Volume XI
Issue 10
October 2008
Copyright
© 1998-2008
The Globe-Guardian
All Rights Reserved
ISSN: 1525-6316
In the beginning...
The Church of the Rotate Your Envelope Stock, the value-added faith, dates way back to
1977.
It was 1:13 p.m. on July 17, when CRYES founder and pastor, the future Very Left Rev. Oral Groove, then nothing more than a small-town news reporter, had a few idle moments while in a office supply stock room. He was absent-mindedly gazing at the warning emblazoned on the side of a cardboard box when he was smitten by the vision. Perhaps he simply had a minor stroke. Whatever the circumstances, the vision remained, and CRYES was born.
For the ensuing two-plus decades, Rev. Groove patiently awaited a flood of new members. As the end of the millennium approached, CRYES membership had swelled to nearly two. Rev. Groove decided that church expansion might require taking an active recruitment role.
Encouraged by the prospect of doubling his congregation at any moment, Rev. Groove leased space for CRYES international headquarters above an old print shop in early 1998. He began pounding out a weekly church bulletin on his trusty manual Underwood.
He left the first bulletin at the exits of area supermarkets. Although the leaflets were neatly stacked, the budding religism was not well-received. Angry customers and store personnel pelted him with rotten tangelos upon his return, and Rev. Groove was forced to revise his bulletin distribution plan.
Rev. Groove moved his membership drive to shopping center parking lots, where the CRYES weekly bulletin was neatly tucked under vehicle windshield wipers. Furious drivers and mall guards pelted him with rotten mangos, and the Rev. Groove was issued 347 citations for littering.
While serving his subsequent jail sentence for non-payment of fines, Rev. Groove began to identify with other founders of the world's great religions who had been taunted and persecuted for their beliefs. Although neatly presented, his evangelistic talks with fellow prisoners were met with significant animosity. Wrathful inmates pelted him with rotten kiwis as he exited the jail upon his release.
CRYES got its first big break in July of 1998, when it became the first official religism featured in the Globe-Guardian. Although the story of CRYES was neatly told, outraged members of the Globe-Guardian staff of hundreds pelted Rev. Groove with rotten pomegranates, driving him from the publication's corporate headquarters.
In the ensuing seven months, CRYES, amazingly, failed to attract any new members, despite its extremely liberal tenets. Rev. Groove's landlord, incensed by rumors that CRYES was a dangerous cult, pelted him with rotten avocados and ordered him to leave his building.
Homeless, desperate and developing an intense dislike for overly ripe produce, Rev. Groove turned to the only ray of hope he had been offered during his ministry, the Globe-Guardian, and appealed for sanctuary. Taking pity on the good reverend, as well as being in need of a stable source of material for its Religism page, the Globe-Guardian agreed to provide a new headquarters for CRYES. The still agitated staff of hundreds was mollified by an agreement to place a disclaimer on each page of CRYES-associated material.
Not until June of 1999 did the Church of the Rotate Your Envelope Stock experience its first crisis of faith. It came, not because a member of our rapidly growing congregation had begun to question his faith, but because he had begun to acquire a little too much of it. This individual (we'll call him Roger) had assembled a nice little belief system by selecting an assortment of deities and dogmas from the CRYES offerings.
This, in and of itself, was not a problem. Central to the CRYES philosophy is right of each member to believe what he or she wants. Then, things went too far.
Roger soon developed the unshakable faith that the belief system he had created was so right for him that it was also the only right choice for everyone else. He began evangelizing within the CRYES congregation. Once he had succeeded in converting several members less accustomed to making decisions for themselves, he launched a missionary crusade intent on nothing less than a complete CRYES takeover.
Rev. Groove's reaction was one of amusement. Other members of the congregation, however, became annoyed. They felt that Roger was violating the amorphous faith upon which the church had been built, and they demanded action.
Reluctantly, the Rev. Groove agreed to a plan designed to encourage Roger to leave CRYES and form his own congregation. On June 26, a day which may forever live in infamy in CRYES history, the faithfully faithless members acted.
Roger and his followers had just opened a strategic planning meeting when they suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of an avalanche of rotten exotic fruits. Tossing with vigorous accuracy, Rev. Groove and approximately 20 of the more irritated members of the congregation continued to pelt the faithful until they were driven from the CRYES facilities.
Insurrection quashed, CRYES was able to concentrate its energies on development. Several noteworthy milestones were reached during its first year as a guest of the Globe-Guardian.
That May, the congregation established and successfully celebrated its first High Holy Holiday of Optional Observation, "Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us." The holiday was admittedly "borrowed" from Seinfeld, but the flock felt that the television series had a good idea in need of further development. Festivus is optionally observed on the second Thursday following the first Friday in May. Yard decorations should be in place by no later than mid-January and remain on display until late October.
CRYES launched an ambitious outreach program in August of 1999, when it established its first franchised missionary centers in several locations nationwide. Franchise centers, designed much like today's fast-food restaurant, did a brisk business, supplying CRYES dogmas and deities for visitors -- packaged either to go or to take to comfortable booths for in-center assembly and intellectual digestion.
In October of 1999, the church released CRYES 2.0. With this software upgrade, all CRYES deities became bigger, stronger, faster and ready for unlimited power expansion attachments. Dogma elements were rendered fully modular, each capable of standing alone or being tightly interlocked with any number of other elements to form a personal, all-powerful belief system controlled by a user-friendly common interface.
An amazing discovery was made in January of 2000 when what appeared to be a religism vision was found in one of the CRYES sanctuary pews -- the Alfred E. Neuman Losing Lottery Ticket. Validated during a pilgrimage Rev. Groove subsequently made to New York, the vision remains enshrined in a glass case in the very center of the CRYES sanctuary.
Further extending its outreach program in September of 2000, CRYES began manufacturing and selling do-it-yourself Home Religism Kits. The kits put CRYES on the book shelves and seafood sections of finer discount department stores and supermarkets throughout the nation and well within the reach of everyone who was looking for deeper meaning in existence.
Another CRYES milestone was reached the very next month, when the first Pulpit Exchange was announced. This gave CRYES and other participating congregations of the loosely federated religism association an eye-opening look into the decorating schemes generated by various belief systems.
Alas, the good works of CRYES and Rev. Groove came to an untimely end Jan. 28, 2002, when Rev. Groove was taken off life support in a local hospital. He died several hours later. Rev. Groove had been in a coma since Oct. 16, 2001, the date he was admitted to a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He remained in a coma after being transferred to a hospital nearer to CRYES headquarters.
Rev. Groove became missing Aug. 8, 2001, while en route to Kansas City, Missouri, from Wheat Ridge, Colorado, where he had gone to identify the body of a longtime college friend who had apparently died in a single-car crash. When the body he had come to identify had inexplicably disappeared from a locked area, Pastor became convinced he was experiencing a miracle and was determined to document it.
Rev. Groove was suffering from numerous still-healing surgical wounds at time he was dumped at the Albuquerque hospital emergency room entrance. He never recovered from those injuries.
His case remains open in several states and in the FBI's "X-Files."
DISCLAIMER: The views, opinions and beliefs expressed by the Rev. Oral Groove and the Church of the Rotate Your Envelope Stock do not necessarily represent the views, opinions or beliefs of the Globe-Guardian management and do not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent the views, opinions or beliefs of the Globe-Guardian staff of hundreds.