God. Cheese. Burger.

An exercise in ecstatic American theology

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The O-M-Cheeseburger has arrived.

What does it want? Where did it come from? Will we be harmed? What did Saint Thomas Aquinas see in the vision that moved him to compare all his gorgeous writings to straw? “It doesn’t get any meltier than this,” menaces Applebee’s in its description of the O-M-Cheeseburger on its website.

Do you see? Focus.

In ecstatic Kabbalah, developed most fully by Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia, the practitioner meditates by fixating on a single Hebrew letter, a divine name, or a word. Every word, name, and letter contains an Is. That Is is the world, is God, is the United States of America, is a cheeseburger. It takes months, years, a lifetime of dedicated concentration to access the Is in the everyday atoms of a thing, to remove with the blunt blade of thought everything that is not until what remains is the Is.

Let us practice. Let us reduce America’s Is to its smallest sacred unit, the cheeseburger. Let us melt away all that is not the O-M-Cheeseburger. With these words, I seal the world off. There is nothing now except molten three-cheese queso, Applewood-smoked bacon, spicy honey mustard, classic fries, and God, which is all things, all of the above, the entire fabric of our universe. Nothing but the word, the word in which all things live and are: O-M-Cheeseburger.

O-M…

O-M…

Oh-em…

Om…

O… M…

O… M… G…

O-M-Cheeseburger is an event in which Applebee’s, headquartered in Glendale, California, replaces God with Cheeseburger. We are known around the world for the nonchalance of our blasphemy. We arrive on foreign shores and turn temples upside down with the everyday purpose of a suburban mom driving an SUV to pick Colton up from daycare. Applebee’s! One thinks of Eden, the garden, the fruit, the charismatic serpent that sold us on our doom. “New,” promised the serpent.

There is much melting left to do. Focus on breath, on breath, which is the life-bridge between letters, between moment and moment. The Is is elusive. It lives in the now, which is born the moment it dies and dies the moment it’s born. It won’t be held.

O-M…

Oh-em…

Oh… em…

Cheese…

O-M… G…

Oh-em… Gee…

Cheese…

Oh-em…

Gee…

“God” is the word-house of the living deity of the United States; engraved on our money, presiding over our courts, threatening to invade Greenland, hauling foreign rulers back to New York in chains, disappearing your neighbor, lowering heads at football games at all levels of the sport, thirsting for the black buried sludge of the ancient dead, the combustible form of the former kings of this planet who in this very breath propel a Toyota Camry through Akron, Ohio. Their ghosts linger and smother us. Their vengeful whispers clog the sky.

The ocean rises.

OMG, OMG, have you low-key forsaken us? Where are you? What’s with the peek-a-boo act? Why leave us to imagine you? How are we Americans who are after all your children meant to picture you? What is the method? Are there instructions? Hello?

Imagine a cheeseburger.

The O-M-Cheeseburger in which we live is a halved cheeseburger. Both sides lie face-down on a skillet of melted cheese. We learned at an early age that there was already cheese in the cheeseburger before it was dipped in cheese. A cheeseburger without cheese is a burger. A burger with cheese is a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger with cheese is something more. It approaches God.

Advertisements for the O-M-Cheeseburger air during televised American football games. The O-M-Cheeseburger selected this vector to ensure knowledge of itself across the broadest possible spectrum of its chosen people. The American football arena is one of the few remaining sites where we can smelt down the Pluribus and hammer out an Unum. Nearly all other sites capable of this have moved online and don’t offer the service anymore. You no doubt have memories.

Be rid of them.

Are you afraid? Of the walls between you and the O-M-Cheeseburger? Or are you afraid of the total lack of walls? This question does little but categorize two different types of reader. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Profound prayer is the ordinary act of separating yourself, placing the halves face-down on the hot skillet, and melting.

Are you hungry?

Melt. Melt your you-ness into His His-ness. Return what remains to the silent Applebee’s of the soul. God will be sitting in a vinyl booth beneath the neon “Carside To Go®” sign with a styrofoam clamshell in a plastic bag for you. Accept it. Realize the unity of the three cheeses.

Cheese.

Queso.

Deuso.

Where does the Milk come from? Nowhere. They won’t tell you. Like flesh, like beef: cheese arrives ex nihilo as cheese; motherless. Milk, which is pre-memory. Milk, which welcomes you to false, waking life. Knowledge of the Milk would drive you mad. They are right to keep us from knowing.

Focus.

Om.

The sound of the universe.

The O-M-Cheeseburger, the purest distillate of Americana yet produced.

It’s been twice sieved, squeezed through two national imaginations. Like all gods it was born far away, appearing in prototypical form in Tokyo, in a restaurant called “American Diner Andra.” God is an import. God crawled in larval form out of a foreign hole, out of the honeycombed cliffside caves from which the religions of the ancient Mediterranean emerged, nourished by rhetoric and concentration.

Concentrate.

Concentrate.

Soon, and in our lifetimes.