Goodbye, Billy Pilgrim

Kurt Vonnegut has died. The sadness of that, however, is leavened a bit by the fact that his stories live on. There are people who have banned his books, and at least one case where copies of "Slaughterhouse Five" were burned in a school furnance.
Those people hardly ever win out in the end, because good stories are good stories.
Vonnegut was certainly a secular humanist and an agnostic. Which goes to show you that believers don't have a monopoly on either the truth or decency.
I remember one of his nonfiction books, "Palm Sunday.'' The title essay was, in fact, a sermon he preached at a Unitarian Church. The crux of the sermon was that too often "people get in on the wrong end of a miracle,'' a message Jesus talked himself blue over trying to get across to his sometimes dim disciples. We all want the bells and whistles of a miracle, the water into wine, the clear skin of a cured leper, but we often miss the deeper meanings of the miracle, which in Jesus' case was a message about the Kingdom of God.
Vonnegut's writing was clear and simple, not necessarily black comedy but as close as you get to it. He made me smile, and he made me laugh.
When he gets to heaven, I'm sure he'll be surprised.