as told by Michael (with Alice cleaning up after him)
Before we start… A Note on These Parables
This is part of the Screen Door Series.
The Cult of Brighter Days is a gloriously mismatched congregation—atheists, pagans, Buddhists, progressive Christians, cosmic agnostics, and at least one guy who swears he channels divine wisdom from raccoons.
We don’t agree on God, the afterlife, or whether pineapple belongs on metaphysical pizza. What unites us isn’t belief—it’s the shared ritual of wrestling with meaning, absurdity, and each other’s typos.
These parables are personal dispatches from inside our various reality tunnels—each one shaped by a unique screen door. Some are clear. Some are stained glass. A few are barely hanging on with duct tape and spite. But all are looking out onto the same weird lawn: Abiscoridism—a philosophy of paradox, kindness, chaos, and the occasional divine fart joke.
This isn’t a manual. It’s a potluck.
Don’t look for the one true recipe—just bring something weird and honest to the table.
NOW BACK TO THE STORY…
There once was a boy who loved stories—especially the kind with swords, magic, and mysterious horns that brought down city walls.
He went to church, of course. Everyone did. He was told God was good. That God lived in the sky and had rules. He tried to understand, but mostly he got distracted. While others were memorizing verses, he was imagining dragons. While they feared Hell, he was wondering what it would be like to live in Narnia.
One day, someone gave the boy a book. Not a Bible. Not a textbook. A strange little story called Illusions, about a pilot who gave airplane rides and said strange things about God and magic.
The boy didn’t read it, not really. He skimmed it. He shelved it. He forgot it. But one line stuck with him, like a whisper that refused to fade:
“The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.”
He didn’t understand it yet. But he didn’t throw the book away.
Years passed. He grew. School became a battlefield. Faith became a question mark. One day, while avoiding chores, he pulled Illusions off the shelf. He actually read it this time.
It wasn’t really about God.
Not the one with the beard and the lightning bolts.
It was about something else. Something bigger.
The pilot in the story said you could open any book and find an answer, if you read with the right kind of eyes. The boy—now nearly a man—realized he’d been doing that his whole life. Tarot cards. Maxims. Fictional characters. Books inside books inside books.
And suddenly, the whisper returned, louder this time.
“God is a box. The Is is not.”
The boy remembered all the names people gave to the divine: God, Buddha, The Universe, The Collective Unconscious. They were all trying to define something that couldn’t be defined. Something that wasn’t a noun or a person or a place. Just… existence.
Just Is.
And the more he thought about it, the more he realized: he didn’t need to believe in God.
Not because he was faithless. But because he had found something deeper.
He didn’t believe in God.
He trusted the Is.
The Is wasn’t a being. It didn’t care about rules or rituals. It didn’t live in a book or a temple or the sky. It lived in the question itself. In the magic of opening a random page. In the stories that stuck. In the strange, stubborn hope that there’s something more.
And even though he was still afraid of death, he held tight to one final line from the book:
“Imagine the universe beautiful, and just and perfect.
Then be sure of one thing:
The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.”
He smiled.
He turned another page.
And somewhere, the Is smiled back.
