GET ON BOARD The Polar Express Analogy
MY TEXT for this episode is from the BIBLE, Matthew 11:16 to 19
Mat 11:16 But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows,
Mat 11:17 And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.
Mat 11:18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil.
Mat 11:19 The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.
What exactly does this passage mean? Jesus Christ was talking to the multitudes about John the Baptist , who had been imprisoned by the wicked King Herod (who later had John killed.). John the Baptist had sent his disciples to Christ to ask, “Are you the Messiah or not? Did we make a mistake announcing you to Israel?”
Why was John so vexed?
Because John wondered how it was possible for him to wind up in jail, after announcing the greatest event in Jewish history— the arrival of the Messiah on the streets of Jerusalem! So where was the justice here? You’d have thought that all Israel— the people and the powers-that-be— would have welcomed and revered John, and listened to his message, and demanded Herod release him! But not a peep from anybody!
That’s the situation here as Jesus addresses the crowds. And what does Jesus say to them? In the language of today, I suppose he would have said,
“What is the matter with you people? We’ve announced the Good News in a thousand different ways! We’ve sent you prophets and theologians and philosophers and teachers —and proved the Bible linguistically, and technically, and archeologically, and historically, and reasonably— and yet you’ve mocked our message and rejected it as not scientific enough or not convincing enough or not professional enough or TOO theological or TOO philosophical or TOO preachy.
So we’ve sent you children’s stories— stuff even a child could understand— and you’ve taken these stories and pronounced them fairy tales (which they are)— but which you KNOW were intended to be more than fairy tales, they were intended as moral tales designed to teach deep moral truths to children— and you’ve rejected them too!
So you’ve rejected both the prophets and the poets!
You’ve treated God’s messengers with such disrespect, that even the little children in the marketplace are offended! Even little children can see the situation for what it is: “We try to make you cry, and you don’t cry, we try to make you laugh, and you don’t laugh— what is the matter with you people?”
And of course Jesus’ little story is so true today. Everything we Christians have done to try to get the Good News out to the world has in one way or another been twisted and ignored or denied —and it’s all interfered with what God has intended. God has intended for everybody who hears the Good News to get on board.
PEOPLE GET READY — TO GET ON BOARD
One of my favourite singers is Eva Cassidy. She had such a beautiful voice and gentle spirit. In my book, she ranks along with Cat Stevens, Melanie, and Simon& Garfunkel as the gentle voice of hope, charity, truth and gentleness in this dark generation. For example, she did one of the most touching and hopeful renditions of Julie Garland’s Over the Rainbow— (if possible I’ll do a bit of a take on that in a future blog.)
Eva would open her sets with the song People Get Ready. Here’s a link to the session she did on the 3rd of January, 1996, at the Blues Alley Jazz Supper Club in Georgetown, DC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzLd2MDAHK8
Ten months later, on Nov 2nd 1996, she died of cancer at age 33.
Here’s the lyrics to that song. I can’t read them without thinking, she knew.
People get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear diesels humming
You don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord
Yeah yeah yeah
People get ready
For the train to Jordan
Picking up passengers
From coast to coast
Faith is the key
Open the doors and board them
There’s room for all
Among the loved and lost
Now there ain’t no room
For the hopeless sinner
Whom would hurt all mankind
Just to save his own
Have pity on those
Whose chances are thinner
‘Cause there’s no hiding place
From the Kingdom’s throne
Ohh people get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear diesels a- humming
You don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord
Yeah yeah yeah
I’m getting ready
I – I’m ready yeah yeah yeah
Oh I’m getting ready oh – oh
I’m ready yeah
Songwriter: Curtis Mayfield
People Get Ready lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc
My point is that Eva Cassidy knew Jesus Christ. She was ready. Now she didn’t use preaching or polemics or apologetics or philosophical reasoning— she used music. Have YOU ever responded to the truth when it came to you in music? When popular singers sang songs expressing their faith— did you ever respond?
(I think of Elvis when he sang “I Can Feel His Hand in Mine” you can’t get any closer than that to the truth,can you?)
And then again let me get to the heart of my message today. Before you became a religious or theological critic, and before you became a music critic, I’m sure you were once a child. And do you remember how you responded to the “fairy tale” of Santa and his elves and the North Pole and Christmas Eve?
Let me back up here for a minute. I realize this is sacred ground. Somehow the world of philosophy, history, science, theology and fantasy clashes in the minds of adults. Adults seem incapable or reconciling their childhood fantasies with their adult realities. So when Christians speak of Heaven and Hell to this generation, many adults respond by calling Bible stuff mythology, fairytales, fiction and fantasy, “children’s stories”.
So then what about The Three Pigs? What about The Polar Express? Can we as adults admit that although they are “only fairy tales” they contain an element of truth? This is hard for some of us —who have suddenly been confronted with the wonderful experience of having a child of our own, and being faced with one of the dilemmas of this modern pragmatic society: what do you do with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Winnie the Pooh and Kermit the Frog?
Where do they fit into a world where everything must be absolutely established by scientific evidence and cold hard facts?
I’ve heard parents say, “I won’t lie to my children and tell them there’s a Santa Claus.” That is SO indicative of an age steepened in the ideology of secular humanism. A secular humanist believes nothing is REAL except what can be confirmed by the five senses. This of course eliminates the Bible— because most of the Bible focuses on supernatural realities such as Heaven and immortality.
And it also eliminates all fiction. Fiction, after all “isn’t true”— and if it “isn’t true” then it’s a lie. Right?
Wrong. That’s reductionism.* [See the footnote]
Reductionism is one of the major killers of imagination, whimsy, art and culture.
What people need to understand is that fiction can be as much “true” in it’s own way as historical fact.
What?
Fiction is a tool used by the artist (the writer) to drive home a truth that may not or cannot be understood by a child, or even by an adult who doesn’t have ALL the facts. Fiction can be TRUTH on steroids (if I may be so bold)—if it’s based on truth and if it’s purpose is TRUTH.
Here, my friend, let me quote a pithy little line by Berthold Brecht: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” What he meant by this is that art such as literature, poetry, music, and cinema can help shape a person’s reality as effectively as so called “truth” because art simply portrays truths in a way that people can feel and understand them. So if you can’t be reached one way— ie. you avoid any religious instruction whatever— you can’t avoid being affected by some of those things in the culture we call fairy tales or fiction or children’s stories.
So when the skeptics and the critics and the experts have got through with Christmas and the sort of fantasies associated with it— elves and reindeer and the North Pole— all we have left is raw reality. Worse, this “reality” is stripped of the Christian message entirely, because the skeptics and the critics have dismissed the Bible as mythology. So what’s left? Childhood is stripped of imagination, of fantasy, of stories, of fairy tales— all that is left is pragmatism and most of it is nihilism in disguise.
What an impoverished ideology! I could not live in such a world. Fortunately, I don’t need to live in the austere, sterile, pragmatic world of the secular humanist. These folks are actually more deluded than the child who believes innocently in Santa Claus. As the atheist “theologian” Don Cupitt once said, “Nobody in the West can be wholly non-Christian. You may call yourself a non-Christian, but the dreams you dream are still Christian dreams.” What he meant by this is that only because of the influence of 400 years of Christendom in the West are we able to enjoy so much peace and plenty and comfort and FREEDOM— freedom even to insist on being a non-Christian!
Subsequently, Christendom has allowed us to live happily in reality, but also allowed us a rich tradition of fantasy based on truth. Of which the idea of Santa Claus is a good example. You see, Santa Claus has over time passed from hand to hand and from generation to generation as the personification of the perfect father figure. He is everything a child would hope his daddy to be. “He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” How could we even have conceived of such a character? Because it is part of the two gifts — imagination and conscience — those marvelous faculties given to us by the Creator — that we are able to imagine a person who loves us, who is benevolent and kind and giving, who wants every child to be delighted by his gifts, who wants every child to know he cares, and that every child is important to him. You couldn’t get much closer to the character of the Christian God spoken of in Scripture!
Now then add the North Pole (heaven) and the great company of elves (angels) and the constant exhortation to being good (righteousness) and the perennial hope of a glorious future (immortality) and you have the Christian hope expressed in such a way that even the smallest, youngest child can understand it.
So whether I’m talking about Eva Cassidy’s rendition of People Get Ready or Tom Hank’s portrayal of Santa Claus in The Polar Express my reaction— and my prescription— is the same. GET ON BOARD.
But how can you believe in something you haven’t seen? Folks, you’ve heard. The Bible says so:
“But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.” (Romans 10:18) Twenty centuries have passed and we are still celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ— along with a host of children’s stories to go along with it. An unknown writer summed it up beautifully:
“Two thousand years have come and gone and today he is the central figure of the human race and the leader of the column of progress.
“All the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that ever sailed, and all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as has that one solitary life.”
Yes, God Almighty expects you to believe his Word and the testimony of millions of Christians who have passed along the rich heritage of Christmas. His WORD (the Bible) has been buried in the bedrock of human civilisation for MILLENNIA, and it’s this Bible that has inspired thousands of artists and musicians over the years to embellish this yearly event we know as Christmas with opportunities to turn spiritual realities, eternal truths, into modes of expression even little children can understand.
Remember, stories can be fiction, but they can contain truths essential to a CHILD in a form palatable to a child’s mind— and Christmas is your opportunity as an adult to close this circle of understanding.
Listen. Hear that sound? Sounds like the train is pulling up at the front of your house.
Isn’t it time to GET ON BOARD?
*FOOTNOTE: REDUCTIONISM is a major concept that I will develop further in a future blog
[1] re·duc·tion·ism/ rəˈdəkSHəˌnizəm/noun/ used as derogatory/ ”the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.”
The complex phenomenon of story-telling can’t be reduced down to the simple definition that ANYTHING THAT ISN’T EXACTLY TRUE IS A LIE. That’s absurd. There are things that are absolutely true in reality and then there are fictitious artistic interpretations of how that truth is worked out in people’s lives. So Charles’s Dicken’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL, for instance, isn’t historically true, but it’s not a lie. It doesn’t pretend to be historically true. It is simply an artist’s demonstration of what is called “poetic license”— the licence to speculate on what could happen or might happen or might have happened, since other elements of the particular story have been established as truth. So Ebenezer Scrooge’s miserliness and selfishness are attitudes that are TRUE enough in real life that they can be used as a “vehicle” to bring people to the absolutely true condition of repentance. Here FICTION becomes a tool to propel people into behaviour that FACT has been unable to do. And why did fact not do it? Because FICTION. being non-historical, can add feelings and thoughts and perspectives to flesh out a concept in a way that raw fact may not be able do. For instance, I may not be brought to repentance by a sermon demanding I repent— but when I hear the fairy tale Beauty & The Beast, the affect of the Beast’s bitterness, resentment, obstinance and selfishness may be to bring me to realize that under the same circumstances, I would choose to REPENT. So BEAUTY and the BEAST is a fictitious redemptive analogy, a legitimate literary tool for bringing children to understand repentance and redemption.