The Reader Travels

Yesterday was a lazy day of TV on DVD, Web surfing and old movies, starting off with a viewing of The Bells of St. Mary’s. Surprisingly, the movie was half over before Bing Crosby sang his first song. Every time the light and the camera hit his face a certain way, I just knew they were ramping up for a bit of crooning, but usually they were just trying to make him look all fatherly and angelic.

Anyway, the first song in the movie comes around a young student’s essay about the five senses. Father O’Malley equates “common sense” to being able to appreciate the five senses, and then he goes off and sings about it. So it brought to mind the vision of a sunset, the sound of laughter, the touch of silk, the smell of roses and the taste of chocolate.

Of course, we all know that some people don’t have all five senses, and sometimes people are emotionally blocked with hysterical blindness, or physically blocked with a cold or wax in their ears. In the book, Mina, by Jonatha Ceely, the characters work in the kitchen of a wealthy country estate in England, surrounded by all this delicious food, but they can’t truly appreciate even the table scraps.

The main character has recently struggled with starvation, watching family members die from lack of food. The wounds are fresh, and so is the guilt of eating when loved ones have died from hunger.  Perhaps this youth would have an eating disorder for life, but I left the book with hope that this would not be the case.

OK, well I’m still not sure what this has to do with common sense, but it’s always nice to hear Bing sing.

There are references to two separate miracles in The Bible, where Jesus took a small amount of fish and bread and turned it into enough to feed a horde of hungry travelers. So what would Jesus do if faced with a thousand hungry pilgrims? He’d wave his magic wand over a few loaves and fishes, and poof, no more hunger.

The rest of us have to be a little more humble in our charity.  Maybe we get a little more creative and work together with others.  Maybe we learn to do what we can and accept our limitations. Maybe our hearts grow hard and hateful toward those in need. Maybe we try to take the weight of human suffering on our own shoulders and spit disgust at those who don’t do the same.

I’ve often thought about the hard ethical decisions, about what one might do if faced with a desperate choice. I saw the last half of a 1975 TV movie when I was in college, called The Last Survivors, starring Martin Sheen as a man in command of a lifeboat full of shipwrecked passengers. With only a small amount of food and water for each of them, he has to decide which of his boat mates is worthy to live, and which should be thrown overboard.

Jesus would have rained down fresh water from the sky, and his food supplies would be never-ending. The sick and the elderly would be healed and strengthened, and they’d all make it to shore alive.

All I’m saying is, it’s a really hard act to follow.