Did you have a childhood hero? And if you were affected this profoundly, did you ever fully recover?
It was 7:28, Thursday night, but I was still brushing. My hands shaking with adrenaline, I ground the bristles into my back teeth, splatted one mouthful of water into the bathroom sink, then wheeled to face the top of the hamper, where I’d left my things. Grabbing my Sears Flintlock with one hand and my coonskin cap that didn’t have any rings on the tail because I didn’t know it was fox fur, I thundered downstairs, skidding to a stop on my knees in front of the footstool just as the momentarily blank screen that followed a final commercial came to life with a tomahawk getting thrown into a tree and splitting the whole thing wide open to the resounding all-male chorus of:
Daniel Boone was a man Just a big man With a nose like an eagle And as fast as a beagle was he.
Of course he probably couldn’t really run as fast as a beagle, but almost. You needed that kind of speed on the frontier. And his nose didn’t really look like the beak of an eagle. They just meant that old Dan’l, as his buddies mostly called him, had a keen sense of smell, as in the following scene:
Israel, looking up at his dad in the long shadows of late afternoon, deep in the forest of the American wilderness: “Hey, Paw – what’s fer supper?”
Boone, squaring his powerful shoulders and raising his proud nose in the general direction of Becky’s cooking: “Venison.”
Israel: “Venison again?”
Boone: “I reckon.”
Israel: “Can you really smell it from here, Paw?”
Boone, beaming down on his young son, lays a hand on his shoulder. He picks a few choice grass blades and lightly tosses them in the air, his keen eyes following every subtlety in the direction of their drift.
Boone: “Yep.”
Soon the screen goes dark again for that last half-second prior to the first commercial break. I leap to my feet, tipping the footstool on end to take up a position in front of it. A British captain taps me on the shoulder from behind. Always a mistake.
“You, Mr. Boone, are under arrest for treason.”
I wheel around in blazing silence – one right uppercut followed by three swift blows to the abdomen and he’s down, but a second Redcoat steps in and delivers a cowardly blow from my left side. I flip back over the footstool/tree stump, somersaulting to my feet to land precisely at the edge of the radiator/cliff.
“Wham! Slam! Oof!” We fall in a struggling heap, each of us reaching for the Bowie knife in the dirt, when the first muted trumpet notes from the Dan-yule-bwoone, was a mwaaaaan…. theme find their way to the back of my brain. Realizing with a shock that I could miss something, I rise still with the frontiersman’s instinct intact: pivoting to a squatting position, springing to my feet, flipping the footstool back into place, then slamming my chin on my hands on my elbows on the stool just as my mom slides a second bowl of popcorn under my nose in much the same manner as Becky would have landed a freshly loaded flintlock in Dan’l’s hands under siege.
Boone and his faithful sidekick Mango are walking with ease and speed through a forest in perfect silence. If a single twig snaps, everybody dies.
Boone, leaning toward Mango: “Reckon we’re in Comanche territory yet?”
Mango, gesturing ahead: “It begins there.”
Boone: “Where?”
Mango: “The second birch from the left after the rock on which rests moss resembling the cuticle of a large elk.”
Now they come to a clearing. They are confronted by three Comanche, who are a lot smarter than the Redcoats, except that they never remember to stand the right distance from Mango. The first of them runs forward, stopping three yards away, then raises his tomahawk at Danl’s head with deadly intent.
“THWACK!” The end of Mango’s whip coils around the manxome foe’s right ankle, and the two lock eyes in the sudden recognition that this has probably happened in a past episode. Mango yanks him to the ground. The scene suddenly shifts…
Boone has a Comanche on his shoulders and his twirling him around and around. The third Comanche, running over to help his friend, never sees what’s coming…
Boone and Mango dust themselves off and shake hands. Briefly, we see the terrible lifeless poses of three Comanche who have been twirled to death, whipped to death, and stricken by a spinning Comanche.
Mango: “Well done, my friend. But will we still have time enough to rescue the French travelers from the Pawnee war party?”
Boone, shaking a crabapple tree and counting the number of ripe fruit that fall on his head: “Yes – but just enough.”
Here’s the essential picture I’m getting of fundamentalism from reading your comments and giving it further thought:
Fundamentalism is…
Professed knowledge: A fundamentalist speaks with great assurance. I’m not sure whether a fundamentalist would put it in so many words – “I’m not a believer, I’m a knower”- but the level of professed certainty is very high as compared with other people of faith.
Insistence: A fundamentalist, whether strident or polite, doesn’t want you to think what you think. He or she wants you to think what he or she thinks. The level of acceptance of other points of view is very low as compared with other people of faith.
I’ve been wondering what fundamentalism is lately – ever since that conversation with my friend’s wife that I mentioned a couple posts back. She brought this into focus for me because although I had two good friends when I lived in Virginia with views that were as conservative as hers, I realized that only… let’s call her “Betty” – strikes me as what I’d consider a fundamentalist.
Many Christians believe that Jesus was Savior – God in the flesh who was resurrected to atone for human sin – and that the Bible is inerrant. While this would identify a Christian as conservative, it wouldn’t necessarily identify him or her with what I’d want to call fundamentalism.
Talking with Betty was so very different from talking with Judith and Twila, my friends in Virginia. First, my friends and I didn’t usually talk about religion. In contrast, this was the first extended conversation I’d ever had with Betty and it was about almost nothing but her religious views. Second, the conversation with Betty wasn’t a real conversation. There was little listening on her part. She showed no interest in understanding my thoughts and was entirely focused on trying to get me to see things her way.
In a word, her style could be described as aggressive. This wasn’t the case with my friends or, for that matter, folks with whom I became acquainted from Twila’s church. They helped me out from time to time around the house as my condition declined during my last year of work and did no proselytizing. We did, however, have a few conversations about religion that were mutually engaging.
Visible Sign?
Perhaps aggressiveness is the most visible sign, so to speak, of fundamentalism. I should add that by this word, I mean an assertion of religious views that non fundamentalists would tend to see as socially inappropriate because the timing isn’t right or the fundamentalist doesn’t have the kind of relationship with the other individual that most people would deem necessary to having an intensely personal discussion of religion that was meaningful.
The question which then comes to mind for me is: what’s behind fundamentalist aggressiveness? Going by my own experience, I’d have to rule out the most obvious possibility: deep concern for the state of the other person’s spiritual well being and fear that he or she will go to hell. The fact that fundamentalists often bring up their views with people whom they barely know tends to suggest that this isn’t where they’re coming from. Although I'd known Betty, for example, for several years in early adulthood, she and I never did become well acquainted.
I’d be interested in your thoughts. My personal experience with fundamentalism is limited.
“For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” Matt. 16:26
Some see Jesus as a spiritual teacher whom accidents of history elevated to special prominence. Others believe that he was the Messiah. Either way, though we see the historical Jesus through a glass darkly, the gospels provide us with the basic outlines of a person with a first hand relationship to God and a first hand love of others.
Whether Jesus saw himself as Savior or simply teacher, the New Testament gives no suggestion that his motive was personal reward. He didn’t die on the cross, whether as the outcome of taking on certain risks in the course of his ministry or as the preordained culmination of his life’s mission, because he wanted the best seat at the table in heaven. Whoever Jesus was and however one reads the New Testament, he appears to have been a man who cared passionately for the world beyond himself.
More than ever before in human history, the world abounds in problems to be solved whose reach is truly global. When we see the cross exclusively as a symbol of Jesus Christ’s dedication, then the cross becomes a pedestal. We can worship from a safe distance, counting on this to earn us a heavenly reward while we focus most of our time and energy on trying to get a big piece of the earthly pie.
Recently I heard a wealthy man interviewed on the radio about the financial assistance he was providing to help a popular local business stay afloat. When the reporter asked if he really believed that he’d get his investment back or if he was mainly trying to be helpful, the man’s voice took on an edge of defensiveness: “I’m no philanthropist. I expect to make a profit.”
Clearly it’s a good thing to help others and make a profit at the same time. Yet this man’s implied adherence to the popular contemporary notion that accruing private wealth ought to be front and center in our lives – or, to borrow the theologian Paul Tillich’s wonderful phrase, our “ultimate concern” – has resulted in widespread greed whose harmful effects ironically include the worst environment for making money that most of us have ever seen.
Let us recognize that the cross stands not only for how Jesus gave up his life for others but for how we too are called to give our lives for others in our own ways. Usually all that we are called to give up is the illusion that a life predicated squarely on self interest can bring us peace and happiness. _____
A word about my use of the word God:
To borrow from Paul’s quotation in the New Testament, God is the One in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God is the Wholeness of the whole story that holds the story of each little life. When I refer to God, I refer to the greatest Context that exists: being in the immensity of its full power for inclusiveness and creativity, including and yet beyond that which we are able to comprehend.
Believers may want to cite additional attributes of God. Unbelievers may consider the word God as referring to Being or Reality itself.
Do You Use the Mind of God When You Read Scripture?
I’m spending most of my time in bed now. Using my remote control radio or headset phone are the only things I can do there.
A few days ago I spoke to an old acquaintance. After learning a few minutes into the conversation that I’m seriously ill, she asked if I’d “accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.” I said I didn’t accept her test question.
She went on to give a fundamentalist view of Christianity, quoting many scripture verses and repeatedly expressing the view that her way of understanding them was the only correct way to understand them.The conversation brought this to mind:
Citing scripture as the inerrant word of God to justify the beliefs we derive from it is a mistake. Scripture is composed of human language; to comprehend language is necessarily an interpretative act.
In other words...
In reading scripture, it's impossible not to use our own minds to interpret its words, phrases, verses, chapters, books, and their interrelationships. Even if God used actual human language to communicate with scripture writers, we still can't claim that our views are inerrant unless we claim that our minds are as inerrant as the scripture they ponder.
Even if we’d like to avoid taking ownership for our own views, we just can’t help using our own minds even to do that much.
In moral decision making, is it possible to clearly recognize the good as good and the bad as bad - with real insight into what makes the good good and the bad bad – and then deliberately choose the bad? Another angle on this question:
Do evildoers, to borrow from the former president's lexicon, see themselves as evildoers?
Over time I find that I take myself less and less seriously and yet still more seriously than I take others. And over time, I’ve noticed the different ways and levels at which my self-centeredness occurs.
What actually prompted the previous post is that several days ago I reached a point where I’d developed so many pressure sores and abrasions on my shins that my bedridden time went up maybe three hours a day and I'm facing the possibility of completely losing the ability to work at the computer sooner rather than later. My rare disease leaves me unable to sit, and I can stand and walk just enough to get food, use the bathroom and get to this workstation, where I have to work from a kneeling position on shins whose skin has become highly compromised.
If it were someone else's shins instead of mine that were oozing and from time to time bleeding and had large pressure-sore scabs that had been growing in size for years and will eventually break off and turn into wounds that are notoriously resistant to healing, and if it were someone else who’d been unable to leave the house for the last four years and was spending more and more of every day lying flat on his or her back, this would frankly bother me a lot less than experiencing it myself.
I say this as someone who I think it’s fair to say is characteristically empathetic and compassionate and who has put some distance between me and my ego. But “detachment” runs into certain constraints when it comes to our physical bodies.
For example, it’s me who has to keep trying to figure out, so far without success, how to get on and off my kneeling-chair every fifteen minutes – as I’ve been doing for years so as to make it harder for pressure sores to develop – without causing further damage to my connective tissue and peripheral nerves. Now that my shins can take very little friction against the lip of my chair, it’s forcing me to support more of my weight with my arms. My right brachial nerve and the paraspinal muscles in my back that are in perpetual spasm are being impacted by the extra work. And it’s me who has to spend those extra hours each day looking at the ceiling.
But while our first-hand relationship with our own bodies forces us to take them with particular seriousness, there is another first-hand relationship that we can experience that makes even truly heavy burdens bearable and even, in a sense, light.
"Do not think I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" Matthew 10:34
This quotation has often been cited by Christians past and present with crusading or at least judgmental inclinations. It's usually quoted to back up the notion that we need to expect a bloodbath before we can hope for peace, or as a stern warning to unbelievers.
I think that the essential human division, the division that gives rise to the divisions among us, is within us. And I like to think that the peace that Jesus came to shatter with his sword is the peace of self-complacency.
Progressive & Conservative Attitude Problems - and Better Communication Approaches
Holier Than Thou: Conservatives are sure to win over progressives when they follow up stern warnings and threats about how mad God will be at them for not seeing things their way with offers to pray for them. It also helps their cause when they quote so much scripture that progressives are left shaking their heads, awestruck, and going, “Gosh… Those guys must be holier than us!”
Smarter Than You: Progressives earn the admiration of conservatives each time they come up with a new way of saying, “You sure are stupid.” Condescension and sarcasm always leave conservatives thinking to themselves, “Gee, I guess I really am dumb. I’m gonna start to see things their way from now on.”
Better Approaches:
Agree: Try starting out by finding some angle or aspect of the other person’s position that you can agree with.
Restate: Restate the other's position. First, this makes sure you understand it. Second, this can be used to gently point out, say, an inconsistency, as in, “So you’re saying that both X and Y are true?”
Edit: Edit your own comments. Weed out the stuff that’s just your way of saying, “See how smart I am compared to you!” or, “So that means I'm right and you're wrong!”
A practical problem with using verbal attack modes is that even if the point you're trying to make is a good one, they make it far less likely that the other person will understand and appreciate it.
In the 1960s, I attended a Catholic school through grade two in a northern New England small town. The residents were of mainly French Canadian descent - us too, although we didn’t speak French at home. So I guess I thought of French as a kind of English that priests and nuns spoke…
I remember clearly that his name was David Bradley and that he had a crew cut, which was the same as a buzz cut, except that in those days every boy under twelve had to have one to show you were part of that age group, or “crew.” All other details of the day’s events are shrouded in shock, denial, and repression, except for one more.
I was turned completely around in my seat, and me and David were having a great conversation using the kind of English we knew best. It would have gone something like:
“Cinaminnon toast better’n peanabutter ‘n jelly? Ya crazy?”
“I bet ya nebber eben had cinmin toast!”
“Hey, buster, my grandma made it.”
“Oh yeah? What’s yers look like?”
Suddenly we were doing penance, each kneeling on different sides of Sister Josephine’s gigantic wooden desk, separated like the two sinners on Golgotha. I was the one who said the wrong thing.
Sister Josephine, to David: “Marky bell la blah blah blah. Zee Messy Masser.” (Say you’re sorry.)
David: “Messy Masser.” (I apologize.)
SJ: “Bo coo la bell tra vell poo dee-dee zhay twah-blah.” (Go back to your seat and sin no more.)
Saint David, mortified, eyes downcast, made his pallid way wanly back up the aisle, collapsing noiselessly into his seat. The hushed class sat in silent witness.
SJ turned to me. We had the exact same conversation, but she left out the part about going back to my seat.
I continued to stare at the wall, struck dumb for three seconds. Then the fabric of the wall was rent before my eyes. For long ago, it had been revealed to me that grownups were supposed to be fair.
Suddenly I was on my feet, speaking the only English I really knew, and in thunderous, declamatory tones for a five year old. The heavens darkened. The moon rolled over a couple times. The fowl of the air fell down upon the beasts of the land.
I spun in circles, speaking great tongues of fire. In one sharp moment etched in memory with perfect clarity, I saw Donna with the brown hair looking up at me from her desk with a face that said, “Am I seeing this?” I was briefly amazed for both of us, then quickly reabsorbed in the general uproar of taking a fit.
At some later point, from far away and through the sounds of whatever I was yelling, I saw Sister Saint Lion, most feared of all nuns, step into the room. But it was like I was spotting her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. She looked small.
“Keska voolay voolay la-blah?” (What’s going on here?)
In righteousness and fury came my outraged reply: either, “Shut up!” or “Get out!” I never could remember which.
My mom tells me I got a spanking but I seem to have lost consciousness for the rest of the day...
Life is fair. Life isn’t fair. Life is supposed to be fair. Who says life is supposed to be fair? Fairness is a false construct because…
What do you make of the idea of fairness? Or forget all that and talk about a time when you had a fit, lol...
