Skip to main content

Sunday School with Scarves

Mari and I went to see Shen Yun, partly because of the rave reviews purported to have come from the New York performance.  We, of course, saw the performance in Minneapolis.  It was Sunday School with scarves.  That is to say, the battle for good against evil, and the need to choose sides now, before the inevitable victory of ultimate good, up in the sky, was all dressed up in asian costumes and flying saints.

The dancing was beautiful!  The costumes were lovely, and dramatic.  But it was a morality play in which it was clear that the forces of evil wore black, emblazoned with red Chinese characters, or something.

"Our cultures have much in common!", I thought.  Moses climbed up on Mt. Sinai during a thunderstorm, and reported that he had heard the voice of God.  Somewhere in Asia, a nearsighted monk stared at the sun  and reported that he had seen the golden face of Buddha.  My Scandinavian ancestors heard the hammer and anvil of Thor, and sailed off to Ireland to steal chickens and maidens.  In the Southwest, Coyote created the world; clever critter that he is!

Personally, I tend toward Coyote, probably because I am a terrible dancer, and am reluctant to stare at the sun.  And it may be a matter of preferring something in my own image.  Or, maybe, that we are moving back to Tucson, and I do not think it wise to irritate the local gods.

But I do wish I could dance.  But out in Washington State, when I was young, Hans Svinth, our pastor, and local well-digger, reported that he had it on good authority that God did not approve of dancing, and that has made all the difference. I suppose that one thinks about such things, at the bottom of a well.

I am trying to understand what it means that I come from a religious tradition that found God at the bottom of a well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more