A monologue from the play by Lila Feinberg
CLEO (twenty-two)
Cleo is talking to her cousin, Suzi, a member of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, whose husband was chosen for her by Rev. Moon,
challenging her belief in Moon, who, members of his church considered to be the Messiah.
You know what I’m like having a really hard time wrapping my brain around? You know what I’m trying to just like process but it’s not really cohering for me?
See, if the foundation of your religion is strict sexual purity, right? You know, poor Eve had dirty snake sex with Satan in the garden and now,
because of that figleafed sl*t’s failed one-night stand, all women are Fallen and can only be Restored by their husbands or whatever—
then doesn’t it strike you as, I don’t know, odd that the Messiah Reverend Moon was arrested for conducting ritual sex ceremonies with women other than his own six wives?
I mean, not to say that ritual sex doesn’t sound like something I might want to try one day when I’m at like Burning Man or on an Ayahuasca tea cleanse,
but it’s got to suck for all those little illegitimate Moonie kids he—whoops!— fathered that they will never inherit any of his billion dollar empire.
You know? But, I guess at least those women have new “spiritual bodies”! At least their wombs are cleansed! . . .
That doesn’t seem just a tad like . . . paradoxical to you?
No? Wouldn’t that just make you doubt like everything you believed in if the very person who created those beliefs personally invalidated them?