Church of the Ascending Legume · founded during a soak

The Great Bean
in the Sky

The Bean is life. In the bean are the answers.

scroll down, slowly

What we hold

Six things we consider likely

On the Problem of the Hard Bean — the one that never softens, however long you cook it — the Church has no answer. It has bicarbonate, and a certain willingness to live alongside the thing.

The Book of the Bean

The Bean does not speak. The Bean sings, and has no words. What follows was written down by people who were listening to something else at the time — mostly a pot.

    Beanomancy

    Ask the pod

    Hold the question in silence, then let the beans fall.

    Ordination

    Become a Bachelor of the Pod

    I · The vowsII · Your nameIII · The certificate

    There are three vows. You take all three or none. Nobody is watching, which is rather the point.

    Three fields, two of which are optional. We do not ask your religion, since you have just told us.

    Optional means optional. Nothing is sent unless you fill this in, and one line unsubscribes you for good.

    Joining a faith, even this one, is a record about your beliefs, and the law is particular about those. Here is exactly what happens to it.

    The Church of the Ascending Legume

    Be it known to whoever is reading over your shoulder that

    —

    having soaked, having waited, and having declined to raise the flame,
    is hereby received into the order of

    Bachelor of the Pod

    with all rights pertaining thereto, which are: to bless a pot, to open a soaking, to name a child, and to conduct ceremonies of no legal consequence whatsoever in any jurisdiction on earth.

    The Great Soaker

    No. —

    —

    This certificate confers no civil, canonical or fiscal standing of any kind.
    Frame it anyway.
    thegreatbeaninthesky.com

    Next: find a pod near you, or found one.

    The Register of Pods

    Congregations, such as they are

    A pod is a congregation. The minimum size is one, provided that one owns a pot. There is no hierarchy between pods, no dues, and no obligation to like each other.

    What you enter here is published once someone has read it. What we do with it.

    Fiasco Day · the ninth of November

    What you ruined by hurrying

    English took fiasco from Italian in the 1850s, out of the theatre, where far fiasco meant to bring a performance down around your ears. Almost nobody who uses the word knows that a fiasco is a straw-covered flask — the same vessel in which beans are cooked slowly overnight, and from which this church takes its only sacred instrument. So the word for total failure and the word for our holiest pot are the same word. We did not arrange this. We merely noticed.

    Once a year each of us says out loud one thing we ruined this year by raising the flame. There is no absolution and no penance. There is a second helping.

    The Book stays open the rest of the year, for those who cannot wait until November.

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    A fiasco is your own: leave other people unnamed, and moderation will do it for you if you forget. What we do with it.