dianahooley Books, Film, Art, Current Events, Uncategorized

Remembering an Easter Story During the Coronavirus Plague

When I was a little girl my parents didn’t go to church much, but my grandmother did, and she encouraged me every summer to attend Vacation Bible School (VBS) at the neighborhood church.  It was there that I heard Agnes Gibson, or Sister Gibson as she was called, tell wonderful Bible stories using a teaching tool called Flannel Graph.

The Flannel Graph board was mounted on an easel, and as Sister Gibson recounted the Bible story, she’d press paper cut-out Bible figures on the clingy flannel-covered board. 

This Easter, as we all deal with what feels like the coronavirus plague, I’m remembering Sister Gibson telling our VBS class the Passover story of Moses and Pharaoh.

“What do you think happened next?”  Sister Gibson was a Socratic teacher, always asking questions.

“Whatttt?”  The gap-toothed children in her audience (including me) sat with our mouths opened wide.

Well, she told us, Pharaoh still wouldn’t let the Israelites leave Egypt, even after all the plagues God sent to torment the Egyptian people. Sister Gibson covered her flannel-graph board with cut-out Egyptians, arms over their heads and legs lifted as if running for their lives.

“Will God be able to change Pharaoh’s mind?”

We didn’t know, but God was really angry with Pharaoh.  I suspected God would have to do something even worse to make the Egyptians obey him.

He’d already plagued them with “boils” which sounded a lot like the mumps to me.  Then, he sent a lot of bugs called locusts to eat all the trees and shrubs in their yards.  Sister Gibson carefully placed a paper cut-out of Moses wearing a long bath robe and holding a big cane called a staff on the flannel board.

“God told Moses he was going to have to punish Pharaoh again.  But the Israelites could escape this punishment if they stayed in their homes and marked their door.  The Angel of Death would pass over them and not kill their first-born son.”

At the time I’m sure I considered this a good reason to be born a girl.  I remember thinking how lucky I was to be female because I’d never get drafted and have to go to Viet Nam like my cousin Bobby. Sister Gibson finished telling her story as we children raptly listened.  She pressed a cut-out of a sad Pharaoh, head hanging down, on the flannel board.  In the end, Pharaoh was forced to obey God and let Moses and his people go.

As I sit here writing, I’m thinking of how many parallels there are between the Passover story and our current Covid-19 crisis.  Moses told the Israelites God wanted them to shelter-in-place to avoid the ravages of a new (novel) plague he was sending.

Though God didn’t send us the coronavirus, the message of staying home to be safe certainly resonates.

There are other Bible stories that take on new meaning in the time of Covid 19.  Old Testament Jews had several rituals related to being clean and cleanliness.  Both foot-washing and hand-washing were routinely practiced.  They didn’t wash their hands for 20 seconds through the “Happy Birthday” chorus, but still, good hygiene was a part of their culture and faith.

Maybe the most significant Bible story I heard at my grandmother’s church, and the one that has such an inspiring message for us today, is the Easter story.  As we grimly watch the death toll climb from Covid-19, it feels good to consider the story of how Christ conquered death.  Whether you believe in the resurrection or not, the message of life after death is an undeniably hopeful one.  The greater meaning in this story for me though, is that fear and sorrow eventually pass away.  The Israelites were finally freed from their bondage.  They made it safely out of Egypt, leaving despair behind.  I believe we will too.

 

Image credit: Flannel Graph        Image credit:  Moses and Pharaoh        Image credit:  Shelter-in-Place

 

 

 

 

 

dianahooley Current Events, Uncategorized

Electing an honest man . . .

About once a week, I wake up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, and read a poem or two.  I like poetry:  wit and emotion condensed into a few words.  This morning I read Sheenagh Pugh’s poem, Sometimes and it made me think about our country and its presidents.  Pugh wrote:

“Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse . . .

A people will sometimes step back from war;

elect an honest man, decide they care …”

I cannot tell a lie.

Pugh seems wistful about electing an honest man—and well she might be.  Honesty in politics is almost as scarce as thrift in politics.  I realize our country was founded on wonderful myths about integrity and honesty like the one in which George Washington disobeyed his father and chopped down a cherry tree.  He confesses his deed by saying: “I cannot tell a lie.”

George Washington is ancient news though, and the new normal seems like an abnormal:  lie—and get by.  Sadly, presidential lying has a long and depressing history.  Some rationalize that we set the bar too high, characterize-wise, for our presidents.  Others say that politicians would never get anything done if they didn’t occasionally tell a white one (or red, or blue one).  FDR and JFK both hid and lied about infidelities in their marriages.  Nixon lied about Watergate.  Ronald Reagan lied about the Iran-Contra affair (though some historians give him a pass due to his “forgetfulness”).  George W. Bush exaggerated the Iraq threat and promoted the lie about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.  The list goes on.

It is refreshing though, when someone somewhere in politics steps up, and tells a painful truth.  I felt this way during the recent presidential debates, when candidate Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow, “I couldn’t get it done…”  referring to being the mayor of a city that needed more Black police officers, especially in light of a recent officer-involved shooting of a black man there.  I’m not sure why Buttigieg’s confession struck me as an act of courage, whereas former president Jimmy Carter’s admission that he was responsible for the 1980 failed hostage rescue in Iran simply seemed like ineptitude.

Actually, I don’t expect more from my president than I expect from myself, and according to research, some inadvertent or harmless lying happens daily for most humans.  I think it becomes an issue when there’s too much intentional lying, or there is a risk related to a specific lie.  In this regard, we have a problem with our current president.

There’s been numerous polls tracking the number of lies President Trump tells on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis.  At some point, presidential lying crosses the line from benign political misdirection to charlatanism—a con man playing the American people.  In fact, it was a president, Abraham Lincoln, who reminded us: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time—but you can’t fool ALL the people ALL of the time.”

Honest Abe

Then there’s the all-important issue of the lie’s importance.  Lies that divide us as a nation, or get us into foreign wars, two problems George Washington foresaw as threatening our democracy, can be especially harmful.  Trump this past week lied when he questioned whether four U.S. congresswomen were really “American.”  Washington would say this increases our divisiveness.  Trump also twisted the truth and set the stage for a foreign war with Iran.  Another George Washington no-no. Trump accused Iran yesterday of violating a nuclear deal that his administration withdrew from last year.  Even though Iran was faithful to the deal up until that point.  If George Washington is our founding father, Donald Trump is the confounding one.

The policies of my president are important to me, but so is his or her person.  I want to trust and be proud of the president of our country.  I want someone in office who not only has moral courage, but is moral.  Am I asking for too much?  Maybe.  And the sad reality is, I only have one vote to make things better.  In this, I again find comfort reading Sheenagh Pugh’s poem:

“Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.”

dianahooley Out West, Uncategorized

Buying Fireworks at the Reservation

 

We drove through the Duck Valley Indian Reservation on the Idaho-Nevada border this past week, and I thought about the many times my husband and I took our sons to the rez to buy fireworks for the 4th of July.  As a couple of rowdy, growing boys, my sons loved going to the reservation to get “real” fireworks.

Going to Duck Valley, the home of the Shoshone-Paiute tribe, was like crossing the border into another country—and in a way, reservations are other countries.  As sovereign nations, tribes are answerable only to the federal (not state) government.

My family would watch out the car window searching the sagebrush plains, hoping to be the first one to spot a wickiup—a sure sign we’d entered reservation territory.  Someone in the car would soon say, “There’s one.”  Then we’d all look to see a conical-shaped structure made up of branches and sticks sitting in the backyard behind a house.  Wickiups look similar to the tipis of the Plains Indians, and like tipis, their original purpose was to be a temporary camp dwelling.

I remember one of our first 4th of July trips to the reservation.  Down the main drag of the little town of Owyhee, Nevada, the only town on the reservation, we saw a hand-painted fireworks sign that signaled with an arrow to make a turn.  The fireworks stand sat in front of a run-down cinderblock apartment building.  I saw a blanket used as a curtain over one window and a screen bent and hanging from another one.  My sons jumped from the car as soon as we stopped, racing to the stand to see what kind of fireworks were for sale.  The door to the apartment opened and a young man stepped out wearing a baggy pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

“How-gh!  Yá’át’ééh!” he smiled toothily and held up his hand in greeting, Indian chief-style.

“Hello!  We want to buy some fireworks,” my husband told him.

George (he introduced himself) asked us if there was any particular kind we were looking for.  Before we could say a word, both my sons offered, “M-80’s.  Bottle rockets.  The good stuff.”

George was very genial and seemed more than happy to accommodate us.  I asked him if he got a lot of firework customers way out here on the reservation.

“Oh sure.  Quite a few.  You’d be surprised.  They’re like you, looking for the kind of fireworks they can’t buy where they live.”

Everyone wants more bang for their bucks on the 4th, but I had some hesitancy about buying “real” fireworks, something I’d vocally expressed many times to the rest of my family with little success.  I’d heard enough stories about people losing fingers lighting M-80’s.  Call me sentimental, but I had this wistful hope that my sons might grow up with all their digits intact.

“Anything special happening on the reservation?” I asked George conversationally.

“Yes!  It’s time to make some money,” he grinned, taking my husband’s twenty dollar bill to make change.

“I meant to celebrate the um . . .  well, Independence Day?”

Suddenly it hit me.  I’d just realized the obvious and sad irony in celebrating America’s independence from Britain—by buying fireworks from people who’d sought their own independence from America.

But George didn’t seemed fazed by my question.  “We got a big pow wow going on, food and dancing—probably do some handgames, some sticks and bones, you know?”

I didn’t know.  But George patiently explained that handgames were an old Native American tradition.  He said the games were like small-time gambling.  Any age and any number of people could play.  We talked a little more and when we finally left the rez, our backseat was full of fireworks contraband.

Our sons are grown now, and with the West increasingly a tinder box just waiting for the match, my husband and I have little interest buying anything with the word “fire” in it.  As I write this blog though, I’m remembering George.  I wonder if he went on to bigger and better things.  He was so bright and charismatic.  I hope he’s no longer selling “real” fireworks, but instead, has found a real job—or at least something that’s enabled him to move out of his shabby cinderblock apartment and into his own home, a home of course, with a wickiup in the back yard.

 

Image credit:  Diana Hooley,  Image credit:  Diana Hooley, Image credit: wickiup