This past February, Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie made her best literary effort to ruin everybody’s favorite month with the publishing of her pious book, Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere. Since then, the The Blunt Truth has not been seeking nor finding any love for this subtly titled, swashbuckling entry into the pantheon of Christian literature.
However, we at TBT have been doing a lot of reflecting, mostly on how to ignore this book. Not least because we feel it hymns and hums the latest stanza of a tired song: just another woman assuming the name of Savannah Guthrie, championing God as the reason for her being a successful, comely, left-handed, morning television filibusterer. Hark, we have seen this angel sing this ditty too many times before! It’s redolent of the sacred and profane experience of being in the audience every single night for a Vegas Celine Dion residency. Which we of course indeed were. (All 70 Celine performances of the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in 2011. Just could not stop ourselves.)
But after further reverent rumination on What God Mostly Does (in his free time, at his nine to five and in the lavatory), all these fortnights later, it’s still stuck in our craw that this book took the stairway to heaven, cubit by cubit, all the way to number one on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
Satan be damned, for some reason we still can’t pull this celebrity-driven meditation on the higher authority out from our sore spot under the utters of a sacred cow. So, why are we so darn Green Eggs and Ham on this divine tome? (We do not like Mostly What God Does in a box. We’re ashamed to say we do not much care for it with a fox. We do not like it in a sack. We prob won’t even dig it in paperback.)
One of the things that makes this high-stakes book quandary so bedeviling is that we have mostly failed to obey the first commandment of a book review. Indeed, thy hack columnist hast not actually read Mostly What God Does. We haven’t even mostly skimmed it. Or even mostly cracked it open. We have yet to see the light, or the words. But this is a book about religion, so read or unread, if we got wrath, must we not still deliver our judgment heretofore forsooth therewith with-here-forth-to-sooth and-back-again?
Therefore, we at The Blunt Truth are going to mitzvah and mostly wait for The Rapture to digest this particular work of non-fictionish’s ecclesiastical wisdom. So it has been written that some books are straight-up summertime reads; others are for Rapture-time only. To everything it’s season, although we won’t be turn, turn, turning the pages of this paean to the spirit in the sky anytime soon.
It seems pointless as a fallen amoeba to read a book where the soul-searching, head-scratching subtitle says it all : Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere. The subtitle reveals a well-worn arc. It wasn’t so long ago that the television character Felicity went to seek and find her man-crush by following him to NYU. For those that didn’t see it, Felicity went to the New York campus and not the Abu Dhabi campus built by slave-adjacent labor. Still, they squeezed four seasons out of that premise. (For real!)
And so sayeth the Book of Early Keri Russell that a quixotic journey to chase a beau can make for good story, but Mostly What God Does even in the description… is turn even our saintly stomach. According to the synopsis on Amazon, Mostly What God Does, “…reveals the transformative ways that belief in God helps us discover real hope for this life and beyond.” Fun as a Beyond afterlife burger does sound to masticate, we must also chew on whether Providence or Chat GPT himself wrote that synopsis. Or are they now becoming one in the same? Oh Jesus, Sam Altman, Mother Mary and Kirk Cameron combined!
In Ms. Guthrie’s book blurb, we’re particularly nauseated by the oxymoronic notion of “real hope.” Call us old fashioned, but we here at The Blunt Truth still prefer fake hope. The kind of false expectations that Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, sitting down to play blackjack at Mandalay Bay, Wilson Phillips, and the United Nations all used to give us — and on a good day still does.
In this post-hope metaverse we must also wonder: what is meant by the man-phrasing of it as “Finding HIS Love” in the subtitle? How presumptuous of Ms. Guthrie to suppose how God takes their pronouns. (With a side of ketchup, for sure.) Doesn’t she know the nowadays rules of they/them don’t stop at heaven’s gate? Is the brazen implication here that it’s only worthwhile to hang hither with a Lord who is hung? How is she so sure the Almighty is also heteronormative? And if our Father doth sometime stray from that mostly hetero path, will the next book be called Mostly Who God Does?
In truth, the book’s title, paying tribute to Ms. Guthrie’s favorite Galilean, is especially galling because a true opportunity for unity was lost here. If the book had simply been titled (and about) Why I Changed My Name to Gavannah Suthrie – now that’s something everyone could get on board with. Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Drake and Kendrick, pickleballs and shuttlecocks alike, would cohere to treat such a book as gospel.
Yea, Why I Changed My Name to Gavannah Suthrie, a book about walking through life as the gimlet-eyed gamine known as Gavannah Laticia Suthrie (IV) would have been a book to wax rapturous about, instead of one that leaves us wanting for the Rapture to read.
All that said, whether we’re devoted readers or demented ramblers, Gavannah’s future Pulitzer-winner raises a real question: how could we ever possibly know what God mostly does?
It stands to reason, we would have to somehow rip a page from His (and not Hers, mind you, get that straight) day planner.
Fortunately, The Blunt Truth has recently acquired through an anonymous source (St. Peter, shhhhhh) a whole day of calendar entries from His calendar.
The following are the contents of a recent day in His busy schedule:
July 18th, Infiniti
9am – Have the angels give me a good day-starter manscaping. Soup to nuts if you know what I’m saying.
9:30am – Giveth the TikTokers the Samson-like strength to drain the last ounce of fun from Coachella.
10am – Meet with the Income Inequality Fairy about paying children for their GOLD teeth only.
10:30 – Microdose with Gamantha Brand vegan gummy edibles (repeat every 15 minutes).
11:00 – Microdose with Gamantha Brand mushrooms you have yourself made magic (repeat every 15 minutes).
11:30 – Bless the world with a chameleon-like misogyny that adapts with the times.
12:00 – Look into this whole wet market vs. lab leak thing. (Seems interesting and uncontroversial!)
12:30 – Rain down more disruption on the entertainment industry. (See last 20 years of entries)
1:00 – Get word to Margaret somehow that we are in fact here, but at the same time remain wholly uninterested in her period.
1:30 – Work with team on some real zingers for The Great Satan Roast.
2:00 – Call Xenu about an installment plan for those Scientology classes. (Expensive!)
2:30 – Answer the prayers of the good people of Haiti, Sudan, Syria, El Salvador, and do something about their immense suffering. Take afternoon nap.
3:00 – Pick the Super Bowl winner. Be nice and give it to the Jets this year. Phhhht. Right. LOL!
3:30 – Cut Taylor Swift a break in life. Time to stop testing her like you did with good ole Job.
4:00 – Brainstorm on 11th Commandment or new viral dance craze. Whichever comes to you first.
4:30 – Meet with the creative team about that promising pitch for Crusades 2.0. Is there a market for a new exploration of the crusades universe? And if so, what does a modern-day crusade look like? The Crusaverse? (Just a note that Tom Cruise and the crusades rolls off the tongue.) Can the existing IP of the original crusades guarantee us an opening weekend of worldwide BO that provides ROI for investors, shareholders, stakeholders and those we would need to literally burn at the stake?
5:00 – Change Friday to Saturday and Saturday to Friday. Then change Saturday back to Friday and return Friday to its original Saturday slot. Feel a sense of singular accomplishment.
5:30 – Inspire Satirize Gamantha Suthrie’s new book about yours truly.
6:00 to 3:00am – Spend the rest of the night poppin’ bottles with my boys (Peter, Paul, and definitely not Mary) at the exclusive 700 Club.
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Dear Readers:
The Blunt Truth sincerely disvalues your opinion and commentary. However, in subsequent columns we will be addressing lukewarm topics and questions for which readers feel the world requires a serving of the bluntiest truth. If you have a topic or question you would like TBT to address in what’s left of the future, send it to davidlaryrock@gmail.com and set your expectations to somewhere betwixt the sweet spot of disappointment and blocked.
David Rock is a television producer and playwright, splitting time between Los Angeles and The Iron Islands. His most recent play, Masters of Puppets, premiered in 2023 at The Legacy Theatre. He believes in vices, not viceroys.
To HeadMagazine.com readers: The contents of this feature are solely the opinions of the author; you are entitled to your own. To help you do so, you may want to visit here: https://www.amazon.com/Mostly-What-God-Does-. Finally, if you are unfamiliar with the definition of satire, we refer you to this: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire. – The editors
