I can't help but thinking that what I did earlier today was impious in its own way. Yes, I went ahead and visited a Catholic religious supplies store (yo, a big shout out to the Pauline Sisters and their wee Catholic supplies store in Old Town Alexandria - you know, the nun who worked the check-out must have been no older than 25. Wow, I thought, I didn't know there were nuns that young left in North America!) in Alexandria and found a $3.00 St. Joseph plastic dashboard "statue" (in quotes because I must ask myself: is it a statue made of cheap plastic or is it more or less just a cheap plastic figurine?). I then proceeded to my house and buried it head-down, facing the house, next to the shrubs. It is maybe all of one inch below the surface.

Now if I were a devout fellow I would if anything be open to accusations of superstitious beliefs or perhaps just plain ignorance regarding Catholic doctrine. That is forgivable. But come on, everyone who knows me knows I am far from religiously observant. Yes, I have my interests in the deeper questions of life, the nature of the divine, etc., and spend far too much time pondering such unanswerables as "Why are we here, after all?", showing a decided leaning toward pantheism, etc. But no one can ever accuse me of holding a simple faith or being inclined in general to reverence. So I must ask... is giving in to the impulse to engage in iconographic burials of religious figures in some bizarre effort to speed up a financially-inspired process one of the most impious things a heathen fellow like myself can do? I mean, really, is it a bad thing to be doing?

Now wait... if I was so impious, I wouldn't even be asking this question.

OK, so maybe it's not so bad. But what of that plastic statue, huh? What of it?

Well at least it's not a statue of Lazarus. Now that would be utterly tasteless as well as impious.