A Soda, a Sandwich, and an Unshakeable Testimony
May 22nd, 2007 by Glenn
It is very easy to get cynical and even a little snide when talking about folklore. There is a tendency to frame folklore is a bunch of stupid stuff for stupid people. I really don’t want to create or perpetuate that impression. I don’t know if there is anything more valuable to us than our folklore — our traditional beliefs and the life-experiences we interpret through those beliefs can be very powerful and sacred.
I want to share a story I collected years ago – a personal narrative that was sent to me from David Smith. I think this story is a common example of the way that our personal lore can create tremendous meaning in our lives:
I served in the Brazil, Porto Alegre south mission in 1991. During the first month money was very tight because the Bank Card I had to use to get money had some problems. It would not work and I did not know the language very well yet.
Well, After just two months, I was transferred to a city which was 9 grueling hours by bus. A long trip and I was broke. It was the middle of summer and I had about 2000 cruzeiros, which was about 3 USD, and change. It was about the exact amount I would need to pay for a cab when I got to my next city. I had not had anything to eat the night before because we were broke. I did not have any breakfast either. I was extremely hungry and thirsty. It was very hot and I was past sweating from dehydration. We were at a bus stop about half way. It must have been over 100 and about 90% humidity.
Although I needed all of my money for the upcoming taxi ride, I thought that maybe I could just get a soda – one would not cost very much. So I pulled my money out and counted it. 3000 and change. I counted it again. 3000 and change. A 1000 cruzeiros had appeared in my pocket. It gave me enough money to buy a drink, small sandwich and another drink in the next city. And I had just enough to get a taxi at the bus station in the next city.
This was one of the first times I recognized the Hand of the Lord in my life directly. It was a great blessing to me. I was reluctant to mention this, because of the personal nature of it. I just hope it helps someone see that God is real and loving and does care about each of us personally.
David Smith, March 19, 2000
I want to point out the reluctance David felt in sharing this story. It was something that was sacred for him, and he did not want to see it belittled or mocked. There is certainly a lot of humor and cynicism weaved into the very framework of this website, but it is my hope that those things can be balanced with a healthy respect for the value that people put into their lore. I certainly don’t want to make anyone feel foolish or ridiculed for the traditional beliefs they hold.
How many of you have had experiences like this? I know that I have. How can we discuss folklore in a way that is not demeaning or belittling? Why would anyone even consider something like this to be “folklore” in the first place?
Great questions, Glenn. I’m not a folklorist (nor do I know the first thing about folklore, actually) but I think your question has implications for lots of us in the humanities: how do we approach the experiences of other people with respect, especially when we’re trained to be critical and skeptical? I can see this being a particularly vital question when you’re dealing with people’s religious experiences.
Great Question! I always worry about sharing my sacred tithing experience from when I joined the church because it may be ridiculed; it having happened so perfectly. Also, I worry that new converts I teach may expect the same experience that I had and ultimately be let down. My experience consists of being given an unplanned for 10.2% raise on the very day we signed our first tithing check. This exprience was so foundational to my testimony and future growth that it’s ridicule tends to make me become contentious. Luckily, the spirit has revealed to me when I should share it and when I should keep it to myself, leaving only a few contentious occassions.
I think blogs are good ways to create and perpetuate folklore. The informal style of most blogs is akin to oral traditions. And the widespread readership, or at least the potential for it, magnifies the effect.
I try to make my “Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon” blog as accurate as possible in the description of events and encounters, but I admit that there are a lot of my own interpretations of the events in it. And especially my own interpretations of my feelings and impressions surrounding many of the encounters that I have.
I categorize my encounters in three groups: 1) ones that I seek out, 2) ones that fall into my lap, or happenstance, and 3) ones that are prompted/guided by the Spirit. Examples might be: 1) intentionally going to an ethnic restaurant, 2) meeting someone standing in line next to me at the grocerywhile I do my normal shopping, and 3) the Spirit saying “Go to this store/restaurant”.
I haven’t done an accurate statistical count, but I think the breakdown of frequency is approximately 45%/45%/10%.
An interesting thing, as it relates to folklore, is that I can’t prove what the Lord is doing behind the scenes in these encounters. A doubter would say that in a city with lots of immigrants, one is bound to meet them on a regular basis. And a believer could quote the verse from Doctrine and Covenants 59:21, “And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments. ”
My goals in keeping the blog are to encourage others to give out copies of the Book of Mormon and the Bible, to illustrate the incredible number of recent immigrants who are eager for bilingual material, to illustrate the ease of encountering them and offering them material, and to “make known the wonderful deeds of the Lord” (Psalms 105:1) in arranging many of these encounters.
I think my stories of the encounters illustrate some gospel principles, and the project has been a wonderful learning experience for me.
Glenn makes a very good point in this post. When we say “folklore” to non-folklorists, it can seem that we are trivializing a subject. This assumption is part of the legacy of folklore as the study of things done by peasants (mindlessly?) enacting their superorganic culture. This view, which discounted the individual more or less explicitly, characterized folkloristics well into the twentieth century. Folklore studies has made a radical change in the past fifty years or so, to where we focus on the individual and are reminded, to quote the late Alan Dundes, that “we are the folk.” Everyone is in a folk group of some sort (even the pope has learned traditions and vernacular ways of being the pope from observing previous popes: his group may be exceedingly small, but it is still a folk group).
What folklorists study now gets at the heart of what it means to be human in a particular time and place. We have our own traditions and they are important to us. While we can have fun with them, they are part of who we are, and our attitude towards them is instructive because it can tell us what we like and what we don’t like about ourselves and our culture, and what is in contention.
David’s story is exactly the kind of story that is mocked by those skeptical of religion, yet they no doubt have their own stories that are used to affirm their particular choices. For those of us who have made the choice to believe, David’s story is one we understand, and many of us could tell parallel stories of our own. Narratives like his are at the core of our identity and concept of our selves.
Feneved,
Well said.
Eve,
Yes, exactly. The critical/skeptical part is so difficult to balance with respect. And even if you are able to manage it, when you are dealing with real people and their real stories and/or beliefs, it is very easy for them to disagree with or disapprove of the way you are trying to use their information. And you have to agree, it is a very arrogant position to say “here is what you really mean.” It’s one of the big reasons my academic motivation waned. I’ll give you one example from my experience gathering data for my dissertation on Mormon Humor.
I was interviewing a rather distinguished and august member of our ward. He has served several missions with his wife and has been a stake president and a bishop as well. I was telling him several jokes and asking him to rate them on a rather subjective scale of very funny-somewhat funny-not funny-offensive. The joke was as follows:
As soon as I got to that punchline, the man I was interviewing laughed out loud — a huge smile across his face. As his flurry of chuckles died down to a friendly smile I asked, “So how would you rate this joke?”
“Oh, it’s not funny,” he said without any hesitation, the friendly smile still across his face. “I’ve been a bishop. People don’t recognize how difficult a calling that is. I would never make fun of a bishop. In fact,” his smile changed to a frown, “why don’t you change that to offensive. Yes, I find that joke offensive.”
So there you go. What can you do?
John,
I am glad you shared. I had an experience close to that the summer between my Jr. and Sr. years of high school. I was working at a job I had worked the previous summer, and a friend gave me the opportunity to go to San Diego with him for a week. My parents said I could go, but I had to pay for the plane ticket myself. It was a good amount of money and the only savings I had was in the tithing bank I kept in my room, so I had a choice – use the tithing money to pay for the plane ticket and make up the amount later, or do the right thing and pay my tithing as I had committed to do.
I paid the tithing, and I remember sitting at work on the last day I had to purchase the plane ticket with payday still a few weeks away. A secretary came in and told me that she noticed an error in my payment – they had been paying me at the previous summer’s rate ($5.00 per hour) instead of the current summer’s rate ($5.50 per hour) – and while she would normally just make it up in my next paycheck, she decided she would go ahead and cut me a check that day along with some other transactions she had to make. She handed me a check for the exact amount I needed for my plane ticket. The heavens opened to my young mind that day.
Now, to be fair, while that experience reaffirmed my testimony of tithing, it also raised some disturbing questions regarding the omniscience of God given a few of the things I ended up doing on that trip. But that’s another story for another time.
Dear Brother Bookslinger,
What a fascinating name. Is it Dutch? I just want to commend you on your valiant efforts. Ten-percent is nothing to be ashamed of, but keep working at it – you will need all the help you can get, especially for your protection, as you continue to target ethnic restaurants and illegal immigrants.
May I also suggest a Book of Mormon and a snack for the homeless people (just make sure that you give them the snack only AFTER they have successfully completed Moroni’s promise — we don’t want any reprobates taking advantage of your generosity). Press onward dear brother, press on.
Brother Stephen,
Bookslinger might have more success with the homeless if he were to include a frosty mug of some “mild drink” made from barley as described by Joseph Smith in the Word of Wisdom page.
Cold Postum? Eeww!
Glenn, isn’t a “dissertation on Mormon Humor” a contradiction in terms? (Or, perhaps I’m guilty of the very topic of this thread, not approaching the experiences of other people with respect.
Of course, I really liked the story of the guy who laughed at the “offensive” joke. That’s a good joke. I’ll send it with my husband on his high adventure.
Postum? Heavens no. Korean barley tea is the way to go.
http://www.koamart.com/shop/19-1067-tea_bags-barley_tea__bo_ri_cha___15_teabags.asp
‘rastus: I suppose I could ask to see green cards, but all God’s children deserve access to the scriptures. And more importantly, I don’t have authority to ask to see someone’s green card. I don’t particularly seek out illegal immigrants who come across our southern border. And immigrants from elsewhere are almost all legitimate. I hope you weren’t implying that all immigrants are illegal. There are still large numbers of legal immigrants coming here from Africa and Asia.
With three local Spanish language newspapers, and Spanish-language books/magazines available at the Mexican grocery stores, there is not the demand for bilingual Spanish/English material as there is for the languages of Africa and Asia. Or at least there is not the “wow” factor when people see something in Spanish.
“Hey, I’ve got this book in Shona” spoken to someone from Zimbabwe has a lot more impact to them than “Hey, I’ve got this book in Spanish” said to someone from Latin America.
Glenn,
I think the flaw in your scale is that offensive jokes can be funny too.
Just one flaw? I assure you, there were others. It was not the tightest methodology in the world.
But you are right, and clearly in this case he immediataely laughed (i.e. gave the universaly recognized “this is funny” humor-response) and yet he eventually called it offensive. Often the thing that causes that “laughter” reaction is the sudden realization of an incongruity — something is not what something is supposed to be. That incongruity can be offensive or not, but since this kind of humor-response is the recogniztion of things that aren’t what they are “supposed” to be, you are likely to find some offensive things being laughed at.
I remember an anecdote that Bert Wilson used to tell — my apologies if I get it wrong. Bert is a pioneer in Mormon folklore studies and was well known as a professor at both BYU and Utah State. He told the story about a lecture he gave where he was talking about personal narratives — the type of stories that would be similar to the one from David Smith above. Bert was using his mother and her stories as examples. She was in the audience, and she clearly bristled every time he called them “fictions” — because certain scenes and events had been edited and filtered through her belief/value-system as part of the construction of the narrative. He said that his mother was a little upset with him afterwards and said something like, “my stories aren’t fiction, they’re true.”
Well, yes, but you can have both if you understand the definitions. I don’t think anyone would argue with the idea that different people can see the same event and interpret it very differently. When they give “their version” of what happened, they can both be right, but their story if what happened can vary greatly.
So it is with these personal narratives, although in most cases with these, we only get one side of the story, and it is usually a carefully constructed story meant to support some kind of belief or to express a certain message. That is a “fiction” because it is a construction. But it doesn’t mean the experience didn’t really happen or that the interpretation isn’t really true. It just means that you need to be very careful and respectful.
Glenn, this last point is very interesting. In my own extended family there was an individual who could be described as physically abusive of his children. All but one of his children chose to focus on the abuse and what it did to them. The remaining one focused on his strengths and how much better he gave than what he got (he grew up in horrendous circumstances) and how he changed over time. They all experienced the same sorts of things, but the one chose to narrativize the events in a way that allowed her to understand her father and see him in a positive light. Neither side is false, even though they are diametrically opposed. Both, however, are fictions, in the sense that they are “made up” to explain the facts that were experienced. Ultimately, in this case, I find the forgiving fiction much more useful than the condeming fiction, because it led the individual to forgive her father and become a better person, while the condemning fiction has served to hold the other siblings back in many ways.
Good point. I think it highlights the roles of choice and agency — do you have any idea why the one person would want to see it one way rather than the other?
I think part of it was that the one chose to embrace the Gospel seriously, while the others chose to ignore it. But this may be a post hoc, propter hoc fallacy, and I suspect that whatever it was in her character that led her to forgive her father was also what led her to embrace the Gospel. I don’t what that something was though. I’ll ask her though and see what she says. It’s an interesting question and I’ve never really focused on the why so far because I’ve been far more interested in the what and the results in her life.
Well, the desire part is what usually interests me. It helps me understand certain things better — the “knock and it shall be open, ask and ye shall receive, search and you shall find” scriptures — even the more new age quantum-physics stuff that really I don’t know anything about beyond the movie “What in the Bleep do we know” — the idea that observation and expectation will bias the result of any situation — all of this makes the idea of faith more powerful to me, and the connection with desire makes it more personal and accessible.
“Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?”
“We are the music makers and we are the dreamer of dreams.”
Another line from that film has has always reminded me of faith, and of the fear that many of us have about what lies on its edges:
“Up the airy mountain Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting, For fear of little men.” (William Allingham, “The Fairies.”)