My Incapacitating Phobia

My phobia includes bees, wasps, anything with wings and a stinger. At 61 years of age, I have learned these creepy fliers and dive bombers won't harm me if I freeze stiffly until they leave my vicinity. As a child I didn't know you shouldn't hunt them with a rubber-band gun made from clothes pins and Lincoln Log green roof slats.

On a summer Saturday when I was about seven, some friends and I were stalking the awnings and eves of our New Orleans apartment complex spying the paper nests of the big red fiery wasps. They were easy to find. Once spotted we would take turns shooting our bits of elastic at those nests in a mostly fruitless attempt to knock them down. All we succeeded in doing was stir up the inhabitants who aggressively questioned our intent by their immediate actions, “Who dat?” and “Waz Up?” On this particular Saturday a wasp decided to fight back with a Kamikaze-style dive at us. It struck me in the right side of my face stinger first. Dropping my inefficient weapon to the ground, I screamed, ran toward home, and started crying all at about the same moment. I was greeted with a not-so-soothing, “Told you so.”

Failing to learn from my mistake, the next Saturday found me on the prowl again…with the same result. I was stung in the same spot on my cheek before the first wound had even fully healed. I never hunted wasps again. Something like “Fool me twice shame on me” may have come to mind even though at that age I don’t remember being anything but scared to death. I have maintained a fervent, though somewhat by now seasoned, phobia for flying insects with stingers ever since.

My God doesn’t want me to be afraid…of wasps, stingers, dentist’s needles, heights, peanut butter, or anything else. I’ll get back to the pb later. The Bible encourages us to “fear not” or “be not afraid” hundreds of times. I’m sure there’s a message in there someplace for me. He also tells me not to be anxious or worry about my height, my clothes, my next meal, or even tomorrow. God would certainly approve of the Serenity Prayer (full, original, long version by Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971):

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that You will make all things right, if I surrender to Your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.

Niebuhr died the year I was married. I’m sure he had my phobias in mind when he first prayed those words. Perhaps he was deathly afraid of…the list seems endless, but I’ve included a few of the more unusual phobias here:

• Peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth- Arachibutyrophobia (I like pb regardless of what part of my mouth it sticks to)
• Bees- Apiphobia or Melissophobia (think I mentioned this before)
• Blood- Hemophobia, Hemaphobia or Hematophobia (especially my own)
• Flutes- Aulophobia (my daughter Kara played this instrument beautifully – I was never afraid)
• Lawsuits- Liticaphobia (never had one of these thrust upon me – probably would not like it much)
• Mother-in-law- Pentheraphobia (never a problem – my mother-in-law was the kindest of women)
• Needles- Aichmophobia or Belonephobia (this one got me big time for years – still not in love with them, but have matured to something of a tolerance when absolutely necessary)
• Stings- Cnidophobia (de ja vous)
• Wasps- Spheksophobia (de ja vous all over again)
  

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands more. Check the Internet for lots of lists. But be aware and beware that there could possibly be a phobia for lists of phobias that might keep someone from looking at such a document on the WWW. A phobia-phobic person might rationalize that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

By today’s standards I should never have survived the Fifties. Those were scary times, but we didn’t even know it. Our baby beds were covered with brightly colored lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans. When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops with clothespin noisemakers on our wheels. We rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the passenger seat was a treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle – tasted the same. We drank fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight; because we were always outside playing. We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this…or even got mono. We did not have Playstations or X-Boxes, no video games at all…didn’t even miss the Wii or Guitar Hero (wasn’t that a nickname for Chet Adkins, Elvis, or somebody). No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet chat rooms. We had friends; we went outside and found them. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learned not to do the same thing again. We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue – we learned to get over it. We walked to friends’ homes. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live stuff; and although we were told it would happen, we did not have very many eyes out, nor did the live stuff live inside us forever. We played home run derby with a whiffle ball and plastic bat. Street football was for Sunday afternoons. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

So phobias aside, let’s put our phobias aside. Not sure what any of this means, but I’ve enjoyed once again rambling about not much. Guess I could steal a line from Mr. Shakespeare and title this Much Ado about Nothing. But don’t titles usually go at the beginning rather than her at The End. Besides, I have a plagiarism phobia…it leaves my blogging skills incapacitated.

Footprints

Footprints are what we leave behind when we take footsteps. When the old hymn summons us to “follow the steps of Jesus where e’er they lead,” that lyricist is actually encouraging us to walk in the prints made by those steps. Peter indicated as much when he stated: To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps (1 Peter 2:21). So let’s ponder this idea for awhile and see where it leads our thought-steps.

The first important footprints left on the surface of the newly created Earth that I can imagine were those formed by God as he strolled around in the lush paradise of Eden in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8) – notice that God is no fool; he chooses to eschew that tropical garden when it is hottest, and only visits during the more pleasant temperatures – probably early morning or late evening. God was playing the original Hide ‘n’ Seek looking for Adam and Eve…but it wasn’t a game. They had just sinned; they knew it; God knew it. Satan knew it, although he had already slithered into hiding as well with his serpentish hiss. After a few moments God called out, Where are you? To which Adam, not being very good at H and S, immediately answered giving away his position and hence losing the game…badly. He never got a rematch. He compounded that blunder with a lame excuse about, “Not having a thing to wear.” The excuses came flying fast and frivolously from that point on and soon snake is belly-groveling, Eve is laboring painfully, and Adam is a filthy mess from working in the dirt all day. So what about those first footprints of God? Gone and forgotten perhaps – until this blog. An angel with a fiery sword kept future archeologists from excavating the garden site and unearthing any left-behind divine prints or other fossils. At least that seems to be the case until the flood. The garden of Eden probably was drowned out and destroyed by the same deluge that covered and killed all the other plants and animals…except those in the Ark that Noah constructed, of course. But that theory of the final days of Eden will need to wait for a subsequent blog.

I’ve seen many films and shows and read many books and stories in which man or beast follows a trail of footprints and signs that lead over meadow sod, forest undergrowth, or desert sand. Then there is the inevitable rock outcropping which the pursued always finds for a crucial part of the escape that throws the hunter off the track. Or perhaps a stream crosses the path and the question becomes “Upstream or down?” When John Wayne sent his troops upstream while he went down (in Rio Lobo), it led to his capture by the same gold-absconding, train-robbing Confederates he was chasing. The vanishing wagon tracks and hoof prints led to the thickening of that plot and the remainder of the movie. Of course the Duke wins the day and becomes “comfortable” with the ladies (you’ll have to see the flick to discover the rest of the story).

We’ve all read or heard about the poem “Footprints” in which Jesus carries the author when the two sets of side-by-side sandy prints become one. It’s a valuable and comforting thought that God is right there with a hand or a lift as needed. It’s also rather soothing to have such a “human” deity looking out for us. Jesus weeps, gets hungry and thirsty, needs time alone, talks to his father, works, sweats, bleeds, gets angry, comforts his mom...the list goes on of that God’s personification. All of that shouldn’t be too surprising since we were told way back in Genesis 1:26 that we were to be made in God’s image and after his likeness (and Jesus’ as well – notice the “we”). So I’m absolutely sure that when either the Father or the Son are walking on terra firma, they leave footprints. Want to join me in looking for them?

Dueling

Recently I watched one of my favorite movies about music, The Five Pennies, detailing the life and struggles of Ernest Loring “Red” Nichols, cornet player and Big Band leader extraordinaire. As you may never have pondered, there is a difference between a musical and a movie about music.

The former takes a possibly otherwise music-less plot and characters and puts lots of songs at strategic points scattered appropriately throughout the scenes. Examples of musicals are The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Brigadoon, The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma…the list is almost endless including good and bad renderings. I love many musicals, some just for the music, others for the storyline as well. One highlight of our mid-life travels included our staying at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. That’s where the Sound of Music family settled after immigrating to America to escape the spider flag people that made everyone so cross with one another during World War II. That vacation was a picturesque and memorable experience.

The latter, movies about music, would include the aforementioned Pennies, The Glenn Miller Story, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, just to name a few. Those usually include great music with a better-than-average plot involving the lives of real characters who loved music and made it a top priority in their lives. In the three named above, Danny Kay, Jimmy Stewart, and James Cagney all do remarkable jobs of portraying Nichols, Miller, and George M. Cohan respectively. I enjoy both types of movies a lot.

So if you’re still with me and haven’t as yet escaped back into your real, music-less world…you may be asking yourself what in the treble clef this has to do with the title of this blog…Dueling? It just so happens that Red Nichols hooks up with Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong in Pennies to engage in what I like to call dueling brass. Red’s cornet begins a jazzed-up version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” which is joined by Satchmo’s trumpet in true Dixieland style. They “duel” together on screen while ad-libbing and echoing each other as the tempo brightens and the pitch soars. As a brass lover who played trumpet for 10 years from grade two until high school graduation, I love watching and re-watching that scene. It also helps that I have fond memories of my son Daniel who became quite a good trumpeter in his teen years.

That made me ponder other “duels.” Of course, historically, there was Burr’s outshooting Hamilton in that episode from early U.S. History that we all studies in junior high and high school classes. Several movies and television shows about duels come to mind as well. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmund Dantes and his “son” discover the truth before they shoot it on the “field of honor.” An episode of my favorite TV show, all about Andy Griffith and life in and around the peaceful town of Mayberry, has the Wakefields and Carters performing their version of the Hatfields and McCoys as Sheriff Taylor takes a side-trip to ponder the goings on of the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet. With Andy’s well-scripted guidance, the feud ends and a happy marriage commences.

Two other musical “duelings” come to mind. Of course there’s the famous and infamous “Dueling Banjos” in Deliverance; and more dueling banjos picking at top speed to win a coveted prize and title in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Those boys were smokin’! (Exactly what I'm not sure?)

The “real” dueling that comes to mind however has nothing at all to do with music. I don’t even remember Dennis Weaver or the my-face-can’t-be-on-film truck driver ever singing, playing, or even humming or whistling anything. The movie was Duel (1971 – year of my marriage – no I wouldn’t dare blog about that 39+ year dueling – just kidding, honey, it’s been wonderful). It was one of creepiest films I’ve ever seen. I think my wife would agree. Dennis Weaver is driving an old, broken-down, barely alive automobile cross country on a business trip in the daze before GPS and cell phones. He gets in a periodic duel with a tanker truck obviously driven by a terrorist (one bent on terrorizing others – in this case Weaver’s character – for no apparent reason that the script dictates it) played by famous stunt actor Carey Loftin. It gets dangerous; it gets scary; it gets intense. Choose your weapons? Not swords or clubs or even pistols at 10 paces (certainly not musical instruments)…count, walk, turn, and fire at will with your carefully-chosen seconds poised to enforce the rules and assist the wounded. Not this flick. These two “stars” get in their respective vehicles and stalk each other on the highways at high speeds with evil intent. I trust that’s just enough of the plot to whet your appetite.

So my mind foggily blogged from the serene and entertaining musical brass duel of The Five Pennies to the intensely powerful, dramatic vehicular “war” of Duel. Such is the nature of blogging…at least in my cranial cavity.

Faith isn't past tense

As an ex-English teacher I naturally tend to thoughts of good grammar and sentence structure. It’s brain-ingrained. I’ve had those usage and mechanics principals drilled into my head from an early age. With the skills necessary to do his job exceptionally well as a court reporter, my dad was prone to quizzing me on various social outings. He would give me a sentence, and I would try to tell him what part of speech each word was in that sentence. This wasn’t as exciting as a video game; but given the fact that those games didn’t even exist, it was pretty challenging for such a young chap as I (notice I typed “as I” rather than “like me” which might be considered “normal” but incorrect in formal grammatical structuring. I’ve seldom been accused of being “normal.”)

Growing up in a family in which good grammar was a fact of life and for which there were high expectations from both parents, I took to it like a dead fish to a toxically polluted pond. (not at all sure why I put that analogy in – trying to be cute, I suppose; was going to type something like “an amoeba to post-creation Oceana” but thought better of it. Oops, guess I did it anyway...)

So one recent morning sitting in Sunday worship my mind flitted to several verses mentioned in that daze sermon. The first was Luke 24:21…We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. Notice the double past tense usage (like a double negative only not really) in that passage as the physician-author combines the future-looking hope with the hopelessness of the past tense was. The thought process might have gone something like this, “Jesus used to be about to redeem; but we killed him, so he can’t do that anymore. Death is, after all, final.”

Furthermore, that same doctor had previously penned Luke 23:47…The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, "Surely this was a righteous man." Can you feel the hopelessness in that official’s bemoaning the death of a good and innocent “man” in spite of the “praised God” reference. I wonder if that Roman soldier moved and was the centurion of Acts 10 whose family became the first Gentile converts through the somewhat resistant and at first unwilling preaching of Peter.

Finally (although I think there are other numerous uses of the hopeless past tense, but these will suffice to sufficiently lengthen this blog), there is again a recounting in Matthew 27:54…When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, "Surely he was the Son of God!" Matthew’s account actually calls the man on that middle cross the “Son of God” adding to the utter hopelessness that not only had they killed innocence but salvation as well.

Considering the idea of Jesus in the past tense makes living hopeless. The security of the knowledge that Jesus always was (the Great I AM with God) and still is as He lives interceding for us at the right hand of God…the pondering restores the hope. Our faith must be active and living and NOW.

And so, with apologies to Tom Hanks (and F.G.), that’s all I’m going to key about that…