God’s Own Hangover
The Dead Sea Scrolls were not a prophecy. They were a recipe for communion wine that never ran out, and a warning.
Wrongly did the Prophet Isaiah say, *vexilla regis prodeunt inferni* — the banners of the King of Hell advance. For it is not the banners but the wine cellars of Hell that are our undoing, and they were dug not in Hades but in a cave at Qumran. I speak, my brothers in penitence, of the discovery in these last years of certain scrolls, which all hoped would reveal the secrets of the Essenes, that pious and dry community. They did not. What they revealed was a recipe. For wine that refills the cask. They called it the Perpetual Vintage. It has been our ruin.
The discoverer, a Bedouin goat-herder named Muhammed adh-Dhib whom the desert sun had baked into a state of permanent surprise, could not read the Aramaic script. He sold the seven scrolls to a cobbler in Bethlehem for three chickens and a promise not to be asked about the state of his sandals. From there, they made their way by stages to the desk of the Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, who, hoping for some lost gospel that would put the boot into the Latins, instead found 2,000-year-old instructions for viticulture. The recipe was straightforward, requiring only the usual grapes, water, and a blessing said backwards over a sliver of the True Cross while thinking disrespectfully of the Emperor. The result was a communion wine that, once decanted, miraculously replenished itself within the cask, forever. *Et lux in tenebris lucet*, and the light shineth in the darkness, except this time the light was a powerful and unexpectedly fruity red.
The Patriarch, seeing a chance to end centuries of logistical torment for his desert-dwelling priests, ordered 500 casks of the Perpetual Vintage brewed at once. This, my brothers, was a mistake born of piety and a tragic failure to read the fine print. For the Essenes, whose entire spiritual project was to be as miserable as possible for God, had included a failsafe. A spiritual tripwire. The seventh scroll, in a passage written in a crabbed and spidery hand, warned that the wine would replenish itself perfectly, but so too would the *drunkenness of the drinker*. The first sip produced a pleasant warmth. The second, a regrettable frankness with one’s superiors. By the eighth cup — usually around the *Agnus Dei* — entire congregations were seen attempting to consecrate their sandals or declaring their donkey an antipope. The state of inebriation became as permanent as the vintage that caused it. And it was hereditary.
The result has been a schism of a novel kind. The Church of the East is now divided between the Drunken and the Sober. The Drunken, numbering some 300,000 souls and several thousand livestock who partook of consecrated grape-mash, are locked in a state of rolling, intergenerational spiritual ecstasy that looks to sober observers like the world’s most disorderly tavern. Their liturgy has collapsed into a series of slurred arguments over who gets the last olive. Their Patriarch, Cyril III, recently attempted to excommunicate the Pope by shouting at a pigeon. He missed. Saint Ephrem the Syrian, forgive us. We have made a sacrament of our own undoing.
