Watchmen Tell Us

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When the local Blockbuster went belly-up a few months back, I was one of the vultures picking the bones. With new DVDs continually creeping up in cost, I look for bargains wherever they might exist. Occasionally I find something for just a couple of dollars that really makes me think. Although I don’t go to theaters often, a couple of years back the previews all featured The Watchmen. I’m not a graphic novel reader either, so it was doubly doubtful that I would ever gravitate to this film. But here it was on sale. Very cheap. The previews had shown Dark Knight-like action and despite my own declarations, I had to admit that I was curious. So I’ve watched it a couple of times and have been intrigued by what an (absentee) role God plays in the movie.

I won’t go into much detail since the story is complex and, to my surprise, sophisticated. Nevertheless, the Watchmen – retired crime-fighters both good and bad – forced out of practice by the government, fear the approach of nuclear war and try to fight back. At several junctures characters declare that there is no God or that they believe there is no God. The setting is an alternate reality in the 1980s, but the crossover between that world and this is evident. Godless heroes may save the day, but with a tremendous human sacrifice required. At first viewing, I was stunned. The message was so bleak and hopeful. The movie could have been made with no mention of God, yet, briefly, his absence was underscored. Strangely, the Bible features in a bedroom scene where a future hero is spending the night with his girlfriend. Why the Bible? Why here?

I would be the first to admit that I do not have the proper background to comprehend the plot. Generally I like to read the book before I see the movie. One of the recurring motifs in the movie version is the doomsday clock that moves dangerously close to atomic war. On top of the Bible is the hero’s watch, ticking inexorably down to midnight. Even I can figure out that the countdown to doomsday is based on the Bible. What the import of this is, however, I can only guess. What kind of world has no God but still has Bibles? A world where Watchmen aren’t wanted and yet are sorely needed. Who will save us now?

Peace on Earth

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One of the most ironic of Christmas messages is “peace on earth.” The irony comes in the means of declaring that peace. Apparently first-century angels were declaring peace to the entire world, according to Luke. The peace that we see proffered, however, often extends only to those like us. What is the harm in extending Christmas joy to all? Must one be a Christian of a particular stripe before the joy of giving can be bestowed? Over the last several years various Christian groups have sought to reclaim ownership of the holiday they borrowed from the pagan Romans, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons. Make it exclusively ours. Peace to us, and let others find their own way home.

In a season of charitable giving, understanding seems to have fallen off the list of Saint Nicholas. In his guise as Santa Claus he makes the rounds of the entire world, according to the mythology that children are told. Do we ever really picture Santa delivering gifts to those who live in Iran, North Korea, or Afghanistan? Does peace on earth apply to them? The thing about peace is, unless everybody has it nobody has it.

Can we learn to share Christmas? Those who fret over Xmas forget that first-century Christians abbreviated Christ with an X (chi in Greek), just as they represented him by a highly stylized fish. Today an empty fish on your bumper declares what an X cannot, apparently. The message is that Christmas belongs to us, not secular pretenders who just want an excuse to make their kids happy. For most of the history of Christianity, Christmas had been a low-key event, barely noticed by most of the faithful. When the possibility of material gain was added in, however, the holiday became especially holy. Should we share the doctrine but not the gain, or should we make Christmas a gift to all the world – a season when all might reasonably hope for peace?

Where Are the Wolves?

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Spend a leisurely hour at your local commercial bookstore and you won’t be able to avoid seeing vampires. Just yesterday I noticed that a neighborhood bookstore had an entire section entitled “Teen Paranormal.” Zombies also continue to grow in popularity, now having their own line of undead Christmas products. And where is the humble werewolf? Not gone, just lurking in the shadows.

This weekend I finished the third werewolf book by my one-time co-Wisconsinist, Linda S. Godfrey. (She’s still there, but I’m not.) Lest any of my readers think I am casually lumping her work together with the fictional fantasy monsters, I must declare up front that The Michigan Dogman is not a work of fiction. Linda is a careful researcher, a former journalist, and a woman who possesses something many researchers lose over the years: an open mind. The problem with occasional phenomena is that they are almost impossible to test in any empirical kind of way. Since even before the Beast of Bray Road story broke in 1992 occasional reports of bipedal canines had stumbled into the news once in a while, causing headline-happy journalists to push the werewolf button. Underneath the current monster hype, however, is an intriguing question of origins.

Where do all these similar stories originate? While not even close to the number of reported Bigfoot sightings, the dogman/manwolf sightings that Linda has pulled together are impressive for their overall uniformity. Witnesses who’d never heard of the creature repeatedly report fine details that mesh with accounts of individuals otherwise unconnected. The standard answers of hoaxes and misidentifications just don’t cover the three volumes worth of material she had compiled. Few would stand by the assertion that these are shapeshifting humans, but for those with an open mind the werewolf trilogy gives pause (paws?).

The universe is large beyond human comprehension. Simply because we’ve evolved very complex brains doesn’t mean we’ve found all the answers. I’ve never seen a werewolf or any other popular cryptid. But having studied the strange world of religion all my life, I know better than to declare, ex cathedra, that very strange things cannot exist.

The Reality of Movies

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Inception was released on DVD this week, and having a weakness for struggling with reality, I knew I had to see it again. Now, people with a far sturdier grip on life than myself have been blogging about the movie since the summer, writing posts both profound and critical. I wrote an earlier post on the movie, toying with its retelling of the Theseus myth. This time, I am wrestling with the wonderful burden of having a subconscious mind. The crux of the movie is when Cobb has to decide which world is real: Mal’s or his own. The movie, of course, refuses to divulge the answer.

With a finesse that I had previously experienced with the original Matrix movie, Inception ups the ante on what we consider reality. “Reality” is a problematic concept, a bi-product, we are told, of consciousness itself. Reality is generally viewed in exclusive terms, and most of us spend our days in what I learned to denominate “naïve realism,” the concept that what we perceive is pure, unadulterated reality. Perhaps not as Inception or The Matrix, or even eXistenZ would have us believe, scientists today tend to agree that the world is not as it seems. The quantum world has opened up levels of reality undreamt of even by Einstein whose God did not play dice. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges to traditional religions.

Although many religions gladly point out that there is a mythical reality behind what we experience every day, there is no hard evidence to back up these assertions. This is not the same as declaring they don’t tap into that reality, it is just that we have no final arbiter as to what that reality is. Having been in the business of religion all my life, I am absolutely certain that it isn’t what any fundamentalist group declares it is. They make claims about reality that would leave Jesus scratching his halo-encircled head. Is it Cobb’s, Neo’s, or Allegra’s reality or is it Hawking’s, Witten’s, or Greene’s? I simply don’t know. I just put the disc in an press the play button.

Aye, Aye, Robot

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As students gave their final presentations, the very last group discussed the End of the World. This is a topic upon which the Hebrew Bible is generally silent, despite the rants of many who misunderstand the Zoroastrian influence upon the apocalyptic book of Daniel. No, the Hebrew Bible’s apocalyptic material looks forward to a change of ages, a radical new beginning, but not an end of the world. Well, maybe the end of the world as R.E.M. knows it, but not the cessation of everything. In an interesting twist, this group moved from the Hebrew Bible to scientific scenarios of the end of it all. What became obvious is that undergrads these days are faced with multiple doomsday scenarios, most of which are of human origin.

Last month I was inexplicably elected as the president of the adult chapter of my daughter’s high school robotics team. An unemployed religion professor hardly seems the logical choice for leading the way into a technological future. I even declined the nomination but was persuaded to give it a try. Robots have improved the quality of our lives to a degree that most people do not even recognize. So I listened in amazement as the students last night presented the doomsday scenario entitled “iRobot.” Clearly this is a Transformer-like blend of iMac/iPod/iPhone and Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi classic I, Robot. (Is it mere coincidence that his name can be written iAsimov?) Their description was terse and scary: nanobots and more boxy industrial models will commandeer the Internet and take over. We will be Matrix-like slaves. And I am the president of a robotic club booster association. I felt like Judas, with a MacBook.

Robots, we are told, lack empathy. Experience teaches me the same about Republicans. This weird hybrid of religio-politics is not unlike our hypothesized robotic nemeses. Religion has given us a rope to hang Judas that can double as whip against the backs of the underprivileged. Where are Asimov’s Laws of Robotics when you need them? “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Yes, the old ways are breaking down indeed. I think I’ll take my chances with the robots. At least when a robot is cutting off your life support systems it is not doing so in the name of Jesus.

The Bible Tells Me So

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As part of my regular Hebrew Bible class, students prepare classroom presentations for the end of the semester. This gives them a break from constant lecturing and also serves the function of initiating discussion. I assign social issues for them to discuss vis-à-vis the Bible; they can discuss these with each other in group-sessions throughout the semester. Since no one knows “the answer” when it comes to the Bible, I figure we can all learn from each other. I’ve been using this exercise for four years now, and at a school the size of Rutgers, you’d expect a wide variety of perspectives. This occurs, to be sure, as does more predictable stances. After fourteen weeks of instruction, most of them can only find the Bible a trove of prooftexts.

Learning to integrate biblical study into a rational worldview is difficult in our cultural climate. From nearly every medium from which religion wafts – Internet, television, newspaper, personal sermonizing – it comes out literal. The Bible/Quran says… (fill in the blank). What occurred to me during the student presentations is that scriptures of all descriptions become dangerous when their context is lost. Politicians, often among the arguably least educated members of society, argue about what the Bible says. Problem is, the Bible was written from a pre-Enlightenment viewpoint, a perspective that is out of reach to all but the most utterly naïve. Even to understand worldviews from the pre-Enlightenment you need to spend years of serious historical study.

So here’s our dilemma: we live in a society enamored of a book it doesn’t understand. Bible verses are used like Band-aids, pasted over every perceived rupture of continuity, but never quite reaching to the ends of the wound. Even after a semester of bald instruction – in the case of Nashotah House three semesters – students generally revert to what they know. To learn what the Bible instructs, take a pair of mental scissors, snip around the pericope, and tape the verse over the issue. There is, however, always a backside to the page. And most students never learn even to turn the page over to see if both sides agree. They could be ready for a life of politics.

I Can’t Ear You

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I bought a box of Q-tips in the store the other day. I noticed that the package shows humans using the cotton swabs in a variety of ways: around the eyes, nose, eyebrows, even on a computer keyboard. Everywhere but an ear. The suggestive shape of the Q-tip, as well as the received wisdom of everything from the South African name “ear buds” to Mad magazine, indicates that they were invented for ears. We all share that somewhat unsavory habit of forming earwax, and doctors warn that using cotton swabs may impact the matter and lead to complications of hearing. Q-tips (originally “Baby Gays” – check out the Q-tips website) are no longer for ears. In the back of my mind I supposed that it was because of lawyers. All it takes is one litigious sophomore and companies run to their attorneys to show that the faulty application wasn’t their suggestion.

Laws run our lives. One of the most famous, but by no means the first, law-givers was Moses. I’m pretty sure Moses didn’t say anything about what to stick in your ears, but he did lay down the laws that Neo-Cons still argue should govern our lives just like the Quran governs the laws of Iran. The laws of the Torah, however, were only meant for the Israelites. Nevertheless, laws have become means of growing wealthy. If we can prove on a technicality that my dumb mistake was somebody else’s fault, why not have that person (or better yet, company) sued to within a millimeter of their lives claiming “damages”? The law has become a means to protect the special interests of those in power. As someone who has tried scrupulously to keep the law my entire life, I sometimes find that old Moses seems to have turned against me.

Laws are meant to protect the rights of people. When did laws shift to becoming instruments of entrapment and means of income? Just before leaving Wisconsin I was driving my family home from a movie. We were talking and laughing when I came to a speed-trap area of my local town where the speed limit drops from 45 to 25 m.p.h. within a matter of inches. Religiously I always complied. Today, in the spirit of the moment, I neglected my usual caution and was pulled over. A policeman young enough to be my son lectured me on unsafe driving (I began driving when he was still wearing diapers, and I had never been given a ticket before because I am not a speeder) before issuing me a citation. My wife couldn’t believe it – she knows that I never speed. One of my last memories of Wisconsin is being unfairly targeted by a law devised to bring money to the local police force. It has nothing to do with safety, since there were no houses or buildings for several hundred yards yet after the slow-down zone. Has the law come to free us or oppress us? Lawyers watch our backs, and law-makers watch their wallets. I want to ask Moses, but I’m afraid I won’t hear him. I seem to have a cotton swab stuck in my ear.

Lead us not into temptation...

Holiday Cheer

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Christmas carols are, it seems, intended to fill holiday shoppers with good cheer. Good cheer opens wallets and purses and everybody is happy until January’s bills make their epiphany. Until then, sing songs of gladness. Princeton University, one of the few financially stable institutions of higher education, each year gives a gift to the community. Some Sunday in Advent a free university Chapel Choir concert is given in a campus chapel the size of a modest medieval European cathedral. The music varies from year-to-year, but seldom is the church not full with locals taking time out from holiday shopping or grading papers. One of the carols yesterday, was the 1914 French piece, “Christmas Carol for Homeless Children.”

Princeton, like most schools, does have a heart buried beneath its deep, cold, jobless front. Chapel choirs like to shake up the status quo by throwing in an occasional piece that requires somber thoughts and social consciousness amid the joy. The French carol dates from that fearsome first year of World War One, a time when France was especially under the gun. The wish for the world at the time was peace – material gain had not yet become the measure of God’s grace. The hymn is sober and wrenching:

We have no more house nor home!
Enemies took all we had;
all gone, all gone,
even our own little bed!
The school they burnt;
they burnt our teacher, too.
They burnt the church and also the Lord Jesus Christ,
the poor old beggar too who could not get away!

Singing it in French may take away the vinegar of the words, but wartime is not the only circumstance that finds people without sufficient means. Even unchecked capitalism will lead to the same results. Only, instead of the Lord Jesus Christ being burnt, he is sold in the markets to make a tidy profit.

Baby Jesus says, "Bring on the gold!"

Slash of the Titans

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I’m suffering from mythology overload. Last night I watched the mediocre 2010 version of Clash of the Titans on DVD. Since I’ve been grading students papers on mythology non-stop for over a week now, I felt that I needed to see what all the fuss was about. Again. I saw the movie in a theater earlier this year and wrote a post on the post-modern perspective the film has on the gods. To get a better sense of a movie, however, a repeated viewing is awful helpful. The fact is that the public exposure to mythology is often limited to the movies. Students frequently ask if something they saw in the Disney version of Hercules is the way it really happened in the myths. Nothing really happened in the myths.

Meanwhile angry letters have been pouring into the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Rounding out a new losing season, Rutgers University football coach Greg Schiano remains the highest paid employee of the state of New Jersey. Academic voices are feeble, but economics makes people sit up and pay attention. Money talks. Brains are lazy when it comes to rigorous thought. As the collection of heroes gathered in the forest of Calydon to chase the great boar Artemis let loose on the city, the academic world has also chased the glory of the pig-skin. And poor Meleager paid the price of the public outcry when it was over. Even though his team won the biggest college bowl ever.

It is hard to tell the real villain in Clash of the Titans. The writers suggest it might be Zeus, or Hades, Medusa, the “Kraken,” Acrisius, Cephus, or even the “fire priest.” Everybody’s looking for someone to blame. Things aren’t right in Argos. Others blame state legislators, the president of Rutgers University, or the football coach himself. The fact is in both the movie and in the university priorities have been skewed. Nobody is driving except the money, no matter which box office it goes into.

Who's got the pig-skin?

Hunting Vampires

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The Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania is a treasure trove of Americana from the turn of the last century. Henry Chapman Mercer, in addition to being wealthy, had the foresight to realize that society was rapidly changing, even back then. He undertook the collection of everyday artifacts from many human industries, poured himself another castle-like concrete building, and housed the baubles there. It is a fascinating walk through nineteenth-century America. And if you visit on a cold day it feels as well as looks like Currier and Ives have just passed through. My main draw, however, was a vampire hunting kit.

If only I had a polaroid lens...

Prominently displayed, the kit includes a Victorian Protestant’s tool chest for any blood-sucking eventuality. A cross (sans corpus), a pistol with “silver” bullets, glass vials with various apotropaic ingredients, even a little stake, all in custom-cut green velvet. Unfortunately, the kit is believed to be a forgery, although the items in it are from the Victorian era. The silver bullets are, for example, pewter. As the placard notes, vampires do not exist, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t believe they might have existed. The museum, naturally enough, hoped that the Victorian era kit might be authentic. Scientific analysis has revealed otherwise despite the fact that many people continue to believe in something that has no basis in reality.

Belief constitutes reality. Otherwise, how could it be that thousands, if not millions, of people don’t accept the fact of global warming? Brash barons of unhindered industrial progress insist that humans can’t harm the planet – it’s just too big. We can suck out all the resources that billions of years have deposited in intricate recesses and that nature has sprouted right on the surface. For, they say, God has given them to us. They believe that. If we held a mirror up to them, what would we see? Maybe we would be forced to change our minds and go after that vampire-hunting kit after all.

Solstice Now!

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Who owns the solstice? Whoever it is, I wish we could just get it over with. The darkness falls before I step into my 5 p.m. class. It is dark when I drive home. The next morning, leaving for my 8:30 a.m. class, I drive to school in the dark. Back at Nashotah House a colleague once said his wife became “almost pagan” in her yearning to pass the winter solstice and head toward the time of year when light prevails over darkness. My wife pointed out a CNN story concerning a New Jersey billboard sponsored by American Atheists. The billboard, just on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel into New York, shows the star of Bethlehem, the manger and the wise men. The inscription reads: “You KNOW it’s a myth. This season celebrate REASON.” Naturally, motorists are up in arms. Who owns the solstice?

Before the Thanksgiving leftovers even hit the fridge, Christmas season has begun. Santa always ends the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, making it official. Since we are capitalists, we do what the red-suited captain of industry says: shop. As long ago as A Charlie Brown Christmas complaints of the commercialization of Christmas have reverberated through the media. Personal properties and billboards enjoin us to “keep Christ in Christmas” and remember “the reason for the season.” Economists tell us to spend more to assist the sluggish economy. Meanwhile the light continues to fade; the days grow darker. Why confuse the issue with religiosity? Why not just spend some money on others, feel the release of endorphins, and be thankful?

Nobody knows when Jesus was born. The church selected December to celebrate the event because the shortest day of the year, for those north of the equator, had long been a time of fervent wishes for the return of light. The first-century Christian rivals, the Gnostics, believed in the continual, literal struggle between light and darkness. When sidelined by Orthodox Christianity, the torch was taken up by those who celebrated Saturnalia, Lupercalia, Hogmanay, Yule, Sol Invictus or any number of other winter festivals. Christmas was a relative late-comer to the celebrations that welcome the resurrection of the sun. So drivers from New Jersey should take it easy. The solstice is everybody’s holiday. I just wish that whoever’s in charge would give us all a little more light.

Holy Horror

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Back in October, in the spirit of the season, I attended a local lecture by a ghost hunter at a nearby public library. This sincere young man struck me as perfectly normal, but haunted by his ghostly encounters. During the question session someone asked about TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society, of “Ghost Hunters” fame). The lecturer indicated that TAPS is not above fabricating evidence for ratings, a disappointing but not unexpected factor when it comes to television. He even gave some evidence to back his assertions. Nevertheless, my wife’s whimsical six-month subscription to the TAPS Paramagazine has continued on well past its expiration date, and when the November/December issue arrived, I was interested to see a piece entitled “Sacramental Horror: What scary stories can tell us about what is real.” Well, this was too good to pass up.

The article, written by Presbyterian minister Jonathan Weyer, discusses the value of horror films. The juxtaposition of a clergyman and horror films is a little unexpected, but believable. After all, many horror films feature religious ideals clothed in monstrous form. Dividing horror films into Uncanny/Unsettling horror, gross-out horror, and torture porn, Weyer goes on to explain how uncanny or unsettling horror underscores the moral order of the universe and is therefore appropriate for Christian contemplation. He even draws the Nicene Creed into it. Gross-out horror serves the function of making the viewer contemplate death and perhaps even helps to make fun of it. This is a less noble, but still acceptable Christian enterprise. Torture porn, on the other hand, simply has no redeeming value. Sacramental horror really didn’t enter the discussion. Douglas Cowan’s Sacred Terror takes this issue on more directly.

I really don’t expect much insight from a fanzine that treats the reality of fairies and the prognostications of tarot cards next to the genuinely mysterious, such as ghosts. Finding morality in horror films is often a matter of eisegesis. The fear in such films often emerges from the sacred, either in pure or distorted form. Even if “the pure of heart or, often the virgin” survives while “Wrongdoers get put to the axe,” as Weyer states, seldom is that the intended point of the movie. John Carpenter denies that there was a moralizing message in his Halloween, often cited as the movie that established the “good girl survives” motif. The fact is that horror relates to the sacred in the element of fear. If people were not afraid, there would be little for religion or horror movies to accomplish.

Brave New Whirled

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Today marks the triumph of capitalism. Having just finished reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time since my undergraduate days, I found it strangely appropriate and prescient. Huxley foresaw a bleak future where comfort and convenience outweighed concerns for truth and meaning. As the World Controller of Western Europe reveals to Mr. Savage, it was the Nine Year’s War that made people so docile that they would accept complete government control over their private lives. Read “9-11” for the Nine Year’s War, and he pretty much nailed it. Americans today put up with severely restricted freedoms because only the rich and powerful are truly free. We even have Huxley’s “feelies” – we just call it the TSA checkpoint at the airport.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” So says Mr. Savage shortly before his tragic end. The remainder of society – those willing to play along with the game, those willing to be anesthetized with the little perks the government throws their way – are already dead. “Let them eat cake.” We have our hedonistic day of shopping frenzy, looking forward to the soma of Christmas. We will comply despite the dehumanization the unemployed, the unwary traveler, the racially profiled, face every other day. As long as we have our electronic toys and the network into which they may be plugged, guide us o thou great Patriot Act. Freedom is not free. Orwell called it doublethink. Today it is doubleclick.

Novels have the capacity to say what libraries full of dusty dissertations cannot. Perhaps the future has not turned out quite the way Orwell or Huxley or Burgess predicted, but they were not far off. November has become the month of the novel. The Office of Letters and Light hosts National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for those in the know) each year to encourage others to find their creative voice. The challenge: write a 50,000-word novel fully in the month of November. I finished mine in just over two weeks. Perhaps someone who has the good fortune to break into the publishing world will once again sound that warning shot before society takes its next Huxleyian turn. But until then, anyone who says they don’t need a gramme or two of soma, well, they’re just plain lying.

Thanksgiving Day

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This post is an excerpt from my unpublished book for young readers giving the history of American holidays:

When you think of Thanksgiving you may see visions of a big turkey dinner and a four-day weekend. If you’re like me (I hope not!) you probably think that ever since the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, Americans have had a big November feast every year since. This popular cozy image may be heartwarming, but it is wrong. Thanksgiving in history is a custom that goes back to the Puritan settlers. Puritans came to America so that they could practice their religion freely. They were religious people (not a great sense of humor); things had been pretty tough for them – crossing the stormy Atlantic in small ships, not knowing what to expect when they arrived, lots of people dying on the way – not an easy thing to do! Once they got here, there were no grocery stores and they hadn’t planted crops earlier in the year, they didn’t even know what would grow here. Many didn’t survive, they weren’t America-tolerant you might say.

What we think of as the first Thanksgiving involved English colonists (Pilgrims) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans. One of the Wampanoag, Squanto, served as an interpreter – pretty big of him, considering he’d learned English from being a slave. He taught the settlers how to grow corn, which was unknown in Europe. (What the English called “corn” is what we call “wheat.” The more correct word for what we call “corn” is “maize.”) Squanto also taught the Pilgrims how to catch eels to eat – maybe he found a way to pay them back after all! The first Thanksgiving meal in 1621 followed the Pilgrims’ first successful harvest. They ate deer and some wild birds – enter the turkey! – along with their crops.

You see, both the Wampanoag and the English had traditional harvest festivals – many peoples do. “Thanksgiving,” however, has to do with, well, giving thanks. Did I mention that the Pilgrims were religious? They believed that God had successfully brought them here, so they thanked God. Not every early harvest was so great. In a bad year they had a day of mourning rather than a Thanksgiving feast. Some historians place the first “Thanksgiving” in 1923. The Pilgrims had experienced a drought. Frantically they prayed for rain, and, Flanders-like, it came. So they held a Thanksgiving. These Massachusetts Puritans held Thanksgivings in church rather than around a banquet table. For them, these irregular days of giving thanks marked the survival of difficult times, not fancy food. So they held occasional Thanksgivings, not watching football after a big meal, but praying in church. By the middle of the 1600s settlers began to have a harvest-day Thanksgiving pretty much every year, but not always on the same day. They had not set a specific date to give thanks and feast.

Puritans, you must realize, gave thanks at the proverbial drop of a buckled hat. They prayed before meals as a regular practice – something many families continue to do. To set aside a day for special prayers, like Thanksgiving, was as natural for them as women wearing bonnets. The practice of having an annual (yearly) day of giving thanks got underway in Massachusetts around 1630. Other colonies joined in, but not always at the same time. Remember, harvests come at different times in different places.

[See Full Essays for the rest of the story.]

Towing Jehovah

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Back before my blogging days began, one of my relatives was reading a book entitled Towing Jehovah by James Morrow. Given my field of study, I was intrigued by the title, made a note of it, and got on with my life. I was reminded of the story when reading a book on religion in popular culture, so it seemed the time was right to pick it up and see what it was about. First of all, it is a work of fiction, so nobody should get too upset. The premise is that God has died and his corporeal body has to be given a proper burial. Since the corpse is huge and since it has fallen into the ocean, a washed-up oil tanker captain is selected by the angels, who are dying out of empathy, to tow the body to its final resting place. Herein lies the tale.

The book won a World Fantasy Award, and is generally an engaging story. Any lifelong student of religion will naturally find bits to quibble with, but the fantasy author’s heart wants what the fantasy author’s heart wants. The question the book raised in my mind was whether it really said much about religion at all. Sure, there are several great one-liners and quirky observations about how the established religions might react to the death of God, but the book itself intimates that humanity does fine without a God, but it required a God to get it started. It is the story of humankind growing up. When I finished the book, however, I was left with the impression that religion is developed here in spite of God.

God, being dead, is a strangely silent character in the book. Western religions have taught us to suppose God is active, and very vocal. Just tune in any televangelist. In Towing Jehovah, God has become an idol, a prime mover that became the main event. It is a provocative yet somehow respectful treatment of God as an idea. James Morrow is often categorized as a secular humanist, yet his book tows God into the consciousness of a world that already largely ignores the divine. In this sense it remains a paradox. No matter what people say, God just doesn’t go away. The reader, cast adrift, like the corpus dei in the novel, keeps bumping back into God. The concept, once born, will live as long as human consciousness survives.