Fears that Bind and Blind
Each week during this sabbatical year, I’ve led the “Friday story circle,” reading a picture book with the five-year-olds at Old South Church’s preschool. They are a group still articulate with wonder, and vulnerable to the unexpected, unclear about the boundaries we finally learn as we negotiate adolescence between the imagined and the real. They want to know, every week, if the stories “really happened,” budding critical historians as they are. And yet they still know to “dwell in possibilities,” to recall one of Emily Dickinson’s felicitous phrases as “a fairer house than prose.”
This past week, I read a book based on a true happening. The “facts” of the story are told in many newspaper reports from the time, about the sighting in the waters off Gloucester in 1817 of an enormous sea serpent. People came from all around to observe this creature – curious onlookers from nearby towns and villages and even zoologists from as far as Boston. How does one take such an account and make it into a story? Ah, here’s the magic: M. T. Anderson creates an account of this event as told from the vantage point of a young boy of seven or eight years old, and illustrator Bagram Ibatoulline captures the feeling of the times with marvelous images. The book is entitled The Serpent Came to Gloucester (2005).
What happens in the book is that the young boy comes to realize that the serpent is not a threat, but really just playing in the water, and the townspeople, at first apprehensive, overcome their fear and come to enjoy watching the great beast cavorting in the harbor. But over the long, cold winter, when the serpent had gone in search of warmer water, the men decide they would have to kill it if and when it returned in the spring – which, of course, it did. The final episode of the story tells of their hunt.
While they gathered to go out in ships to try to kill the serpent, the little boy went, too, following them out in his little rowboat so that he could try to warn the playful beast to dive into the depths and avoid their hunt. As he tells the story, “I whispered, ‘Beast, sink. Stay down in the drink.’” But his warnings come to no avail: the men finally harpooned the serpent, but after a furious fight found that they’d only landed a huge mackerel by mistake.
The story ends many years later, when the boy had become an old man, and found himself reminiscing about the great serpent and its mysterious and beautiful ways with his young grandson. This of course is how stories live best – not on the printed page or lost in old books but in imaginative and colorful retelling that carries them from generation to generation. “And when your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of [these things]?’ then you shall say to your son. . .” (Deut. 7. 21). Remembering stories is one of the ways every culture renews itself, and conveys the meaning of its life to those whose experience is shaped by such memories. In religious communities, we call it “tradition,” and it is what family reunions are made of: the inevitable embellishing is part of telling the “real” truth that cannot be known by fact alone.
I talked with the children as we read this story about how it is that we are sometimes afraid of things we don’t understand – like a sea serpent that appeared suddenly and without precedent. Such things that are different than what we are used to, or that come from unfamiliar places, things that may seem to us wild and unmanageable, can worry us. And it takes courage to find out whether they really are threatening, or just different than what we are used to. How we learn to live together, creatively and constructively, depends on just such wisdom and trust which refuses to vilify what we do not understand or cannot control. We know this in our personal lives, and see it acted out in the rituals by which tribes and nations maintain unity through shared fears and hostilities. Fear like love is what binds – and sometimes blinds – us.
This story reminds us that curiosity about the unknown is often what opens new doors for us, leading us to meet unexpected challenges and experiences with creativity and compassion. Such mysteries may often seem menacing, but they may also be the opening to adventures we’d never imagined – if we remember that new circumstances call for new empathies.
Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton
This past week, I read a book based on a true happening. The “facts” of the story are told in many newspaper reports from the time, about the sighting in the waters off Gloucester in 1817 of an enormous sea serpent. People came from all around to observe this creature – curious onlookers from nearby towns and villages and even zoologists from as far as Boston. How does one take such an account and make it into a story? Ah, here’s the magic: M. T. Anderson creates an account of this event as told from the vantage point of a young boy of seven or eight years old, and illustrator Bagram Ibatoulline captures the feeling of the times with marvelous images. The book is entitled The Serpent Came to Gloucester (2005).
What happens in the book is that the young boy comes to realize that the serpent is not a threat, but really just playing in the water, and the townspeople, at first apprehensive, overcome their fear and come to enjoy watching the great beast cavorting in the harbor. But over the long, cold winter, when the serpent had gone in search of warmer water, the men decide they would have to kill it if and when it returned in the spring – which, of course, it did. The final episode of the story tells of their hunt.
While they gathered to go out in ships to try to kill the serpent, the little boy went, too, following them out in his little rowboat so that he could try to warn the playful beast to dive into the depths and avoid their hunt. As he tells the story, “I whispered, ‘Beast, sink. Stay down in the drink.’” But his warnings come to no avail: the men finally harpooned the serpent, but after a furious fight found that they’d only landed a huge mackerel by mistake.
The story ends many years later, when the boy had become an old man, and found himself reminiscing about the great serpent and its mysterious and beautiful ways with his young grandson. This of course is how stories live best – not on the printed page or lost in old books but in imaginative and colorful retelling that carries them from generation to generation. “And when your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of [these things]?’ then you shall say to your son. . .” (Deut. 7. 21). Remembering stories is one of the ways every culture renews itself, and conveys the meaning of its life to those whose experience is shaped by such memories. In religious communities, we call it “tradition,” and it is what family reunions are made of: the inevitable embellishing is part of telling the “real” truth that cannot be known by fact alone.
I talked with the children as we read this story about how it is that we are sometimes afraid of things we don’t understand – like a sea serpent that appeared suddenly and without precedent. Such things that are different than what we are used to, or that come from unfamiliar places, things that may seem to us wild and unmanageable, can worry us. And it takes courage to find out whether they really are threatening, or just different than what we are used to. How we learn to live together, creatively and constructively, depends on just such wisdom and trust which refuses to vilify what we do not understand or cannot control. We know this in our personal lives, and see it acted out in the rituals by which tribes and nations maintain unity through shared fears and hostilities. Fear like love is what binds – and sometimes blinds – us.
This story reminds us that curiosity about the unknown is often what opens new doors for us, leading us to meet unexpected challenges and experiences with creativity and compassion. Such mysteries may often seem menacing, but they may also be the opening to adventures we’d never imagined – if we remember that new circumstances call for new empathies.
Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton
posted by Andover Newton News at
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