Where? Wolves?

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The problem with occasional phenomena is that they are seldom empirically verified. Try as we might, no one has managed to be in the exact place at the exact time on Loch Ness to capture definitive evidence that Nessie exists. Of course, it is very difficult to prove that something doesn’t exist. I have a creeping suspicion that not all of reality can be quantified. I’m very glad for the parts that can be, but a little mystery never hurt anyone. I’ve just finished reading Linda Godfrey’s Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America. There—I’ve already lost some of you! We all grow up to learn that there are no such things as werewolves and I’ve experienced many a peaceful night in that knowledge. Nevertheless, many people do report seeing upright wolf-like creatures, and many of the people interviewed by Godfrey appear to be entirely sincere. What makes this intriguing to me is that many of these episodes are reported in a circumscribed area (near which I used to live). While reports come from across the country, it is easier to dismiss one person who saw something odd once than it is to discount many people who see a similar thing over many years in the same general vicinity. That’s why I keep coming back to Godfrey’s books.

Being an open-minded writer, Godfrey also considers possible spiritual explanations for what people see. Shamanistic traditions, in this case particularly Native American ones, do not dismiss transformations from human to animal. It is difficult for most of us to accept that a person could bend the laws of physics and biology—for which we suffered through so many tests in our education—to mutate or mix human DNA into or with lupine stock. Indeed, it takes the faith of the world of religion to believe that. And yet, people see beasts.

We have been in the process of sealing the borders to our universe since the Enlightenment. The vaster our universe becomes the smaller the realm of possibilities grows. But we haven’t even explored all of our own little planet yet. The deep-sea trenches remain largely out of our reach, and the sheer volume of the oceans boggles the imagination. Even on land, we can’t watch every place all the time. The possibility of getting to somewhere truly remote is frequently an optimistic illusion. At times with my wife’s family I’ve ventured to places so far from civilization that freedom truly feels palpable. And as we hike down some neglected trail, talking to alert the grizzlies to our presence, nearly always we end up encountering others out here to escape from the likes of us. Yet a whole lot of the woods remain off-trail. It’s not a small world after all. And it’s October. Who’s to say there’s not the occasional werewolf out tonight?

Whirling Spirits

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A photograph and video of a “fire tornado” in Australia have been lighting up the web the last few days. Well, technically there is no such thing as a fire tornado, although that term serves perfectly well as a colloquial expression for the phenomenon. Having spent several years studying vortices for a project on weather language in the Bible, I came to know tornados particularly intimately. Dust devils, caused by surface heating, look and act like tornados, but a true tornado is cloud-based. The fire tornado is probably better termed a “fire whirl” or a “fire devil”—an expression that has a particularly ominous tone. Such vortices occur in wildfires in other parts of the world as well, and they are, obviously, very dangerous. When my wife pointed out the comments on this site (which also has a photograph and a link to the video), however, the implications for a blog on religion became clear.

One of the points I made in my weather work was that severe weather is almost always attributed to God. The comments on boingboing affirm that the concept retains its currency. Now, reading comments on most websites reveals just how juvenile the web readership generally is. On many sites the comments are so annoying that even Spongebob Squarepants would seem an intellectual heavyweight by comparison with the writers. Nevertheless on boingboing, by comment seven God had been brought into the conversation. In this instance, reference was aptly made to the movie The Ten Commandments, with others chiming in that nature here far outdid Cecil B. DeMille’s efforts at a realistic fire devil to represent God. The comments then move on to the guiding of the Israelites by a pillar of fire in the wilderness. Intermingled with the biblical references are meteorological comments attempting to classify the whirl a bit more precisely.

When something out of the ordinary occurs, our default seems to be God. This in no way discounts the scientific discussion for what is really going on. The religion and science comments simply talk past one another—they have the same referent, but entirely different levels of engagement with it. Although not the scientific names, “devils” and “tornados” represent different, if visually similar, phenomena. Vortices seem natural on a round planet that follows a round orbit while rotating swiftly on its axis, and yet they remain comparatively rare. The name “dust devil” probably goes back to indigenous traditions associating the whirls with ghosts or spirits. For Christians encountering these concepts, heathen gods were devils (as is evident in the name Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin, named “Spirit Lake” by the Native Americans. The same applies to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, but I haven’t been there.) It seems to me that these vortices neatly summarize religious sensibilities: an awe-inspiring event is one culture’s deity, another culture’s devil, and a third culture’s natural phenomenon empirically explained.

A real tornado

The Price of Tolerance

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While on a trip to New England recently, my family had taken an exit to look for a bite of lunch. We followed one of those innocuous dinner-plate symbols that often grace roadside signs next to a stylized hotel bed and a gas pump that looks like a suicidal robot. This particular exit, however, seemed unwilling to deliver on the food part. As we wound down an unfamiliar road, we came across the golden cupolas of a Sikh temple. This was the first Sikh temple I’d ever seen, and my daughter asked why she’s never heard of Sikhs before. “Because they never cause problems,” was my reply. Of the major world religions, Sikhism is notable for its lack of overt violence even though a sword is one of the religion’s symbols. Unfortunately, over the weekend, violence found some innocent Sikhs.

As of the moment, no one is able to identify the motives of the man who gunned down four Sikhs preparing to worship in Wisconsin. For many Americans the religion is a mystery. We hear of Hinduism and Buddhism in the course of many historical and literary ventures. Sikhism is somewhat newer on the world religious scene, but it still predates regular European trade with India during the “age of exploration.” Although the classification of religions is always disputed, Sikhism is generally considered around the sixth largest world religion in terms of numbers, and they have avoided the limelight in the western world, showing that a religion can rest on its principles. One of the truly praiseworthy principles of Sikhism is toleration, an idea that his held in very high regard.

From WikiCommons

Toleration often clashes with gun ownership in the United States. Just weeks after twelve people were murdered for going to the movies, we have more headlines of private citizens (some mentally disturbed) with ready access to firearms. And more innocent people are dead. Even the shooter is dead, so we will never likely know whether this was simply a case of mistaken identity or hideous intolerance at work. In my time in Wisconsin I came across many Christians who were extremely intolerant of any viewpoint other than their own. Fortunately, they were the vast minority among the people that I knew. Still, the paradigm that I see emerging disturbs me to the core: we claim it is our right to own guns while identifying with a deity who let himself be tortured to death rather than harm anyone. I wonder if a culture can spell schizophrenia?

Which God?

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In Sunday’s newspaper (that’s the kind of week it’s been) an op-ed piece ran with the title “Is God real? Putting the idea on trial.” Written by a priest, Geno Sylva, the article tells how a Wisconsin church set up a mock trial where the litigants argued the case. The trial did not reach a consensus on the matter, even when a great deal of “money” was at stake. Rev. Sylva is okay with that, noting that the main thing is to keep the conversation around God going.

The article brought to mind the Scopes Monkey Trial, another case where God ended up, indirectly, in the dock. It also occurred to me that the real issue is not the existence of God. Juries, and even—gasp!—lawyers don’t demonstrate the truth. The lawyer’s job is to convince people to approve of his (or her) argument—many famous cases are known where the lawyer knew his (less often her) client committed the crime. The argument gets shifted to guilt (one of the favorite tactics of the God of the Bible)—is the defendant guilty or not? Not did the defendant do it. Now let’s put God in the equation. God is not on trial here—remember, it is God’s reality that is being debated.

It appears that God, as an abstract, does not and cannot matter. The mere existence of God proves nothing. Rev. Sylva mentions Einstein as a believer. Well, in a very qualified way. Einstein’s “God” was non-interventionist; the laws of relativity ran the universe. Enter the atomic bomb. QED. The existence of God is not meaningful to believers if God does nothing. The purpose of worship is, after all, to please and interact with God. If God exists like an ancient, unmoving statue, nobody’s happy. The kind of God that worshippers want must be at least able to hear prayers, and must be able to do something about them. Their God is interventionist. This is not Einstein’s god.

Arguing whether God exists proves nothing. It would be like arguing that the universe exists. If it does, so what? What Rev. Sylva’s faithful need to know is does God do stuff. Is there promise of heaven or threat of hell? Or, less crassly, does the ethic of God compel me to do good? Is God, as the old hymn says, “mighty to save”? A god who merely exists is an academic or intellectual curiosity. No more. Will Rev. Sylva’s congregation be happy with that? It seems likely that if the verdict denied God’s existence the party on the side of the Lord would simply appeal to a higher court.

What's really at stake?

Material Whirled

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With the moon and Jupiter waltzing slowly so high in the sky, radiating such brilliance early in the morning over this past week, it is understandable how ancient people came to see the gods as material objects. The course of progression seems to have been physical gods to spiritual gods: the earliest deities ate, drank, made love, fought. They were of the same substance as humans, or at least of the same psychological makeup. The Egyptians, Zoroastrians, and Greeks all toyed with ideas of beings of “spirit”—non-corporeal entities that did not participate in our material world, but were able to influence it. In the world but not of it. The tremendous gulf between great goddess and material girl was born. Today that concept is taken for granted, especially in western religions. We are locked into physicality while God is free to come and go.

Many religions respond to this by suggesting that we should look beyond the physical to the majesty hidden from biological eyes. And yet, physical creatures that we are, we are drawn back to material means to demonstrate our spirituality. One of the perks of working for a publisher is the constant exposure to new ideas. At Routledge I have been learning about the rising interest in material religion: the manifestation of religion through physical objects and rituals. This aspect of religious life easily devolves into a cheapening of faith into mass-produced, religious knickknacks and kitsch. Some mistake this for the real thing. While living in Wisconsin, my family used to visit the spectacular Holy Hill, the site of a Carmelite monastery atop a large glacial moraine. On a clear day you can see Milwaukee from the church tower. It is a large tourist draw.

No visit to such a shrine would be complete without the obligatory stop at the gift shop. Even the non-believer feels compelled to buy some incredibly tasteless artifact to keep them grounded in reality. Many of the items—giant glow-in-the-dark rosaries, maudlin mini-portraits of the blessed virgin Mary (BVM as the insiders call her, not to be confused with BVD) and the crucified Lord on all manner of crosses, line the walls and shelves. This commercialization is not limited to the Catholic tradition. Evangelical groups realize the importance of branding as well, passing out cheap merchandise (or better, selling it) with Bible verses emblazoned on it. These signs of faith sell themselves, but they blur the sacred distinction between human and divine. Does religion point to a reality behind the physical? This is its claim, but what is the harm in making a bit of cash on the side, just in case?

Blue Monkey God

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A friend of mine pointed me to the following YouTube video:

Having spent many years in Wisconsin, I have to admit that this isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve witnessed. Not even the weirdest thing in the name of religion. Nevertheless, the fact that grown adults are running around the Wisconsin woods dressed as Na’vi and throwing toilet paper onto innocent trees shows just how diverse religions can be. My ears perked up at about the 3:50 mark on the video where Tsu’tey says “I didn’t believe in God before Avatar” – a statement that catapults James Cameron into the role of father of God, I guess. What will it take to make some people believe?

I have said for years that movies are the new mythology. At the risk of showing my age, and blowing my coolness factor, I recall the episode of Northern Exposure (“Rosebud”) where Leonard Quinhagak, a Native American shaman, tries to discover the healing myths of the Caucasians. The inhabitants of Cicely simply don’t know any myths. Meanwhile, in a separate plot, Ed Chigliak attempts to make a movie. The juxtaposition illustrates quite nicely how movies are indeed modern myths. The sense of transport many viewers reported upon seeing Avatar (critics, be quiet) also illustrates this phenomenon. Movies take us outside ourselves in a way most religions would kill (some literally do) to achieve.

Donning a blue body suit and freezing your tail off in Wisconsin may not be everyone’s favored form of religious expression. It is healthier than much of the religion I saw expressed at Nashotah House. In fact, when Tsu’tey and Eytukan are shooting arrows at the manikin of a woman I thought I had slipped back into my accustomed pew for a spell. The myth of Avatar is that peace, love, and tolerance may indeed coexist without the greed of the sky people who only want the money. There is a truth deeply buried here. If a few more cassocks could be shed along with a few more human tears perhaps we could embrace the contents of Pandora’s box unafraid.

Ice Father in Heaven

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The Internet can be a window into the collective consciousness of a nation. In a world where even the Weather Channel invites comments on its forecast page, the outlook of many Americans is laid bare. This latest shot of winter weather on the northeastern quarter of the country is an excellent example. It is still March, the tempestuous month of the war god, so a little snow in the northern latitudes should come as no surprise. An unnamed dean at a state school here in New Jersey had just sent out an email blast the week before stating, with decanal authority, that there would be no more weather delays this year. Yesterday there was still snow on the ground after the storm. Frustrated citizens cursed – actually cursed – the winter on weather.com.

For years I have maintained that the weather is key to understanding the human perception of the divine. From ancient Sumer’s An and Enlil through classical Greece’s Uranus and Zeus, the gods unquestionably in charge are the sky gods. The guys who control the weather. In Israel Yahweh took that job description from a reluctant Hadad – aka Baal – and many people considered this a serious mistake. Don’t mess with the weather god! As the snow begins to melt once more, even those of us in the enlightened twenty-first century should be reminded that our sense of what the world should be is an illusion. Nature evolved our brains, and now our brains think they have the right to take over.

Once, back in Wisconsin, I stepped outside on a chilly June morning and saw flecks of snow in the air. It wasn’t “snowing” – it doesn’t snow in June – but there was definitely a frozen sort of precipitation hanging tentatively in the air. I was teaching at the most self-righteous of seminaries at the time, and it became clear to me, once again, that we are not in control. Among the scariest books I read in Wisconsin was Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age. I was at work on my book on weather language in the Psalms (still unpublished) and the unsettling truth drifted around me like this winter’s snows: if a new ice age settles in, there is nothing we can do to stop it. Geologists still can’t state what triggers these periodic events, or even what their timetable might be. If earth’s ice caps again begin to grow, however, I am certain that we will also see a dramatic increase in religiosity. For the gods, we all know deep down, are in the skies.

Zounds

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Back in my first exposure to state university life in Wisconsin, I frequently received eager guidance from students on religion in the media. After having taught in a seminary where interest in the world beyond ecclesiastical walls was rare, this exposure to wider interpretation was welcome. One of the movies suggested to me by helpful undergraduates was the then fairly contemporary Stigmata. My interest in horror films was burgeoning again after my nightmarish experience at Nashotah House, so I watched the movie with renewed appreciation for the abuses presented on the part of the established church. I rewatched Stigmata this past weekend and a number of features stood out as apposite for this blog.

As always in movies, liberties are taken with reality. Stigmata presents the Gospel of Thomas as a serious threat to Catholicism. Of course, even the Gospel of Judas made a public splash back in my Oshkosh days, but the great Titanic of the church remained steadily afloat. The contents of the Bible are secure and non-negotiable for the vast majority of Christianity. There is no more room within its black leather binding for further revelations. The movie also presents a woman – an atheist, no less – as being the vehicle for a truth she can’t understand. In the masculine citadel of the Catholic Church she must be silenced, in an overly dramatic way, of course. The message seems to be that religion is unwilling to learn from secular women, even if they bear the truth.

The critics were not kind to the movie, but I found it a strangely religious film. The premise behind it advocates the reality of Christianity, only the Jesus of history is occluded behind a great mask of human tradition. Enamored of power, the church decides what will be revealed to the masses since control is more important than truth. A woman cannot correct the false belief of men, since a masculine god has given manly instructions to a male institution. Underneath it all, however, is a virgin Mary weeping real human blood as half of humanity is simply disregarded by the half that retains its abusive strength. Perhaps the commentary was a little too close to home, even for the (mostly male) critics.

Neverwhere Angel

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Neil Gaiman is popular among my students. At least among those that still read for fun. A couple of years back one of them lent me a copy of American Gods, and the story stayed with me. Having lived for many years in Wisconsin, and having visited the House on the Rock, the novel was like a kaleidoscope of some of my more pleasant memories of the state. Neverwhere is quite different and yet equally compelling. Gaiman peoples his worlds with characters just on the edge of believability thrown in with protagonists who tend to be completely confused by what they’re experiencing. Instead of gods, in Neverwhere there is an angel with the unlikely name of Islington and we have the myth of Lucifer’s fall retold in fantasy format, rolled together with Alice in Wonderland and the myth of Theseus. For starters.

A person is a composite of what s/he reads and learns and accepts. The books we digest, each in a unique recipe fitting our individual tastes, create new compounds and concepts that explore our personal realities. Neverwhere takes the reader down a rat-hole instead of a rabbit-hole, but nevertheless follows a young girl on a journey of maturity. The hero’s quest is undertaken to actualize both protagonist and idol, and along the way the beast in the labyrinth must be encountered and slain. Theseus, the flawed hero, dominates a world where even saviors have peccadilloes.

The protagonist of Neverwhere does not believe in angels, despite his encounter with one. As Gaiman puts it: “it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name.” Belief generally involves not seeing. Once the object of belief is empirically confirmed, belief becomes knowledge. Today the belief in angels remains unabated. No empirical proof, nothing tangible confirms this belief beyond the anecdotal accounts of those who claim to have experienced them. Even the fanciful image of their androgynous good looks and unlikely wings remain untainted for all the centuries. Neverwhere raises an intelligent question about angels, but to discover what it is you’ll need to go down the rat-hole as well.

Sacred Bowl

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No winners in this game

I am not a sports fan. Nevertheless, in years when we can afford cable I’ve watched the Super Bowl with a perverse curiosity. Especially when I’ve lived near the locus of one of the competing teams. Having grown up just north of Pittsburgh and having spent fourteen years just south of Green Bay, this year would have been a toss-up for me anyway. I have friends from both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and it was interesting to watch the pre-game posturing, knowing that someone’s self esteem would be low this morning after. The Super Bowl, unlike Sunday religious meetings, is an event that never fails to fill the pews. Football reaches across denominational borders into personal pride. It is an odd thing to find regional self-worth in the antics of highly paid professional players from all over the country secured in a single location by money alone.

Sports are religious for many. There are acolytes, saints, bishops and high priests of the gaming community. And the congregation feels special when their team wins. An odd way to measure civic pride. When was the last time that a city bragged about the social care offered to its unfortunate? Would sponsors pay millions to see a city cleansed of unemployment, uneven health care, and corruption? Shining cities just aren’t set on the hills any more. What shines are lycra leggings and polycarbonate helmets. And funny commercials. For one day many Americans are gathered around the common altar of the television screen and many, many prayers are uttered.

In a world full of serious problems, playtime may be essential release. Nevertheless, when the game is over the problems remain. If only people could get as excited about solving a genuine crisis, and feel a sense of accomplishment by helping those on the opposite team. Instead religions divide up into teams and compete for stakes higher than even a Vince Lombardi, stakes that are sometimes taken too literally. No matter what the teams may be, the losers are always the same. They are the ones who suffer no matter which team walks away with the prize. Who won the Super Bowl? Did anybody really win?

2012 Reconsidered

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Maybe I was a little too hasty on the 2012 thing. Back in first grade Mrs. Shaw told us, “one bad one ruins it for everyone.” Nevertheless, I was somewhat content with my educational experience: not too many privileges were revoked over the years. But then things changed. When my wife and I expatriated to Scotland back in ’89, we flew on what had formerly been known as Pan Am flight 103, the route of the airliner that had been blown up over Lockerbie just three months before our international move. Being resident aliens, we had to register with the police in Edinburgh, so at 26 I acquired my first police record. Other than a disputed traffic violation ticket, after returning to the States, I’ve kept a clean record since.

Now I try to volunteer at the local schools. I had been newly elected as PTO president in Wisconsin just before I will dismissed from a position I’d held for some 12 years with nothing but excellent teaching reviews. Paranoia may have begun then. Here in New Jersey, to volunteer to help high school clubs (such as Robotics), you must be fingerprinted. As I made my way to a bio-tech company set up in a back room like a shady fly-by-night business venture, I reflected on how strange this world has become. I was duly fingerprinted and released. Then as I attempted to get back to the highway there was a roadblock with a sign reading “Check Point.” A black-garbed police officer was stopping cars and sending select drivers off to a detention point at the side of the road. I wondered if somehow I’d mistakenly awoken in Kosovo. Was this “the land of the free and the home of the brave”?

Not that I ever felt terribly secure at the best of times, I wonder what has happened to the country I was born in. Freedom now requires groping at airports, random check-points on local roads, and regular “silver alerts” on the highway. It feels like it’s a crime to be born American now. As a kid who was always taught to do what’s right, and who’s tried to live that exacting standard his whole life, the world has come to confound me. Fired for excellent work, fingerprinted for volunteering, felt-up for wanting to fly – the world may well have already ended before 2012 has a chance to get here. Now, what’s that guy doing on the telephone pole outside my window?

Is this now the game of Life?

Ipse Dixit Dragon

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Confession time: I have little patience for scholars who have already made up their minds before examining the evidence. Anyone who has put themselves through the ordeal of reading my academic publications will know that I do not advocate sloppy research or slipshod thinking. Nevertheless, if we are to be honest about our world, we must follow the evidence. It is for this reason that I sometimes read unconventional material. I am well aware that untrained amateurs sometimes misinterpret what they see (so do trained professionals), but when evidence exists, why deny it? I just finished reading Archie Eschborn’s The Dragon in the Lake. Chalk this up to my having lived for many years in southern Wisconsin, and maybe a touch of nostalgia. I first learned of Eschborn’s book while teaching for a year in the Anthropology and Religion Department at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. The chair of the Anthropology Department had me in his office one day and showed me this book by a “crackpot” amateur underwater explorer who really believed the claims that Rock Lake – between Madison and Milwaukee – actually housed underwater Native American structures.

I visited Rock Lake during my years in Wisconsin, along with the nearby prehistoric site of Aztalan State Park. There is no doubt that Aztalan was a major settlement of Native American mound builders. The structures there, while not quite rivaling Cahokia in southern Illinois, are quite impressive. Aztalan is three miles east of Rock Lake. Rumors of “pyramids” in Rock Lake have circulated for many, many years. The lake, however, is clouded with marine growth and sediment, and although there are undoubtedly underwater features the official line is that they are glacial artifacts rather than human constructions. Eschborn’s book is an attempt to demonstrate the artificial nature of these features. At his own expense and effort, the author built up a small research society, purchased a boat, and spent several early springs and late falls (when the water is clearest) sending divers and sonar scanners into the water to document what is there. While the book was self-published (and could have used some professional editorial attention) it nevertheless lays out solid evidence that Rock Lake does house a mystery worthy of exploration.

While I can’t accept all of Eschborn’s conclusions, I would insist that his evidence demands the attention of those who deny it is even worth investigation. This is less a struggle of evidence versus absence of evidence than it is a struggle against academic arrogance: professionals know better and need not be bothered with evidence. I have personally witnessed this in my own field many, many times. It is what Eschborn calls “ipsi dicit” [sic]; ipse dixit, “he himself said it,” is the assumption that a well-respected authority may be accepted as uttering the truth in principle, based on reputation. Many professionals in this country make their living based on this faulty premise. Eschborn died prematurely shortly after his book was published, before he could launch the next phase of his investigations. While his interpretation of the data may reach too far, the world suffers for the loss of a truly open mind, and the establishment ruling, as usual, still stands.

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...

Faith of a Lusty Monk

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Wisconsin is so much more than its iconic cheese. I was reminded of this fact when my wife sent me an advertisement from the latest edition of the National Mustard Museum catalogue. I have to confess that while living in Wisconsin we became fans of the earlier incarnation of the institution when it was a roadside attraction called the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. In addition to the perk of the biblical namesake of the town, the museum itself was the kind of place you instantly fall in love with. Quirky, pungent, and informative. The museum was nevertheless dominated by the shop that spoke for most of the actual floor-space. You could sample most mustards either by pretzel or by little sample spoons – no double-dipping please! There were only a few hard-core patrons there at our first visit, but as we continued to stop in over the years, the clientele seemed to be growing.

The ad my wife brought to my attention is for “Lusty Monk Altar Boy Honey Mustard.” The title begs for exegesis: Lusty Monk is the brand. The concept on many of the mustards we saw at the museum was to emphasize humor and shock value. Apparently the venial sin of enjoying mustard is enhanced with a decorous dollop of naughtiness. I suspect many people buy the products for the cleverness of the labels alone. Altar Boy is the title of the specific mustard blend. One must be careful to separate the word “Honey” from “Altar Boy,” otherwise an inappropriate picture might emerge. Of course, no one need admit they were thinking that anyway. “Honey Mustard” is familiar to condiment connoisseurs as a slightly sweet version of the dressing made with a generous infusion of industrious bees’ work (and there are many honey bees in Wisconsin as well). Thus read, there is nothing suggestive of mendicant malfeasance in this mustard.

On Wisconsin!

An entire blog could be devoted (and there may be one for all I know) to the slightly unsavory names of various mustards. A good place to do research would be at Wisconsin’s own National Mustard Museum. We still receive their catalogues, but since moving to New Jersey easy access to one of our favorite free museums has sadly become an empty jar of dreams and memories. We still proudly display a Poupon U. banner in refrigerator-magnet format to remind us of the tasty hours we spent sampling the very plant whose seed Jesus compared to faith itself. And the many off-color titles temper this faith with fun.

Where Wolves Dare

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It’s the fall of the year when an old man’s thoughts turn to werewolves. Not that I’ve ever believed there were such creatures, but they do have a pedigree in ancient religious ideas, and even today skin-walkers play a role in some Native American traditions. While I lived in Wisconsin I found out about the Beast of Bray Road, a cryptid that is seen on occasion south of Nashotah, where I lived. Unfortunately I learned about the beastie too late to make any attempts to see it, but the documentation of the creature is in good hands with local author Linda Godfrey.

When I moved to New Jersey, scrabbling for a living tended to outweigh concerns about werewolves. Nevertheless, I did hear of an odd account in a south Jersey newspaper from 1925. According to the Woodbury Daily Times (now defunct), a farmer in Greenwich, south of Camden, shot an up-right hopping, dog-like creature that had twice raided his chicken coop early on a December morning in 1925. According to the paper, hundred of people went to view the unidentified animal and some even photographed it. Now, 85 years later, the story is barely remembered. Was this just another gun-toting Philadelphia suburbanite shooting an annoying dog, or had a “werewolf” passed through New Jersey all those many years ago? Periodically accounts of dogs running on hind legs are posted by late-night drivers in the Garden State, but no photographs or other evidence ever seems to be forthcoming.

Werewolves are less about monsters than they are about struggling with inner conflict, according to many psychologists. Our animal nature, deeply sublimated, sometimes makes a ferocious bid for freedom and otherwise sane individuals believe themselves to have turned into wolves. When I look at my crazy employment history, somehow I can relate. Some day I hope to transform into a fully employed academic or editor who has a steady income and an appreciative employer. My chances of seeing a werewolf, however, may be slightly better. I think I’ll head to Greenwich to poke around a bit, but I’m going to wait for a full moon, Friday the 13th, or a full-time job – whichever comes first.

Read Linda Godfrey's new book