REVEREND HART LEE SYKES, AND HIS VERY WELL KNOWN COCKATIEL UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT, THROUGH WHOM THE LORD HAS BEEN HEARD PERSONALLY TO SPEAK ON SEVERAL TELEVISED OCCASIONS.

THE REVEREND HART LEE SYKES: Friends.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS:. (Personalty directed and accompanied on the xytophone by Mrs. Fanny May Sykes) Friends ...
REVEREND SYKES: Dear, dear friends.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: God bless everything and everybody! THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Friends ...
REVEREND SYKES: Friends, what is a partner?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT : Friends.
REVEREND SYKES: Friends, I stand before you tonight to say that a partner is a worker. That a partner is an individual who recognizes that individuals working together are stronger in the service of the Lord than individuals going their own separate, individual ways.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh yes, a partner is a worker ... REVEREND SYKES: Friends, a partner takes what is in his hand, and casts it down into the soil, to grow. A partner sows, friends. A partner sows. And friends, who reaps?
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Oh yes, a partner is a worker who sows ...
REVEREND SYKES: We the partners take the seed of faith which is in our hand and sow it in the soil of partnership, and now who reaps?
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Who reaps, oh, who reaps ... ? UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT : Jesus reaped!
REVEREND SYKES: That’s right friends we can see together tonight that the one who reaps is none other than Jesus.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: That’s right friends.
REVEREND SYKES: That’s right: Jesus. And now friends we have this question, to introduce tonight’s food-for-thought segment of our time together tonight. Friends, who is Jesus?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who?
REVEREND SYKES: That’s right friends who is Jesus?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who?
REVEREND SYKES: Who is he?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: I have to do what’s right for me. REVEREND SYKES: Who?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: He is we! We are He!
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Oh, we are He and He is we ... REVEREND SYKES: That’s right friends we are Jesus! In a theologically important sense we are Jesus!
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: How can this be?
REVEREND SYKES: Shall I tell you how this can be?
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Tell, oh tell us, how all this can be ... REVEREND SYKES: Friends I stand before you tonight to say that it is for no other reason than that we, like Jesus, are partners with God.
The Partnership Singers begin to hum a pleasing harmony.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT : Hart Lee, we are He.
REVEREND SYKES: You’re so right, little miracle. We are Jesus. We are Jesus because Jesus is a worker. Like us. And a partner. Like us. Can we not see friends that in partnership, and now friends I mean here true partnership, everything comes together?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: God bless everything! Make me come together! Like this!
REVEREND SYKES: So friends we come to see together once again tonight that the answer ... is partnership.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT : I don’t know what you mean by that word. Tell me what you mean by that word.
REVEREND SYKES: Friends what I mean is nothing less than a miracle.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: A miracle ...
REVEREND SYKES: Friends, whether you choose to become a partner with God by just picking up your telephone and dialing us here at the Partnership Pledge Center at 1-800-PARTNER, and becoming a Lifetime And Beyond Partner with your contributing subscription of five hundred dollars or more, or whether you choose to dial us here at 1- 800-PARTNER and become a Lifetime Partner With God for two hundred and fifty dollars, or a Star Partner for one hundred, or a Personal Friend Of Ugolino Partner for fifty, or yes friends even an equally important Prayer Partner for just twenty dollars, whatever you choose, something will happen. Friends, what will happen?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT : Friends, as subscribing members of the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes’s Partners With God Club you can expect the entry of the Almighty Lord Jesus into your own personal life in twenty-four hours or less.
REVEREND SYKES: That’s exactly right the entry of Jesus into your life. The habitation by Jesus of your own heart. The existence of the Lord Himself inside each of you, as He is inside all of us here at the Partnership Pledge Center studio. What a glorious and miraculous thing! Partnership!
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Miracle, glory, partnership ...
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Inside out!
REVEREND SYKES: What was that, now?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Let us not forget, friends, that all subscriptions are deductible from love.
REVEREND SYKES: Were you trying to say just now that the entry of Jesus into an individual’s life will in some theological sense turn that individual inside out?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Pardon me?
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : What, oh what, was he trying to say ... ? REVEREND SYKES: Friends, did the acknowledged tweeter of the Lord’s own sound system mean that when Jesus dwells in us, we dwell in Jesus? Can this be what he meant?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: I’m a pretty boy.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Oh, is he not a pretty pretty boy ... ? REVEREND SYKES: But friends this would have the spiritual consequence that all our dreams and wishes and needs and goals and desires of our own lives also become Jesus’s desires. And thus that in true partnership with God, the desires of each individual man, woman and child become the desires of Jesus, in Jesus’s name.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Women have desires, buster. Don’t think they don’t have desires.
REVEREND SYKES: Of course women have desires, friends, everyone has desires in their lives, that’s part of the experience of what it is to be human in God’s world. We all have desires, friends. And now we can see that if all us partners work together, in the Lord’s soil, our desires are automatically spiritually transformed into Jesus’s desires, too. UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Holy cow!
REVEREND SYKES: A need in us is a need in Jesus. And friends can’t we see together that a need in Jesus is a need automatically, by theological definition, fulfilled and satisfied?
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: We need to know, why this is so ... REVEREND SYKES: So that a need in a partner with God, a need that exists simultaneously in our Lord Jesus Christ, is a need instantly, completely, satisfied and met?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: You fill me up. You satisfy me like no man did before. I can’t deny it. God.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Can’t deny, that you satisfy ... REVEREND SYKES: Yes friends I stand before you on national prime-time television talking about the satisfaction of your every need. The fulfillment of your every wish. Friends hear me! What I tell you tonight is that if you are a partner with God you are automatically in Jesus, we know that now. You are inside out! Your needs are now Jesus’s needs, and thus you will not go wanting. You will not go wanting. Why is this so? THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Why ... ?
REVEREND SYKES: Why is this, I say why is this so?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Because Jesus shall not want!
REVEREND SYKES: Oh say it again!
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Who’s got the special-wecial book? REVEREND SYKES: Oh say it again!
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Jesus shall not want.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Amen, Aman, Amen, Aman ... REVEREND SYKES: Amen, and Aman. For here friends is tonight’s “Partners With God Club” food-for-thought spiritual message. It is that Jesus shall not want. Jesus shall not want! There it is.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Has the little turd learned his lines yet?
REVEREND SYKES: Friends let us all pause here and listen together and reflect on the implications of such a revelation. That’s right ... THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS : Hmmmmm ...
REVEREND SYKES: ... a revelation.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: (Accompanied by the pleasing harmonies of the Partnership Singers)
Oh, when I’m feelin’ down, down as I can be;
When there’s a giant shadow, a-fallin’ over me;
My spirit’s still as strong as steel, my hope you cannot daunt;
For I stand firm in my belief ... that Jesus shall not want!
/b/

“Do you want to hear what I think?” says Mindy Metalman Lang.
“I am one enormous ear,” says Rick Vigorous.
“I think you’re just tired, and tense, and understandably upset, and that’s why you’re not being fair, and making up these lies.”
“And who may I ask has the temerity to allege that I am making up lies,” says Rick Vigorous softly, looking up and away. His face is running with light.
What is going on is that tonight it is raining, between the moon and the window. It is raining awfully hard. Lines of rainwater run down the window, and the moon shines through the rain and the window and makes the rear wall of the dark bedroom run with reflections. Back against the wall leans Rick Vigorous as he sits up in bed, in his underpants. He looks like he’s running with moonlit rain. So does the bed. The whole room, running with clear white. The colored chalk sketch of Rick and Veronica Vigorous in their Scarsdale yard, the one that’s framed in dark wood and hanging above the bed, seems almost to glow. The television is on, over by the window, but its cold flicker is lost in the moon’s million white trickles.
“Rick,” Mindy says from the window.
“Don’t look out,” says Rick.
Mindy turns and waggles her finger. It runs down all the walls. “Rick.”
“Do you know why I don’t want you to look out?”
“Sweetie pumpkin,” says Mindy, “I’m trying ever so hard to still be pleasant about this whole thing, but it’s wrong of you not to tell. It’s not right, and you know it.”
“My God the window’s drooling,” Rick says. He points. His wrist hangs with light. “Doesn’t it look as though the window is drooling? Salivating at the prospect of absolutely everything there is to impart ?”
Mindy starts to turn back.
“But don’t look out,” Rick says.
“So start imparting,” says Mindy.
“Haven’t I already?”
“I want to know where my husband is,” Mindy says softly, looking down into the television. “I don’t care about your ‘context,’ and I’m more than a little upset and worried that you’re sitting there with that thing on your wrist seriously trying to tell me that Lenore Beadsman died in your phone tunnel.”
“You saw the lobby floor.”
“But Andy and Lenore went to the airport tonight, I happen to know. I talked to Dr. Tissaw tonight. ”
“Context is essential,” Rick says.
“But I don’t care about context Rick,” says Mindy. “If you want to know the truth I don’t really care that much about Lenore. And I don’t care about some book, which I have no idea what you’re talking about, which first you say you wrote, then you say is the Bible, then you say is the dictionary, then you say is the Sears Catalogue, so what am I supposed to think? But anyway I don’t care about that.” Mindy crosses her arms over her bra. The moon is white jelly through the top of her hair. “Honestly,” she says.
“But it’s essential to the whole story,” says Rick. He is playing with his stomach, over the band of his underpants.
“Or about alphabets of old people, or children singing like birds, or fat men chewing on buildings, or phone crews fishing in black air, or people eating each other’s membranes—you can just stop whispering about all of it, because I don’t care about it right now.”
“What do you want,” says Rick.
Mindy taps a foot on the floor. “I either want to watch the bird’s show, here, which by the way don’t think I’ve forgotten you practically promised to call, last night ...”
“I forbid you to look at it directly.”
“... Or then I want to know where my husband and ditzy little Lenore are, so I can begin to take steps. What branch are they supposed to be at?”
“Lenore Beadsman and W.D.L. are finished,” Rick says. He looks around him, his shadow on the flowing wall. “They’re over.”
“Rick sweetie I’m so trying to be nice but that’s just a lie,” says Mindy. She comes to stand at the bed. “Can’t you tell what’s a lie? I don’t know what happened to you today, and how could I since you won’t tell me, but you’re in bad shape if you sincerely think people are done who are obviously not done, I’ve got to tell you. I’ve got to think you’re either lying for fun, or you’re maybe just not a well man. Daddy always said you weren’t a hundred percent.”
Rick looks up at Mindy.
“Honestly,” Mindy says. She looks back at the television. “I can just watch the news, you know.” Rick keeps looking at her. “I can just watch the news at eleven, if you want to be a little dung beetle about it,” she says. “Why lie if I can just find out the truth in a couple hours?”
“I think you’re confused,” says Rick.
/c/

REVEREND SYKES: And so friends if we are to be in Jesus and so never want, never ever want, what must we do here tonight? UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Use me. Satisfy me like never before. REVEREND SYKES: Tonight we must attempt to see together that to be satisfied in a spiritual sense is to be used.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh yes that’s right, to be satisfied is to be used ...
REVEREND SYKES: For we’ve seen together that to be satisfied is to be in Jesus, and to be in Jesus is to be a partner. And what is a partner?
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT : Who cares how many partners I’ve had, Clinty?
REVEREND SYKES: Yes friends it makes no difference how many partners work together, what is a partner?
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Partner, oh what is a partner ... ? REVEREND SYKES: Is not an individual who is a partner with God simply an individual who recognizes, and finds within his own soul the strength to perform, the function God has assigned to him? We must ask how can we be useful to God.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh, how might I personally be used ... ? 1 UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Sunflower seed, please.
REVEREND SYKES: But friends can’t we see that it’s all just a glorious living circle of faith, because now to be useful to God is merely to be apartner with God!
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: Oh, it’s all a glorious circle ... REVEREND SYKES: And to be satisfied is to be used, to be used is to be a partner, to be a partner is to be a worker, to be a worker is to be one of many, locked and nourished, together, in the soil of faith. UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Sounds pretty healthy!
REVEREND SYKES: Friends, tonight I want us to think together of this humble program as the soil of faith. I want us to think of ourselves ... joined here tonight, together, in the electronic soil of faith today. I want us to feel used and satisfied by the Lord together tonight.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Miss Beaksman, hear the mandate! REVEREND SYKES: So friends, laugh if you will, but tonight I have a game for us to play together. A profoundly and vitally important game for us to play together tonight. The stakes’ll be as high as the stars in heaven, friends, I’ll warn you now.
The Partnership Singers begin to hum a harmony even more pleasing than the pleasing harmonies previously hummed
REVEREND SYKES: Friends, I want us all to get up and put our hand on our television screen. Those of you who might be unable to get up with us tonight, why you have a friend or loved one bring your television close to you. Friends I want you to come to me and place your hand on my hand, that I hold out to you tonight. Let us all place our hands together in the electronic soil.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Sow to reap a pretty boy!
REVEREND SYKES: So there is the game, friends, and now here are the stakes tonight.
THE PARTNERSHIP SINGERS: The stakes tonight ... (They return to the pleasing harmony.)
REVEREND SYKES: Every player, every one of you who feels something, who feels what I can feel standing right here before you tonight, who can feel the individual imprisoned inside these secular shells of impotent pain and desire flow out of you, flow out into the soil, who feels the sort of union with all and with- the Lord our Savior Jesus Christ that I feel right now, when you touch my hand, each one of you who feels what I know in my heart we shall all feel together tonight ... each player who feels it will go straight to his telephone and call us here at the Partnership Pledge Center at 1- 800-PARTNER, to become a partner with us and with God, tonight. So to feel what I feel tonight, friends, is to become a partner. No two ways about it. This game is a challenge, friends. Are you up to it? I stand here challenging you tonight.
UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Holy holy!
REVEREND SYKES: Use me, friends. Let us play the game together. I promise that no player will feel alone. You see my hand? Here it is. I hold it out for you to touch. Touch it. Lay your hands in the soil and touch me. Here I am for you. Friends I sense we are all ready tonight.
/d

“Well no I’m not angry, you silly,” says Mindy, kneeling in front of the television. Cold light comes out from between her fingers, on the screen.
“I promise to tell,” Rick says, looking down at himself.
“I know you’ll tell,” Mindy says softly into the television. White shimmers melt down her back. Drops of light stop and start. She reaches back with her free hand, tosses her hair out of the way, unhooks herself.
“What are you doing?”
Mindy rises and turns and slides out of everything, moving her hips.
“I said I’d tell,” says Rick.
“I know you will,” says Mindy. “I know you’re upset, but I feel like I just know you will.” She comes to the bed. Her body moves a million ways in the wet white light. Behind her Rick can see a flickering hand, dead and cold. It covers everything.
“I really will,” he whispers.
Mindy touches his leg. Light comes out of his leg, between her fingers.
“Don’t you worry about anything,” she says. “I know you.”
“You can trust me,” R. V. says, watching her hand. “I’m a man of my.