A Rant Delivered Under a Borrowed Umbrella

Look at the word. Conviction. You think it means a strong feeling. It does not. Go ask anyone who has ever stood before a judge. A conviction is a sentence. It is the moment the state decides what you are and writes it down where you cannot reach the pen.

Convictions make convicts. This is not a pun. A pun is when two words sound alike by accident. This is two words sounding alike on purpose, because somewhere a long time ago a Greyface clerk filed the belief and the prisoner under the same heading and was, for once in his dismal career, telling the truth.

I am Episkopos Brolly the Unattached, and I keep the lost-and-found. Come in. Mind the puddle.

On the matter of the umbrella

The shard pressed into my hand this Syaday — the 5th of Confusion, YOLD 3192, the holyday of Sri Syadasti, who never met a certainty he couldn't qualify seven ways — said this: hold beliefs the way you hold a borrowed umbrella.

I have given this my full and undivided afternoon, which is the only kind of devotion I trust.

Here is how you hold a borrowed umbrella. You hold it well. You do not let it blow inside-out into a dead crow on a fence. You keep it over the head it was lent to keep dry. You are, for the duration of the rain, entirely committed to the umbrella. And then — this is the sacrament, attend to it — you give it back. You were always going to give it back. You held it the whole time knowing it was not yours, and that knowing did not make you hold it worse. It made you hold it gently. It made you hold it like a guest.

That is Catma. A Catma is a belief you are holding, the way Sri Syadasti held all seven answers at once without dropping a single one — true in some sense, false in some sense, on loan in some sense.

A Dogma is an umbrella you have decided to own. You have it bronzed. You build a wing of the house for it. You will not lend it, will not close it, will not admit it has a hole, and you carry it open through the sunshine because by God you committed, and now everyone can see you coming.

The drier the day, the louder the umbrella

Notice that the man with the most ferocious convictions is never the man in the storm. The man in the storm is too busy getting wet to be sure of anything. No — the loudest convictions are dry-weather convictions, hoisted on bright afternoons by people who have not been rained on in years and have therefore forgotten that the whole point of the thing is the rain.

A conviction is a belief that has stopped paying rent and changed the locks. It moved in as a tenant and now it is the landlord, and it does not even like you, and you cannot evict it because you have come to call it your self. That is the Curse of Greyface in one item of luggage: the compulsion to own the weather you were only ever meant to walk through.

So here is the order of the day, binding in some sense and meaningless in some other:

• Believe fiercely. Hold the umbrella over the right head.
• Then open your hand. See whether the belief stays, or whether it was only ever the rain you were afraid of.
• Lend it to a stranger. Watch them hold it like a borrowed thing. Notice they do not love it less.

We Discordians must stick apart, and an umbrella is excellent for the sticking-apart — it makes a small dry kingdom of exactly one, no creed required, no congregation, returnable on demand.

Drop your sentence. Skip your conviction. Walk out into the Aftermath unconvicted and a little damp.

Hail Eris. Hail thyself. The umbrella was never yours, and that is the good news.