Closer and Closer All the Time

Feast of the Holy Cross

Last night, a small group of us gathered in the social hall at St. John's to watch a favorite movie from my childhood, Lerner & Loewe's musical adaption of the classic Antoine de Saint-Exupéry  novella The Little Prince. 

The story recounts the literal and metaphorical journey of a pilot (portrayed by Richard Kiley the Man of La Mancha) who meets a sweet but strange little boy (Steven Warner) after being forced to land his plane in the midst of the Sahara Desert.  

The pilot, who had turned to the skies a cynical loner after his early human engagements proved unsatisfying, is at first impatient with the quixotic child's questions and demands ("please draw me a sheep!") that distract him from his frantic attempts to repair the plane before meager supplies of food and water run out. However, the prince's sketchy details of his own circumstances compel the child inside the adult to unravel this mystery.  His own early artistic attempts having been stifled by the adults around him, the pilot, finally with an appreciative audience, concedes to produce picture after picture, his skill improving along the way, as a means of drawing out the Prince's story. 

We move through the drawings into a combination of early 1970s camera tricks and animation to recollect the Prince's travels from his own small planet (with three knee-high volcanoes, please clean daily) and a single, self-absorbed rose (Donna McKechnie) in an attempt to understand, what else, the meaning of life.  Along the way his encounters with "the grown ups" prove just as frustrating as the pilot's had been.  He finally alights on Earth, and his first interaction -- with a snake, amusingly portrayed by choreographer Bob Fosse -- leads him to speculate that all earthlings might be snakes.  When he recounts this aloud, the pilot says nothing, but his expression speaks volumes.  The older man is concerned by the prince's vocal contemplation of an offer the snake made of a "quick trip" home again, by nature of a sting.

It is the Prince's next encounter, with a fox (Gene Wilder is brilliantly cast) that teaches him what he needs to know. Shy and wary at first, but desperate for companionship, the fox explains (and acts out) what they will need to do in order to build trust of one another.  By this act of "taming" one another, we become "unique in all the world" because we matter to and are responsible for another person.  

The prince, thinking guiltily of his rose, whom he had been disappointed to learn was not as extraordinary as she had claimed, is drawn inexorably back to the snake and his promise of a means to return to his little planet.  The pilot, having become quite "tamed" himself by this maddening but beguiling little boy, races after him in a panic, but is too late.  In a reversal of roles, the Prince becomes the calm teacher and comforts his grieving friend with the advice that -- because he won't know which star is the Prince's --  he should associate them all with him, to always feel his presence.

There is much going on here.  Saint-Exupéry was himself a pilot, and I wonder how much of the portrayal of the narrator is autobiographical.  I know I could go look that up, right now, but I am content to wonder.  I hadn't seen this movie in decades, and watching it again was like discovering a forgotten photo album, because as each conversation or musical number unfolded, I remember us watching it as kids and romping around the living room to the lively soundtrack.  

It was interesting to share the experience with a room of mostly strangers (besides the Archwarden, I was delighted when a high school friend unexpectedly turned up after seeing the event on Facebook) in a church setting.  Other than a passing reference to "the Lord" by Fosse, there is no overt scriptural context, but it is easy to draw parallels to another young man who baffled and infuriated "the grown-ups" during his brief sojourn on Earth, and left us forever changed when he accepted his fate with surprising resolve, and departed with a similar promise that he is always with us.

Make it Stop

St. John of the Cross / San Juan de la Cruz / St. Jean de la Croix

We spent the last week on Captiva Island, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast.  It is a place of rustic beauty, largely overgrown by palms, sea grape and scrub pine. The weather somehow seems more "real" when not competing with traffic and neon and jet exhaust, so one can actually sense the subtle changes to light and wind and water each day. There are few people around during this "shoulder season" between the end of hurricane weather and the arrival of the snowbirds, most of them retirees from Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is not unusual to have a quarter-mile or more of shoreline completely to yourself, other than a bustling tide of sea birds who always seem to be working so busily that one feels almost enough guilt to reach for the corporate Blackberry. Almost.

"In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night." ANTOINE ST. EXUPERY

Thursday night, we made plans to watch the Geminid meteor shower from the beach.  With very little artificial light, it's possible to see an amazing array of celestial detail on Captiva, and the coincidental new moon meant we should be able to take in the show with very little interference.

Alas, when the time came, a swiss-cheese blanket of clouds had spread across the island.  Nevertheless, we took advantage of what gaps there were and glimpsed at least a handful of the quick darts of light the particles made as they zipped by.

Our last full day of vacation dawned warm and muggy, and the clouds cleared up by the time lunch was over, promising a solid beach afternoon to wrap up our week.  The youngest member of our party was my companion on boogie boards in the gentle surf until he found a buddy his own age and left me to seek company with the grown-up types.

We learned the news of the school shootings in Connecticut from passers-by, and instinctively reached for smart phones to see what was happening.  It was hard to reconcile the squeals of laughter from the kids at the water's edge with the nightmarish experience I knew other kids, very close to their age, had been through. As the details were pieced together, the predictable pattern of debate was playing out on Facebook walls and blog posts: gun control, mental health care, school prayer.... a kaleidoscope of speculation and rhetoric, all coming from a place of confusion and pain.  Because of course nobody, regardless of politics, would wish the scene in that school on a sworn enemy, let alone a first-grader.

I have my own thoughts about guns, and health care, and school prayer, and I was not immune from the impulse to share them in the raw voice of someone trying to process the unthinkable, in what appears to be an arms race of ever-escalating unthinkables, because we can't seem as a nation to figure out what's driving people to such acts.

That night, after trying to stay out of earshot of TV gunfire, I hit the beach again with a longtime friend and the dad of my little surfing buddy.  We didn't talk much as we scanned the much-clearer sky for laggard shooting stars we were told we might see.  Staring up at the bejeweled blitz overhead, I remembered what the Little Prince told his pilot friend after meeting the snake whose bite he knew was his destiny: "In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night."

We saw one meteor each, and trudged home again with stiff necks for our trouble.

On a scrap of paper on my bulletin board at work are four words I scribbled to illustrate something to a co-worker who was coming to grips with a difficult family situation

 HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE.

People are calling for -- in addition to gun control -- stronger mental health systems which would ostensibly identify and separate the about-to-become-unhinged from our innocent kids. But -- to repeat an old adage I heard The Right Rev. Gene Robinson quote in a sermon -- it's not enough to keep pulling drowning people out of the water. We've got to head upstream and figure out who is throwing them in! I believe we should as a society take a closer look at how we treat each other, particularly how we treat those who don't fit the mold. Let's face it: we haven't exactly achieved the "kinder, gentler nation" we were promised back in 1988, right after I survived high school relatively unscathed. Instead it appears we have appointed Anne Robinson from The Weakest Link to determine who is smart, Simon Cowell to determine who is talented, and the Peter Pan chairman of Abercrombie & Fitch to determine who is attractive. In case you haven't noticed, these are not especially nice people, at least not the personas they wear for us.  It's not especially cool to be nice, is it? We trade casual put-downs with our friends and cheer at TV shows whose purpose seems to be to determine who can be the meanest.  And those who don't impress us or have anything to offer, we simply tune out.

If you are blessed with good looks, talent, and/or a good support system to constantly reassure you of your worth, you can survive the daily onslaught of unrealistic standards and "good-natured" barbs. But in the America of fractured homes and three-career families, where spend our days bumbling from one screen to another (I bought a week's worth of groceries today without interacting once with another human... is this really progress?), who's doing that for the people who aren't quite that strong? Who is noticing the misfit who eats his lunch alone? Whose job is it to compliment how well she draws on every surface that will take the marks of her pen?

 When I wrote about suicide a while back, I wondered if teachers have the bandwidth to understand the social dynamics of their classroom and keep anybody from falling through the cracks, but I don't think it can all fall on them. It's got to come from all of us. Nobody should be unworthy of a smile or an inquiry about their day. They may not respond in a way we would call grateful or even appropriate, but they were noticed, seen; they mattered, if even for a minute. Another Facebook poster railed that we should never mention these high-profile killers' names again, because recognition was all they were looking for. If that's true, if a tortured mind has been screaming to be heard to the point where it takes murder or suicide to get our attention, then shame on us. Maybe if they got it at age seven, we wouldn't be in this predicament. Maybe.