Category Archives: religion

The spirit of the St. Louis

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There’s always somebody. Somebody not good enough for us no matter their circumstances. Somebody we can always tell, “Go back where you came from.”  Some of the campaign rhetoric this year reminds us of the story of a ship named for our second-largest city.

Let’s go back to Germany, 1938, where the Nazi government’s increasing persecution of Jews caused many to try to flee. Representatives of several western nations met at Evian, France in July, 1938, to discuss the worsening situation. Major nations such as the United States, France, and Britain refused to loosen their immigration laws to allow more refugees from Germany, even as Germany was tightening its laws against Jews wanting to flee. German policies against Jews broke into violence with the Kristallnacht on November 9-10 and in ensuing months, thousands of Jews were arrested.

Nine-hundred-thirty-seven Jewish passengers were aboard the S. S. St. Louis when it left Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939, hoping to find safety in Cuba or the United States.  But Cuba allowed fewer than thirty to disembark.

The St. Louis headed north, hoping to dock in the United States.  But this country had enacted a restrictive immigration law in 1924.  The state department worried that the Jews would be security risks or be dependent on government handouts if they were allowed in.  Passengers could not get tourist visas because they had no home address.  And there were a lot of other German immigrants waiting for entry.

After more than a month the St. Louis headed back to Europe, although not to Germany.  Britain agreed to take 288 of the passengers.  The remaining 620 went to Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, countries still at peace.

It was while the St. Louis was still at sea, its passengers still hoping to find asylum or at least safety in the United States that Heywood Broun, one of the great newspaper columnists of the time, wrote “There is a Ship” for the New York World-Telegram. It was published June 9, 1939.

——-

There is a ship. It is called the St. Louis.  If suddenly the vessel flashed an SOS to indicate that the crew and the 900 passengers were in danger every other steamer within call would be hurrying to the rescue. That is the rule of the sea.

And no vessel which got the flash would pause to inquire the economic, political, religious or national position of those in distress.  It would want no more than the position of the ship.

And the captain on the bridge, according to the prevailing tradition, would ask the engineer to put on all speed so that the work of rescue could be completed as expeditiously as possible.  And this would be true of the skipper of a totalitarian merchantman, one from a democratic nation or a ship flying under the flag of a monarchy, liberal or otherwise.

But there is a ship.  It carries 900 passengers—men, women and small children.  This is a group of God-fearing people guilty of no crime whatsoever.  And they are in peril.

They are in peril which threatens not only their lives but their very souls and spiritual freedom.  It would be better for them by far if the St. Louis has ripped its plates in a collision with some other craft, or if an impersonal iceberg had slashed the hull below the water line.

Then there would be not the slightest hesitation in a movement of all the allied fleets to save these members of the human race in deep and immediate distress.

But this is not an iceberg or a plate which has been ripped away.  The passengers—men, women and children—are Jewish. It is not an accident of nature but an inhuman equation which has put them in deadly peril.  It is quite true that when the St. Louis gets back to Hamburg these 900, with possibly a few exceptions, will not die immediately.  They will starve slowly, since they have already spent their all.  Or they will linger in concentration camps—I refer to the men and women.  God knows what will happen to the children.

And so the whole world stuffs its ears and pays no attention to any wireless.

There is a ship. And almost two thousand years have elapsed since the message of universal brotherhood was brought to earth.

What have we done with that message?  After so many years we have not yet put into practice those principles to which we pay lip service.  Nine hundred are to suffer a crucifixion while the world passes by on the other side.

At any luncheon, banquet or public meeting the orator of the occasion can draw cheers if he raises his right hand in the air and pledges himself, his heart and soul to the declaration that he is for peace and amity and that all men are brothers.  He means it, generally, and so do the diners who pound the table until the coffee cups and the cream dishes rattle into a symphony of good feeling and international sympathy.

But there is a ship. If one were to look upon it with cold logic it would be better for every one of the 900 if the vessel suddenly buckled and went down in forty fathoms.  That would be more merciful.

Against the palpable threat of death we can muster brotherhood.  But against the even more plain sentence of life in death we pretend to be helpless.

Our answer is, “We must look after ourselves.  What can we do about it?  Life is greater than death.”  We agree.  Here is our test.  What price civilization?  There is a ship.  Who will take up an oar to save 900 men, women and children?

——-

Heywood Broun died at 51 years of age on December 18, 1939. About the time he wrote this column, he had forsaken his professed agnosticism after extensive discussions with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and had become a member of the Catholic faith.

Germany invaded the safe countries of Western Europe on May 10, 1940. The Netherlands surrendered five days later. Belgium gave up May 28.  And France fell June 22.   The Holocaust Museum in Washington estimates 254 former passengers on the St. Louis died during the holocaust, most of them at Sobibor and Auschwitz.  Fewer than one-hundred eventually made it to the United States.

The St. Louis was a German naval accommodation ship until it was damaged by the bombing of Kiel in August, 1944.  She was fixed and was a hotel ship in Hamburg for a while before being scrapped in 1952.

But the ghost of the spirit of the ship still hangs over us.

Jews in 1939.  Mexicans and Syrians in 2016.

There’s always somebody.

Reading hymns

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It occurred to us a few years ago as we were singing a Christmas hymn in church, reading lyrics without music that were on the screens at the front of the sanctuary, that the hymns—beautiful as they are at Christmas—are sometimes not as good as the poetry or the prose behind them.

We become so accustomed to the pace and structure of the music that the words come from us unthinkingly.   If we remove the music and the false structure it imposes on the lyrics, we might find some of our Christmas hymns have different meanings and many of them could be sung year-around.  In fact, many could be sung year-around by removing one verse.

If we read hymns instead of singing them, we might find ourselves asking questions about the story that is told in the lyrics and sometimes even wondering about the origins of those lyrics. We’re not much of a student of music but we love it, especially at this time of year, but it seems that the lyrics come first and then somebody writes music for them.

Here’s a f’rinstance.  One of the nicest, lightest, Christmas hymns begins with the words, “Bring a torch….”   I bet you hear it in your mind right now, just because of those three words.  But who is “Jeanette Isabella?”

This is an example of how singing the lyrics changes the lyrics.   In this case, the music eliminates a comma.  If you read the lyrics of the poem, which goes back about seven centuries to the Provence region of France, you see that it is about TWO girls, not one.   The original title was Un Flambeau, Jeanette, Isabelle. (We appear to have Anglicized the names of the girls.)  Various sources we’ve checked say it originally was a dance tune for the nobility and didn’t show up as a Christmas tune until 1553 and an English version of the hymn wasn’t published until the middle of the eighteenth century.

One interpretation of the lyrics links this Christmas song to the Jewish celebration of Chanukah, the eight-day festival of lights that celebrates, as Chabad.com, puts it “the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over adulteration, of spirituality over materiality,” a theme with which many Christians identify as they celebrate the birth of Jesus.  The website makingmusicisfun.net tells us, “The torches, or candles, of ancient Hanukkah’s Festival of Lights played an important part in Christmas celebrations in Provence and southern Europe,” and calls this song, “a wonderful example of the torch songs of that time.”

The New-born *oil on canvas *76 × 91 cm *1600-1652

(Musee des Beaux Arts de Rennes)

“Bring a Torch” is one of those songs that draws the participant into the beauty of the music to the extent that the words are sung but the story they tell is not appreciated.   So let’s look at the lyrics (which might be slightly different depending on your faith traditions).   We’re going to change some punctuation and some of the structure of the poem for reading-out-loud purposes.

“Bring a torch! Jeanette, Isabelle! Bring a torch!

Come swiftly– and run! Christ is born!

Tell the folk of the village (that) Jesus is sleeping in His cradle!

Then we change from excitedly telling these two young girls to grab their torches on this night and dash into the village telling the villagers to approach in haste—but quietly.  Adore the child but do not create a disturbance.  He is sleeping the sleep of the newborn.  And although the song does not refer to his mother, she also probably is resting after the strain of childbirth.

Hasten now, good folk of the village. Hasten now, the Christ Child to see. You will find Him asleep in a manger. Quietly come and whisper softly.

Ah, ah, beautiful is the mother, Ah, ah, beautiful is her Son.

Hush, hush, peacefully now He slumbers. Hush, hush, peacefully now He sleeps.

We have seen a translation of the early French lyrics that places heavier emphasis on urging villagers to not disrupt the rest of the child and his mother.  They’re harsher than the more familiar lines of the hymn.  We don’t recall singing or hearing these words but this part of the poem begins with noise and disruption.  Perhaps it is Joseph who asks, or maybe an angel–the wording is not clear.

Who is that, knocking on the door?

Who is it, knocking like that?

 

And someone in the crowd gathered outside answers:

 

Open up!

We’ve arranged on a platter lovely cakes that we have brought here!

Knock! Knock! Knock! Open the door for us!

Knock! Knock! Knock! Let’s celebrate!

 

We can envision Joseph cracking the door open and slipping out to confront the crowd.  Speaking in a loud whisper, he tells the villagers:

 

It is wrong when the child is sleeping.  It is wrong to talk so loud. Silence, now as you gather around lest your noise should waken Jesus.

 

And as the crowd heeds his wishes, he opens the door and reminds them as they go in:

 

Hush! Hush! see how he slumbers.

Hush! Hush! see how fast he sleeps!

Softly now unto the stable,

Softly for a moment come!

Look and see how charming is Jesus,

Look at him there, His cheeks are rosy!

 

And we hear the whispered voices of the people as they file through the room:

Hush! Hush! see how the Child is sleeping;

Hush! Hush! see how he smiles in dreams!

We still don’t know who these two girls are or were.  Perhaps the names were plucked out of the air by the original writer of the poem to fit the meter of the poem.  But the more popular version seems to rely on a painting by Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), a French Baroque artist who did a lot of religious scenes lit by candlelight.  The story behind his painting is that Jeanette and Isabella (Isabelle in the French lyrics) are milk maids who have gone to the stable to milk the cows and find Jesus has been born there.  We don’t know who tells them to light the torches and spread the good news in the village.  But we are told the custom remains in France for children to dress up as farm folks and as they go to midnight mass, they sing the song that begins, “Bring a torch….”

If you want to take the time today—if you have the time today—and you have a hymnal in your home, you might want to read some other hymns.  It might be hard because there will be the tendency to read them the way the music has them sung.  But you might find reading hymns as poetry or prose is interesting and might even add a new dimension to this day for you.

Take a look particularly at “Joy to the World” and ask yourself after reading it why this song could not be the opening hymn in worship at any time of the year.

We hope we have not spoiled your enjoyment of the music of Christmas with this little excursion that began by wondering who Jeanette Isabella was.  Remember that our word Psalms comes from a Greek word that means “instrumental music” and the words that go with it.

Let all of us, regardless of our faith tradition, hope on this day that light will prevail.

It’s always a surprise

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—to return from a trip that is incredibly stirring to find that nothing has changed when you get home.   When we rolled into Jefferson City about 1:30 a.m. today (Saturday, October 9), the businesses we drove past were the same as they had been two weeks earlier. The Jefferson City Oil Cartel was still charging twenty cents more a gallon for gasoline than the people in Fulton were paying. McDonald’s drive-through window was still open, serving the McMuffin that was a welcome bit to eat for travelers who hadn’t had anything since lunch at the Miami airport after our flight from Guayaquil, Ecuador that morning. American Airlines didn’t even drop its usual paltry package of pretzels on our drop-down tray tables on the flight from Miami to St. Louis. And if you expect to find any place to grab a quick bite at Lambert-St. Louis airport when your flight arrives sometime after 10 p.m., forget it. Lambert is a ghost town after 6.

Our day that started in Guayaquil ended in our own bed in Jefferson City about 2:30 this morning. We don’t know if today’s younger generation finds nothing remarkable about that. But our generation, or many in our generation, still have a “Gee Whiz”–a phrase of our generation–feeling about this sort of thing. We started our day on the south side of the equator trying to sort out what the Spanish-speaking airport attendant was saying over the loudspeaker in our gate area (among other things, I was summoned to the TSA security office downstairs because my checked bag had been randomly selected for a search—I have great sympathy for those people who have to search through bags of rank clothing that had clothed travelers for two weeks.). We finished it in our home in Jefferson City.

We might post some pictures from these two weeks some time later. Nancy already has been sharing some things on her Facebook page. But your correspondent doesn’t do Facebook or LinkedIn, or other internet stuff like that. Too much going on in the real world. And the “what I did on my autumn vacation” slide show isn’t what this series of observations is for.

The big bags have been unpacked. The two remaining clean shirts and one pair of clean socks are back in the drawers. The new washing machine will be getting a big workout this weekend. Sometime in the next few days, Nancy and I will go through the hundreds of pictures we took, considering how we have been changed by these last two weeks.

We met someone whose parents likely were alive during the French and Indian War. I hiked an ancient trail 9,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains to look down on a mysterious village. Nancy stood with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern. We both explored a unique ecosystem populated by hundreds of species found nowhere else in the world, a place where studies done almost two centuries ago continue to produce massive angst among those who believe understanding of our world should be limited to the words written by the author of Genesis.

We were among our fellow creatures of brown skin, yellow skin, white skin, red feet, yellow feet, blue feet, claws, and scales. We walked among the living and the dead. We heard the music of man and the music of nature. We walked on modern and ancient paths. We spent two weeks eating only things that had been cooked or peeled, washing our teeth with bottled water, and throwing toilet tissue in wastebaskets because leaving it in the toilet would damage the sewage system. We rode planes, trains, boats, and buses. And we drove a car to start the whole thing. We wandered in societies that seek God through the sun, the puma, the crucifix, and through being one with nature’s god. We lived with a country that uses currency requiring calculation of value with purchases that often involve bargaining and in a country that imports United States currency to use as its own money and gives back coins in change that are a mix of United States coins and the local country’s coins. We stayed in rooms that were unlocked with cards that fit into slots, or unlocked doors with a wave of the card, or with great big skeleton keys. Some restaurant menus listed various forms of beef, pork, chicken, or guinea pig. Some of our group sampled dozens of beers you won’t find in the liquor section of the grocery store. I was in a place that didn’t have any Coke or Pepsi products, so I had had a bottle of Inka Cola which was kind of a light cream soda.

Peru and Ecuador. Machu Picchu and the Galapagos. And other places.

We didn’t talk to a single person in any of those places who gave a tinker’s dam about Donald Trump or John Boehner, Obamacare, Governor Nixon’s veto of a right to work bill, and the insane pursuit of millionaire campaign donors by people thirsting for power.

And then we came home, changed people returning to a seemingly unchanged community where “Gee Whiz” experiences are unlikely. Travel once again has made us realize that the comfort of sleeping in one’s own bed has its value. But travel makes sure that sleeping in one’s own bed does not turn into living in a rut.

I have a religious objection

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….to religious objections.

But I’m rooting for Kim Davis, the Rowan, Kentucky County Clerk who spent five days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses that the United States Supreme Court says are legal under the Constitution.  She’s out now and still has her job.  She remains “religiously opposed” to issuing same sex marriage licenses but is under a federal district judge’s order not to keep her employees from issuing the licenses she opposes.  If she does, she could be on the wrong side of the bars again.

Her lawyer says, “She loves God, she loves people, she loves her work, and she will not betray any of those three,” a statement that seems from this distance to advocate an interesting dance.

She does not want her name on any same-sex marriage license. Her attorneys say the licenses issued by her deputies while she’s been away are not valid because they don’t bear her signature.   However Kentucky law says any act she is entitled by law to do can be legally done by a “lawful deputy.”

Of course, some political candidates are quick to hitch their campaigns to Davis, who has become a symbol to an important voting segment of our population. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee have gone to Kentucky to sand by Davis. Other Republican hopefuls are keeping some distance.  One of our Missouri Attorney General candidates already has claimed that, if elected, he will have the power to issue an opinion that will protect those who have sincerely held religious objections to state and federal laws.  Apparently this candidate for Attorney General does not realize that an attorney General’s opinion does not have any force of law and is, as a judge said many years ago, is just another lawyer’s opinion.   Interestingly, none of the other candidates for Missouri Attorney General have claimed they also could be a savior.

Kim Davis is the darling of the Religious Right today and, should she wish, could make a lot of money on the speaking circuit.   Her release was a disappointment to many people, not because they believe she is wrong in her position but because her case could set up a court test of the Religious freedom Restoration Act movement.   But she and her supporters are fighting the same-sex marriage issue on more than one front, so her case is likely to get to the United States Supreme Court one way or another.

Some see this case that was, to be blunt, inevitable when RFRA started gaining popularity in increasingly conservative legislatures.  It has been framed as a question of whether government can force someone to violate their personal religious beliefs. The mirror image of the question is whether one person can impose their religious freedom as a way to limit the religious freedom or the secular civil rights of fellow citizens in a nation that has a history of trying to keep church and state apart.

We saw a cartoon the other day portraying the chaos that can result if RFRA is fully sanctioned in society.  A person in a supermarket checkout lane wants to buy some condoms but the checkout clerk says she cannot ring up that sale because it would violate the clerk’s sincerely-held religious beliefs.  “You have to go to register ten,” the clerk says.   So the customer takes the groceries to register ten and has no problem buying the condoms but is told, “I can’t ring up that ham because my sincerely-held religious beliefs do not allow me to sell ham.   You’ll have to go to register eight.”

There is another story that might provide some guidance.  Might.

The ancient historian Josephus, a Pharisee, has written that followers of that movement were supported by the common Jewish people in the time of Jesus.  They claimed to be guided by the law of Moses in their interpretations of Jewish law.  If your correspondent’s understanding of Jewish history is correct, the Pharisees claim to be the founders of today’s Rabbinic Judaism.   Josephus contrasts them to the Sadducees, an upper class whose authority came from the high priest in the times of Solomon.  We fear we have over-simplified the difference, but over-simplification of religion and government is so common today that we hope our indiscretion has not been a serious one.

Three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, record the day that some Pharisees hoped to trip up a young rabbi with a challenging question.  Matthew and Mark say they were Pharisees.  Luke says they were “spies pretending to be sincere.”   Luke says they were trying to set up Jesus so he would say something that would make him vulnerable to prosecution by the Roman governor.

They first flattered him: “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.”  Then came the zinger: “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”  The Jews objected to paying those taxes, of course.   Matthew says they asked the question maliciously.  Mark says they asked it hypocritically.

Jesus, who was born at night but not last night, recognized immediately what was afoot.  And he got a little testy because, as Luke says, he saw through their craftiness.  “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites,” he said in Matthew’s version.

“Show me a coin,” he demanded.  And when they gave him a denarius, He asked them, “Whose face  and inscription are on this coin?”  The scriptures don’t say if there was any hemming and hawing although there might have been at least some of the Pharisees who might have immediately seen where their strategy was about to go out of the wagon tracks.   “Caesar’s,” they answered.

We wonder if Jesus paused for dramatic effect or if he flipped the denarius back to the person who gave it to him as he said, “Therefore, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”   The Pharisees, the scriptures say, were stuck silent and after a while got up and walked away.   They still didn’t like this guy.  But they couldn’t argue with him that day.

The Pharisees, common people like Kim Davis today, had a strong religious objection to the edicts of their government.  And they didn’t want to obey that government.   And some perhaps curried favorable public opinion by opposing them.

We’re not scholars of the Bible in our house.  But we are unaware of any similar statement in the Old Testament, which was the foundation for the Pharisees’ positions in those times.

What Jesus did that day was define the line between church and state.

Many of those who side with Kim Davis argue that she should not be persecuted in this Christian Nation for standing up for her Christian beliefs.   Others say it might not hurt for the Christian Nation to remember the day Jesus Christ defined the line between church and state.   And perhaps the Kim Davis case, if it works its way through the legal system, might determine how much the definition in the First Century of the Common Era remains the same these twenty centuries later.